Whenever I am asked- whether in a spirit of criticism or otherwise – to describe or define consciousness, my first impulse is always to say. ‘But you know what it is’.
The implication behind that reaction is that consciousness is (to use R.D. Laing’s words) primary and self-validating [The Politics of Experience (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967)]and that all other facts and considerations of mental life proceed from it, and from no other point. Descartes might perhaps better have said, ‘I have consciousness, therefore I am.’ For without consciousness there is no existence. Or rather, perhaps there is existence- that is, perhaps the sun for example is, absolutely, with or without any organism present to view it- but there is in that existence no awareness of being, no life. It may be that the point is clarified by creating a distinction between existence and being. The sun has (we assume) some independent existence of its own. It exists. Man also exists and has existence in that sense. But he further has knowledge of his existence. He is aware that he exists, he is self- aware. Self- awareness of existence is, perhaps, being.
My more scientific colleagues might perhaps go along with this. But (I think they would insist) consciousness is not a thing. That is to say, they would not accord consciousness the status (!) of an object. Since the study of objects (objectivity), they would say, is the business of science, therefore whether or not consciousness exists or otherwise is, in some definable sense, the scientist- meaning here especially the scientific psychologist- may ignore it and proceed about his business.
If my imaginary critics have been willing to go along this far, then I have a definition of consciousness which they might also accept – one which I am most reluctant to abandon myself, even though I no longer consider that it adequately describes the full position: namely, that consciousness is functionally dependent on but experientially autonomous of the nervous system. [Perhaps I may remind the reader here of the analogy between the nervous system and consciousness suggested in the introductory section – that is, that consciousness perhaps somehow forms around the nervous system in something of the way a magnetic field forms around a wire conduction an electric current. The field is not the current, even though called into existence by it and wholly dependent on it.]
This definition permits of a ‘Caesar and not Caesar’ solution. That is, if consciousness is entirely functionally dependent , and since the scientific psychologist is only concerned with function, he may then go his way and I mine with out further dispute. Whatever I go on to say. For in any case he will not be listening. On my own definition after all, the ‘shape of consciousness’ is determined by the ‘shape of function – not the other way about. I am sorry (also for myself!) not to be able to rest content with some such amicable and neat arrangement. For I am unable to escape the possibility that consciousness is not the by-product, as my definition implies, but the central product of the evolutionary process. [Product’ begins to sound suspiciously like ‘purpose’. The suspicion is not unfounded. ‘That way madness lies’, as Lear said in one context and a scientist might echo here. Personally, I feel that madness lies in the other direction, as I have often enough indicated. However, if the charge here is one of attempting to introduce the thin end of a ‘why’? question into what, according to science, is exclusively a ‘how’? framework, then I am afraid I have to plead guilty.]
There are numerous ways in which one may begin to question the notion of consciousness as a by-product. One line of approach might be the attempt to show an increase in consciousness in organisms as the phylogenetic scale is ascended – an attempt we shall in fact make. Another would be to show consciousness as continually adding to its potential – that is, to seem to be developing functions of its own aside from and other than those of the observable physical nervous system. For this would of necessity contradict the essential nature and definition of by-product, namely a secondary or accidental product or result, a subsidiary article produced incidentally. I think we shall indeed be able to indicate attributes of consciousness which are hard to accommodate under the heading of either by-products or accidents; and it will become increasingly harder, I hope, for us then not to see consciousness as the central actor (too often, certainly, the small pathetic puppet) on a very, very elaborate stage.
I would like first to examine here an incident which occurred to me while I was a school- boy. It is a commonplace enough one, and what I experienced has been experienced by many others – it is simply more convenient to speak of what one knows well.
During a game of Rugby football out of school hours on a Saturday morning, I must have been kicked or otherwise knocked on the head, for, though I have no memory at all of that incident, I came to find myself standing on the touchline. I had no idea who I was, where I was, what I was, or indeed any attitude towards, or any memory of, anything at all. I remember, however, that as I watched the creatures or shapes in front of me for a while (this was the other boys continuing the game) I was aware of being puzzled, as if there was something I ought to do or something I ought to recall. Then a further period of blankness ensued and I next remember being outside the school ground, walking down the road looking at the gardens. In fact, in the interim, I had somehow got changed, packed my case and was now on my way home. I remember wondering what rose-bushes were. I later vaguely recall being at a bus-stop. I do not remember getting on a bus, but as a next memory found myself sitting on one. At that stage I had a feeling something was rather wrong, and that there was something I should try to remember. I felt I ought to have a name. I also vaguely felt that something or other had happened to me, and wondered what it was.
The account of the incident this far will suffice. In fact I reached home, and throughout the rest of the day kept remembering things about myself. It was rather like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and as in jigsaw puzzles towards the end the process went rather rapidly. I was never able, however, to recollect any details of the actual accident.
That original coming-to was, I suggest, fairly close to pure being, or what we might call unmediated consciousness. Certainly my eyes were recording sense impressions and I was aware of that (not, of course, that I had eyes or that these were sense impressions). But at the same time I had no labels or referents whatsoever for those impressions – nor was I aware that they could have labels; nor, really, was I aware of any sense of ‘they’ either inside or outside of me.
What the experience to me very much demonstrates, I think, is that the contents of consciousness and consciousness itself are not one and the same. Just as in the adult thought and language appear to be the same event (so smooth and instant is their dialogue) so as a rule as adults we readily regard consciousness and its contents as the same, as one indivisible phenomenon. In cases of severe amnesia, but not only in such cases, we appear to have some evidence that this is indeed not so.
As further evidence we may take the again common place reaction reported by individuals involved in car accidents, aeroplane crashes, and so on, in the moments before impact, or sometimes too after the death of a loved one. Some people report under such conditions a marked and unusual degree of detachedness from events (‘this isn’t happening’, ‘this is happening to someone else’, and so forth), sometimes a marked slowing- down of time almost to snail’s pace, and/or a complete absence of fear, with time to reflect (objectively, of course, only a few seconds) in some detail about past events or aspects of their own character – the origin, possibly, of the expression ‘his whole life flashed before his eyes’.[On occasion, because apparently time has subjectively slowed to such a marked extent, an individual is able to perform complex or rapid actions which he or she would certainly not achieve in the same time under normal conditions. I have listened to first-hand accounts of such incidents, in some cases corroborated by independent eye-witness, and am inclined to give them credence.]
Orthodox psychology faces a difficult task in attempting to accommodate these events and the mental states accompanying them, if they are as described. In general, I regret to say, psychologists solve this problem by taking no notice of it.
I personally find my explanation (or at ant rate look for an explanation) of the detachment experienced in amnesia and in moments of crisis in terms of the nature of consciousness – of which more shortly. But let us for the moment return to the details of the amnesia incident. Although I had, and have, no recollection of those events, I did return to the changing room, I did get changed, pack my things and walk to the bus stop. I did get on the right bus and off at my home stop.
Now, if I did not consciously issue these orders to myself, then who did? For an answer we may for once, I think, legitimately turn to the computer for an analogy. The organism without, or in the absence of, consciousness functions robotically. It functions then on the lines along which it has been programmed (a) by inherited instinctive behaviour patterns and (b) by experience and conditioning. Though the tasks performed by my ‘robotic’ nervous system were not at all simple, it was very familiar with {i.e. had been well programmed or conditioned in respect of) all of them. The performance was not so very much more remarkable that that of a modern jet airliner flying on automatic pilot. That machine flies a set course and can make corrections within limits to meet changed conditions – i.e. can ‘deal with’ novel situations, provided they are not too novel. What, as I believe, neither the robotic organism nor, of course, the automatic pilot can do is to perform acts outside their range of previous ‘experience’ or in any case beyond their inherent capacities.
The topic of learning is a particularly vast one, which I do not wish to consider in too much detail. I suggest, however, that we must distinguish between ‘robotic learning’ (which does not at all necessarily mean unsubtle learning) and learning via conscious experience, conscious decisions or as the result of deliberation. What I term ‘robotic learning’ is probably pretty much identical with conditioning (both operant and classical). The circumstances under which this learning (or recording) takes place have been often and amply described by the conditioning theorist – and have to do with schedules or reinforcement, rewards, stimulus differentiation, and so on. This process of conditioning goes on more or less continuously throughout our lives. We may or may not realize that conditioning is taking place- but even when we realize it, or become aware of the outcome of it subsequently, we do not experience at any time the actual underlying processes, the actual laying down of the traces. (Thus, when I have lived in a strange district for a time, I realize that I have not observed that actual conditioning as it has taken place somewhere in my nervous system.) With conscious learning, on the other hand, the case is otherwise. Before proceeding to it, however, let me stress that very often robotic conditioning of the material that I am learning or studying consciously is taking place at the same time.
[Experiment has shown for example that a memorized task is better recalled in the room where the original learning took place than in an otherwise generally similar room.]
Thus some learning – perhaps even most- is stored in two ways at once. There are a number of differences between precisely what is stored in the two cases – robotic learning tends to be more indiscriminate, for example, or at least to be discriminative in terms of its own- but this need not concern us at the moment.
To approach the subject of conscious learning, a short digression is necessary. In a course of classes on meditation which I once attended, one of the exercises we practiced at home was that of observing ourselves, but of observing without interfering. Thus the instruction for one particular week was ‘observe yourself walking’. Now, as we all know, normally if one starts thinking about the mechanics of some task which one has learned to do without any thought – such as typing, driving a car, walking upstairs – the result is that that smooth activity is disrupted, and we make mistakes. This was not at all the purpose of this exercise.. The purpose was to observe without disrupting. Some of us found this very difficult at first, but with practice we all managed it. (This ability to detach oneself from and to observe what one is doing without in any way reducing the level or rate of performance is already of considerable interest to our general argument in that it recalls the detachment sometimes experience during accidents.) The result was not at all unpleasant or tedious, but on the contrary both interesting and rewarding. This exercise represents one small example of the ‘rediscovery of the senses’ which many programmes of meditation incorporate. Another similar exercise we practised was ‘observing oneself in the house’. In the class preceding that exercise, the instructor asked us to suggest examples of things we obviously had done or habitually did, but could not remember doing. My own mundane example happened to concern my spare shoes, which I always found under the bed, although I took them off and left them in various parts of the room.
I could only imagine that in the course of moving about the room during the day I gradually kicked them under the bed. I had no memory of so doing – though I subsequently observed myself doing it.
Further instances of the foregoing in fact happen regularly to all of us. That is, we cannot remember where we have put something – sometimes we cannot even remember when we had it last. When we find the object eventually, we sometimes retrospectively recall putting it where it now is – yet we must have done. For it is, for example, in a locked cupboard to which we only have the key. It is under the tool-bag in the car. It has got into the parcel we sent to Scotland. Like the events surrounding a blow on the head, the incidents in question defy recall – in the present case, I suggest, because they have never been recorded.
The last statement requires amplification. The events surrounding the blow on the head may or may not have been recorded. But if the former is true, the actual (physiological) memory trace seems to have been in some way ruptured beyond repair. The shoes kicked under the bed, the book put back in the cupboard, the key included in the parcel are not in this category. It would seem that they were not recorded (a) by consciousness, because our conscious attention was somewhere else at the time, or (b) by robotic memory, because, I suggest, the actions were performed once (and no kind of reward was involved) on each occasion, and as a rule one trial or one reinforcement is insufficient to produce this type of learning.[The kicking of the shoes under the bed is a frequently repeated action, and one would perhaps have expected conditioned learning to have occurred. However, although robotic observation is fairly open-ended (rather like a perceptual vacuum –cleaner) – so that most of what goes on is noticed and recorded most of the time – it is not infinitely open-ended. Some pre-selection of stimuli occurs, and some types of event have preference over others (situations connected, no doubt, to our phylogenetic history). More –over, I believe the robotic view-finder, though very wide-angled in the young child, narrows progressively with increasing age. Probably too the actual laying-down of the robotic memory trace requires more reinforcement in later life. These suggestions are in general in line with the evidence obtained from conditioning experiments.]
The differences between conscious learning and conditioned or robotic learning seem to me many and clear. Another, broader version of essentially the same statement is that behaviour which involves consciousness (conscious participation) is markedly different from behaviour which does not, supportive evidence for this view can be readily found in any experimental psychology text – though of course the terms used are not those that I employ.
An experiment by Hull involved the use of Chinese characters.
[( C.L.Hull, Quantitive aspects of the evolution of concepts (Psychological Monographs, No. 123, 1920).] Unknown to those concerned in the experiment, a particular sub character was buried in some of the larger characters. The subjects were asked to guess-sort the cards into classes. Although performance improved each run, the subjects still did not know at the end why they were getting their choices right. Unconsciously, and robotically, they had been conditioned to make the correct response without knowing why.
The point of interest in this experiment for present purposes is that, if the subjects has simply been told what to look out for at the beginning, without doubt most of them would have achieve 100 percent correct sorting from the start. Some experimenters have actually confirmed this is similar experiments; in fact the point really needs no demonstration. The matter in question is frequently discussed, as a special issue, under the heading of ‘one-trial learning’. This title is an attempt to bring this kind of ‘learning’ (i.e. the instant appreciation of or acting on a conscious instruction into the general rubric of conditioning or, as I call it, robotic learning. That this is a tortuous, and in my opinion quite unsuccessful, attempt is seen when we consider a few everyday real-life situations. If a friend asks us to go to his house (which we have not been to before), retrieve the key under the brick by the wall, go into the house and pick up the parcel on the sideboard in the lounge, we can do it, just like that. We have ‘learnt’ to do it in one trial. I suggest actually that we have ‘learnt’ to do it before the trial itself, but no matter. Conditioning theory, for its part, is obliged to argue that we have been to many houses and many lounges and seen many parcels before (which is true), so that in a sense earlier conditioning has occurred; and that the reward or reinforcement in the present case is that of retaining the affection of our friend. This already laboured analysis becomes even more unworkable if we consider the next situation. We are on a train, and a total stranger sitting in the compartment requests: ‘Would you mind saying “Smith” to me before I leave the station?’ where is the reward here, and where the previous trials? For some of us, the strict conditioning explanation becomes farcical at this point.
Yet another and even more challenging difficulty resides for the conditionist in so- termed ‘latent learning’. Let us suppose that for the first time in one’s life one is asked by an acquaintance where he can purchase some ice-skates (a Tibetan rug, a glass vat for storing acid – or whatever the recherché item is_. We have never thought of the matter before, but now, on reflecting, we recall that in a part of town we occasionally visit there is a sports-gear shop with some ice skates hanging somewhere on the display. All we have ever done is to walk past the shop, paying no particular attention to any of them. Yet when needed – we can readily e=recall it. Does it not seem, then, as if consciousness is in the recording business on its own account, independently of any material or other reward or advantage, just somehow as part of the process of being conscious? The same type of incidental, non-rewarded learning can, as it happens, be shown to occur also in lower organisms.
Further light on consciousness, and further difficulties for conditioning theories, come from experiments where subjects variously are and are not told certain things – are giver or not given certain instructions. (See R.S. Woodworth and H. Schlosberg, Experimental Psychology (Methuen, London, 1955), pp.572-6) In a series of experiments one experimenter tried to produce a conditioned salivary response in human beings to the sight of nonsense syllables flashed on a screen, via the eating of pretzels (the unconditioned stimulus). The results were chaotic. Those who saw through the experiment developed no salivatory response. Some others produced the response for a while and then lost it, others produced a decrease in salivation, and so on. Eventually the experimenter hit upon the idea of misleading the subjects. He fed their consciousness false information as to the nature and purpose of the experiment. He told them the experiment was about something else altogether. Under these circumstances he was able to produce normal Pavlovian conditioned salivation in all his volunteers.
As Woodworth and Schlosberg point out, one is faced with the problem of how conscious attitudes can control or affect a response like salivation, which is involuntary. The mystery is deepened when the same general picture emerges from experiments involving responses which people do not even know they possess, like the psycho-galvanic skin reflex. Apart from the difficulties which these experiments produce for the conditioning theorist, we see here very much that consciousness (conscious attitudes) has at times a surprising degree of influence and actual control over the robotic or involuntary reactive systems.
I would like to suggest that learning via consciousness is otherwise, and is other-where stored, than is robotic learning – be this of the classical or the operant variety. Under conscious learning we must of course, include everything that is learned by study or rote or deliberation or cognition – the method for solving quadratic equations, the history of the eighteenth century, the speeches of a character in a play, or whatever. I suggest, too, that anything that has been learned consciously – and here we must broaden the rather narrow term ‘learning’ to include all that which passes through conscious awareness in any form at any time, so therefore daydreams, and all thoughts of every kind – is stored and is potentially available to consciousness again; is stamped, as it were, ‘may be wanted on the voyage’. While, on the contrary, neither (a) the processes of robotic learning as such nor (b) necessarily even the results of robotic learning are available to consciousness. (As a rule, however, the results – effects – of such learning can become available, though certainly not always, once attention is directed to them.)
Thus the subjects of Hull’s experiment had robotically learned, or partially learned, how to solve the problem of the Chinese characters. Whether or not they consciously knew this (actually they did not) was of no importance. Being told the truth subsequently (though this, of course, caused further immediate conscious learning to take place) did not bring the conditioning process itself into consciousness (only the results of it), nor could the conditioned learning be thereby unlearned, though it could then, at least in principle, be inhibited or rejected – i.e. not acted upon – by their consciousness or subsequent occasions.[The fact that consciousness can choose to do the ‘wrong’ thing – go against the results of conditioning and/or the known correct answer, here admittedly more decisively in matters of operant than of classical conditioning – again very much suggests that consciousness has powers of action independent of the jurisdiction of those conditioning and reinforcement schedules.]
At this apposite point let us also note the undoubted ability of consciousness to choose to reactivate past memories. I can decide to remember what I did two weeks ago last Thursday. One at this point, so to speak, goes through the files and gradually or otherwise recovers some or all of the appropriate memories. Do we see that these memories and consciousness are not the same thing? They – the memory traces – are capable of being reactivated so that they once again become part of consciousness. But they are not in consciousness or part of consciousness while they are memory traces in storage. Again we can argue that consciousness and the contents of consciousness are not the same.
To digress briefly: it will be realized that we begin to need some fairly sophisticated designing in the physiological level to meet even the proposals I have made so far. We need (1) receiving, processing and storage centres for operant conditioning, (2) receiving, processing and storage centres for operant conditioning, and (3) a generally similar arrangement for material passing through consciousness. Let us now make it still more complex. We need yet a further centre for the material passing through consciousness. Let us now make it still more complex. We need yet a further centre for material passing through consciousness when that consciousness is inhabiting the Self and not the Ego- that is, notably, when we are dreaming.
I have said a good deal on the subject of dreaming in Total Man, and do not wish to repeat all arguments here. But let us briefly run through the following points. For something, I suggest, in excess of 99 per cent. of the time we are dreaming, we have no memory of our waking/conscious lives (that is, in the terms of reference of that consciousness), i.e. no knowledge of waking consciousness and no understanding that we are dreaming, at the time of dreaming, dreaming is our life, and there is no other. Secondly, on waking we recall, as a rule, only the merest fragments of what we have dreamt (even though the normal adult in fact dreams for upwards of two hours a night) and unless we proceed to rehearse this by thinking it over consciously while lying there, these fragments too will disappear in any case, in the course of minutes. And even so, our conscious rehearsal of the dream is, in ant case, not the same as the dream – not only not in its texture and feel, but also in the sense that we, inevitably, embroider and edit the material. From both sides – from waking consciousness and from dreaming – there is then more than a suggestion that some alternative location of activity is involved in the two cases. It is of course true that much of the material of the dream consists of fragments of information and situations from waking life. These fragments, however, are used and experienced in quite different ways, so that they are very much novel items, even if they reveal traces of their origin. As I have proposed, it seems that Self-consciousness can ‘raid’ the memory store of waking consciousness during the latter’s absence, and borrow what it needs for its own use. Aside from this material, there seems other material in dreams (in nightmares, for example, but also in revelatory dreams) that is Self- generated – that is, does not derive from waking life.
Having added centres for the receiving, processing and storing of Self- conscious material, we have still not finished. I have said that material which has once passed through consciousness and been stored can always potentially be reactivated and made conscious once again. The sometimes astonishing extent to which this appears to be true can be demonstrated both under hypnosis and during psychoanalysis where (sometimes objectively verifiable) data are recovered from perceptions in the very earliest months of life. All this concerns the present life of the individual. To my statement I would now like to add the following : that certain material which passed through consciousness in our ancestors, including very distant ancestors, can also potentially be reactivated into present consciousness. This effectively, is Jung’s ‘racial memory’ or ‘collective unconscious’ [Some individuals maintain that under such drugs as L.S.D. they achieve ‘memories’ of pre-human states. I do wish to affirm or refute such claims here, but only to note them.]
What we are discussing here is not the personal day-to-day experience of our ancestors. There is no suggestion of reincarnation. But in ways we do not readily understand it seems that some experience – especially I think archetypal experiences – become genetically encoded in a particular generation, and henceforth become the property of all descendants. Not only do we recapitulate something of these ancestral experiences in the course of our growing up (consider how much more powerful the hero archetype is in most young boys than in most adult males, for example), but we can under some conditions in some sense go back into them. To say with the example just given, despite our, as adults, habitual dismissal, or simple no-longer-awareness, of the heroic situation, a certain story, a military march, a particular incident may suddenly set our heart beating faster, create a momentary re-vision of heroism in our mind, a vision of oneself as hero fighting back uncounted odds…! But then we pull ourselves together.
One further complication : just as Self-consciousness can raid the memory store of waking consciousness, so I believe it can also raid the race memories, that is, the archetypal contents, of the drowsing Ego. And finally, there is the probability that the Self has archetypal memories of its own.
Indeed, it seems we need a dauntingly complex system to meet even the superficial workings of the human psychological organism. How shall we hope to find anything remotely resembling this in a few million blips on a few miles of magnetic tape, or the allied models of the academic psychologist, that would be merely laughable were they not so tragic.
In speaking of the reactivation or recovery of memory traces by consciousness – especially perhaps when not single memories are involved but, as in the case of amnesia, very large areas of experience – there is perhaps some sense of moving intothose memories. This, I would choose to say, is the case. Consciousness, whatever it may be seems subjectively to be capable of somehow shifting its locus in the nervous system. This possibility is already suggested by the finding that, during cognitive thought, problem solving and similar activities, a certain type of electrical activity is recorded from the front of the brain (beta and gamma waves); during daydreaming, especially with the eyes closed, and in states of meditation, a quite different rhythm is detected primarily at the rear of the brain (alpha waves). I base my own main case, however, on rather different ‘evidence’. We note firstly, on the one hand, the clear reference to spatial movement in the very large majority of our metaphors relating to metal states of all kinds: out of my mind, off my head, beside myself, falling in love, falling asleep, feeling ‘low’ feeling ‘high, down-to-earth, way out, flights of fancy, walking on air, floating on cloud of dreams, on top of the world, absent minded, withdrawn, and so on. There is further the central role of many legends and stories of both past and present, including frequently, and still at the present day, in folk-song. In particular, going (we even say ‘going’) to the to sleep is very often described, especially to young children, as a journey – to the Land of Nod, the Land of Dreams. Such metaphors, I have proposed, are archestructural perceptions of the movements of consciousness within the nervous system.
All in all, then, as must by now be very apparent, I find myself obliged to consider consciousness as some kind of entity – not merely some aspect of conscious contents, and non-divisible from those contents : therefore unlike, say, the colour of a car, which, although conceptually abstractable from the car itself, cannot and does not exist without the car (or come other object) – and indeed is nothing more than an aspect or attribute. My earlier definition of consciousness – functionally dependent through experimentally autonomous – will therefore not suffice. For it seems that consciousness, at any rate in human beings, has definite functions and powers of its own. Nor have we, by any means, yet said the last word on this score.
Consciousness, I suggest, is more closely associated with recently evolved parts of the nervous system that it is with older parts. [Thus we would expect Ego-consciousness to be stronger and more definite that Self-consciousness – and this seems to be the case if we compare consciousness during dreams. Consciousness is also enlarged by (takes its quality from) the (sensory) equipment it has available. Thus waking consciousness has full colour, while the large majority of dreams are in monochrome – shades of black and white. Monochromatic vision is phylogenetically very ancient, colour vision being of fairly recent origin. The Self, as I suggest, for the most part makes use of visual centres designed to receive and interpret black-and-white vision. These centres were originally partly connected, I further suggest, with the pineal eye of the pre-mammalian organism.] We may think up to a point in terms of coral bank, coral flourishes best just below the surface of the sea. Where the sea-bed is gradually sinking, as in parts of the Pacific, the lower coal dies, while the still living coral builds further upwards towards the receding light, on the myriad skeletons of its own ancestors. Hence arise coral reefs and coral banks. We may liken consciousness to the few feet of living coral atop perhaps hundreds of feet of dead coral. The analogy is by no means perfect, for I do not suggest that the lower levels of the brain are dead: they are of course alive, but merely, for the most part not illumined by consciousness. Yet the facts of the coral’s life, plus the further fact that its textural structure is not dissimilar in immediate appearance to the material of the brain, plus the yet further fact that the sea has in its own right any number of association with the unconscious – these, I think, are the explanation of our great interest in coral. I believe that our perception of it is in fact atchestructual. And one species, indeed, is actually called brain coral.
A further as I suggest archestructural perception of consciousness involves the firefly or Will-o’-the-wisp. This tiny point of brilliant light moving in a void of surrounding darkness, dipping and rising, alternately flaring and waning or lost to view, very much reminds us again, I think of the behaviour of consciousness in the ‘blackness’ of the inactivated cortex. As also a man might carry a flickering lantern down endless rows of subterranean files, choosing one here and there to illumine momentarily.
On rather another track, it is a very long time since I first puzzled over the reflexive verb, without being quite able to understand why I found it so puzzling and so intriguing. I think I now do understand why, and I believe that in this phenomenon we gain yet further insight into the nature of consciousness.
In the sentence ‘I wash myself’, who is the ‘I’ and who is being washed? (This, essentially, was the problem over which I puzzled.) Now, it is certainly possible to argue that all we have here is a semantic confusion. The sentence really means ‘I wash my body’. Only one entity is involved. Well enough, but what then of the sentence ‘I hate myself’? Does this means ‘I hate my body’? Not necessarily. A person may love his body, but hate, say, his greed and his unreliability. Or what of ‘I hate the fact that I hate myself’ – which may be rather better expressed as: ‘I cannot bear the fact that I hate myself’ (that I cannot accept myself). These situations are far removed from and far harder to explain away than the apparently unremarkable ‘I wash myself’. If someone says he hates his hatefulness, does he (or can he) hate the hate which he is employing at the same time in hating with it? ‘Hates his hatefulness’ can of course also mean that he hates the fact that others hate him. Both statements, however, come close to saying, ‘I hate my personality’. Is ‘I’, then, not part of the personality? Is ‘hate’, then, not part of the personality, at least at the moment in question?
In all these extended examples do we not see that the ‘I’ can apparently borrow attributes which belong to the personality (which are part of the personality) for momentary use against the remainder of the personality – or the overall personalitystructure. If someone says he likes his hatred of evil, he approves at that moment, in that context, of hatred per se. but if he says he hates his hatred of his mother, he disapproves of hatred, at that moment. So at one moment he praises this thing (hatred), at another he dislikes it, at a third momentarily he actually is it (e.g. I hate my parents). ‘I’, it seems, is any of these things and all of these things, and none of these things. Actually, I believe the last of the three statements to be correct. The first and second appear to be true – and, in a temporary sense, are true – whenever the ‘I’ ‘clothes’ itself in a particular attribute or attributes – or, we can again say, activates them.
The analogy of a person and his or her wardrobe is, however, a very useful one here. The ‘I’, it appears, is forever dressing itself up. Just as a person looks different (even feels different) in different styles of dress, so the ‘I’ seems different when it is loving or hating – and in a way is different. But there seems behind every state and every attitude an ‘I’ which is a continuing entity. (In waking consciousness at least, I know that I am the same person who hated lat night, loved the night before and was indifferent the night before that). But like the invisible man, perhaps the ‘I’ can only be seen (by others – be experienced by them) when it is wearing something. I, of course, experience my ‘I’ (am my ‘I’) even when totally detached from all guises. In states of amnesia, in moments of extreme crisis, or when waking alone at night, we become perhaps particularly aware of the ‘I’ that we are without mediation and, virtually, without stimulation. (If consciousness were merely the outcome of sensory stimulation, it would be paradoxical that in this last case – when alone in bed, with stimulation at a minimum – we are sometimes most conscious of ourselves and the fact of our existence.)
Actors interest us more than many figures, I think, because they represent, archestructurally, the ‘I’ which over and over again dresses up in the trappings of the personality. They show us our condition in extremis. Frequently, off-stage, actors seem to be naked scraps of consciousness, not finding in their own mental wardrobe enough to put on – or perhaps (turning my metaphor round) over- dressing to cover up a too-sensitive ‘I’ that fears the glare of reality (daylight and the searching scrutiny) with uncommon desperation. Need I draw attention here to the many metaphors of assuming masks of which we make such play (N.B.!) in every speech? To the mask which most women literally put upon their faces most of the time? To the social roles within and behind which the temporarily safe ‘I’ sits with fingers crossed and eyes shut tight – manager, lorry-driver, secretary, lecturer, housewife, father? [In this general context it will probably be clear that I regard (1) wearing of clothes as such (other than from the purely functional standpoint of keeping warm) and (2) the ‘invisible man’ stories and the attraction of the idea of invisibility through the ages as further (archestructural ) perceptions and expressions of the nature of consciousness. ]
It will have become clear that the consciousness is identical with, and named as, ‘I’. It must be firmly stressed that ‘I’ is not Ego, nor yet Self. [The conscious Ego is haunted by the (then) robotic Self (ghosts, vampires, and so on); the conscious Self is persecuted by the (then) robotic Ego (the machine, Midas, the anti-organism)] Ego and Self are but two very extensive wardrobes, into which the ‘I’ may dip – well, not quite as it pleases, though the freedom of the ‘I’ in this respect can be considerable. Often the ‘I’ is the willing or the unwilling prisoner or shadow of the Ego or Self, or even of one or two dominant aspects of those major personae. As to the precise relationship of the ‘I’ to the Person (to System C), that is a very difficult matter conceptually, which we shall attempt to discuss in the next chapter.
The first of the major attributes of the ‘I’ is that it knows itself to exist. It knows this directly, inherently and without mediation of any kind.[ (Cf. both R.D. Laing’s description of awareness and Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’.)] It then comes to know something (a) of the conditions of its existence in terms of the organism in which it is housed, and of which it is in some sense some kind of extension, and (b) of the external universe in which the organism resides. These aspects of its knowing aremediated, not inherent or direct. (But still the ‘I’ then knows that it knows. It can so to speak invest the incoming information with itself; it can cause information to pass into awareness – to become conscious.) this is a second major attribute of the ‘I’. so consciousness continually extends and augments itself. It is as if it builds itself a house, a vast mansion (many mansions?), of converted or transmuted sensory information: this house becomes the ‘I’ in the sense that the ‘I’ can move within it and know it. But the house, nonetheless, does not know itself. Memory traces when not activated ‘are’ not, though they do exist in the objective sense. [(Cf. earlier discussion concerning the policy of the NorthernEuropePresbyterianBuilding Society.)]Robotic memories also ‘are’ not, though they likewise exist, and in their existence form part of the complex programme of the un-self-conscious nervous system. The functioning of this system (or rather systems) cannot become conscious, though here theresults may sometimes be observed, and these then, of course, consciously recorded in their own right.
I have suggested that the ‘I’ knows itself, that is, has awareness of its own existence, as an irreducible and immutable characteristic. I have further suggested that any extension of knowledge beyond this initial self-knowledge is mediated by whatever (sensory) mechanisms are gathering and conveying the information. In some sense these mechanisms are gathering and conveying the information. In some sense these mechanisms therefore determine the nature (the quality, the dimensions) of the ‘I’s’ further or mediated consciousness.
This is readily illustrated if we consider the ‘I’ (consciousness) in the two cases of occupancy of the Self. During waking hours the normal individual, at least, has the impression that he is exercising control over his actions, is choosing between alternatives. Certainly part of the freedom is illusory, in that for example it can be shown that many people avoid areas of activity and situations where the limited power of their ‘I’ would be revealed – that is, where programmed (conditioned) reactions of the robotic organism would take over instead. For instance, a man might become a bank clerk because, among other reasons, he would not be able to cope without anxiety with people in some less structured, predictable or ‘safe’ situation. A nervous teacher might choose – not necessarily completely consciously, of course – to teach adults instead of children. A woman might marry a timid, conventional man (or, naturally, vice versa) in order not to have her own uncertainties challenged – and so on. Thus, to repeat, though there is a fair measure of autonomy for the ‘I’ in waking consciousness, it is seldom as great as it seems. In the neurotic individual we see, of course, an ‘I’ with a much reduced autonomy. But it is in dreaming sleep that I think we can best personally experience a consciousness (our own consciousness) with a very great deal of its autonomy absent. We speak of ‘having a dream’, but, as already suggested, it is more correct to say that the dream has us. We are very largely at the mercy of the dream and, I suggest, we know that we are. This extension or quality of consciousness (for it is an extension, even though the extension is into an unfree situation) derives from the nature of the Self – which has a yielding or, more extremely, a masochistic nature. Sleeping consciousness is perhaps, too, as a rule less vivid than waking consciousness – but not always or absolutely so. In a strong nightmare, for example, our consciousness of events possibly exceeds anything that we experience when awake. On awaking from such a dream it may be still ‘in the room with us’ for many seconds, and in our thought for much of the day. It is not therefore the degree of consciousness which is essentially different in the two cases, but the type of consciousness. In Self –consciousness the ‘I’ has a very different experience of being extended (of being alive, that is, instead of just being) than it has in Ego-consciousness. But it is nonetheless an experience of being alive, or being somewhere, of being in contact with (mediated) events.
In our Self-consciousness (that is, during dreaming) I think that we come close to getting some idea of what consciousness is like in and for lower organisms, that is, in animals. I say some idea, for the waking consciousness of animals is, nevertheless, a rudimentary Ego-consciousness. But it is far more trapped less-able-to-act consciousness that is your own Ego-awareness. The waking ‘I’ of the animal is much more like the helpless bystander that is our own dreaming ‘I’: the witness who must witness but cannot control. In Roah and the dog Tim, however, we saw two examples of what I consider represent acts of consciousness, specifically Ego-consciousness, in animals.
My assumption is that a rudimentary form of awareness is present from the lowest, single-celled creature upwards – be that creature animal or vegetable. It is then, of course, very, very much a governed (not a governing) consciousness. The very small human baby, I suspect, experiences awareness in something of this highly circumscribed, largely undefined way – though for a real comparison I suggest we should consider rather the early human foetus. At some point in the evolutionary scale (and in the ontogenetic recapitulation of the scale) consciousness begins to develop or acquire powers of control. The switch point from controlled to (ever so slightly) controlling consciousness is as difficult to discuss or assess as any of the other momentous switch points – the moment when inorganic becomes organic, for example – and I do not therefore propose to discuss it here. I am sure in my own mind, however, that phylogenetically this switch occurred well before the advent of the primates, let alone of man himself.
In man the controlling power of consciousness has reached its highest point so far. It is not, though, such a very high point. Such marginal powers as consciousness possesses are as a rule overridden by the commands and demands of the autonomic system, and by both robotic operant and classical programming and pre-programming. Yet I believe that occasionally consciousness, even though its efforts are frequently rather like a pitchfork of straw against a wave, can throw enough into the balance to tip the scales a particular way. In fact I would like to express this notion even more firmly, and quite illogically, by saying that consciousness at certain moments can even drive the organism beyond that of which it is actually capable. There is a clear paradox here, which I do not intend to do anything about resolving: how, after all, could an organism do more that that which is within its capabilities?
Yet it seems to be on these two notions – (1) that consciousness can always seek to reverse, and sometimes succeeds in reversing, the decisions of the autonomic and the robotic systems and (2) that consciousness can demand, and sometimes get, a greater performance than expectation could possibly, let alone reasonably, demand – that the concept, and fact, or morality is based; and only on one or both of these that it could be based. Morality in the true sense is no kind of notion that could apply purely to the robotic systems alone – though I have no doubt that some of our values derive from our precise biological predispositions. True morality must, I think, involve a knowing, striving, choosing entity – one that is, and can be, in some sense more than, and greater than, the sum of its past experience.
Our next chapter also will be very much concerned with the nature of consciousness and morality, and with the further general nature of mental phenomena and contents – more especially with the ways in which a content or set of contents meets and interacts with another.
I am very aware that much of what I have said in this chapter could do with more amplified notation and definition, and that at least as many difficulties are raised as are settled by my explanations and descriptions. Yet I feel that what I have said goes at least some way towards meeting the complexities of readily observable actuality in life – and certainly further than do ant academic accounts of personality that I have so far come across, always excepting the contributions of Freud and Jung.
Total Gooch 