Introduction: The Problem of Consciousness
O what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all ? what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?
Few questions have endured longer or traversed a more perplexing history than this, the problem of consciousness and its place in nature. Despite centuries of pondering and experiment, of trying to get together two supposed entities called mind and matter in one age, subject and object in another, or soul and body in still others, despite endless discoursing on the streams, states, or contents of consciousness, of distinguishing terms like intuitions, sense data, the given, raw feels, the sensa, presentations and representations, the sensations, images, and affections of structuralist introspections, the evidential data of the scientific positivist, phenomenological fields, the apparitions of Hobbes, the phenomena of Kant, the appearances of the idealist, the elements of Mach, the phanera of Peirce, or the category errors of Ryle, inspite of all of these, the problem of consciousness is still with us.
Something about it keeps returning, not taking a solution. It is the difference that will not go away, the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. The difference between the you-and-me of the shared behavioral world and the unlocatable location of things thought about. Our reflections and dreams, and the imaginary conversations we have with others, in which never-to- be-known-by-anyone we excuse, defend, proclaim our hopes and regrets, our futures and our pasts, all this thick fabric of fancy is so absolutely different from handable, standable, kickable reality with its trees, grass, tables, oceans, hands, stars ? even brains! How is this possible? How do these ephemeral existences of our lonely experience fit into the ordered array of nature that somehow surrounds and engulfs this core of knowing?
Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began. And each age has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heraclitus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out.1 A millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was astonished at the “mountains and hills of my high imaginations,” “the plains and caves and caverns of my memory” with its recesses of “manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with unnumberable stores.” 2. Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.
The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were insisting that consciousness was but a small part of mental life, and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.3 In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness from James Mill to Wundt and his students, such as Titchener, was the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings. And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams. There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are.
Now originally, this search into the nature of consciousness was known as the mind-body problem, heavy with its ponderous philosophical solutions. But since the theory of evolution, it has bared itself into a more scientific question. It has become the problem of the origin of mind, or, more specifically, the origin of consciousness in evolution. Where can this subjective experience which we introspect upon, this constant companion of hosts of associations, hopes, fears, affections, knowledges, colors, smells, toothaches, thrills, tickles, pleasures, distresses, and desires ? where and how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of inner experience have evolved? How can we derive this inwardness out of mere matter? And if so, when?
This problem has been at the very center of the thinking of the twentieth century. And it will be worthwhile here to briefly look at some of the solutions that have been proposed. I shall mention the eight that I think are most important.
Consciousness as a Property of Matter
The most extensive possible solution is attractive mostly to physicists. It states that the succession of subjective states that we feel in introspection has a continuity that stretches all the way back through phylogenetic evolution and beyond into a fundamental property of interacting matter. The relationship of consciousness to what we are conscious of is not fundamentally different from the relationship of a tree to the ground in which it is rooted, or even of the gravitational relationship between two celestial bodies. This view was conspicuous in the first quarter of this century. What Alexander called compresence or Whitehead called prehension provided the groundwork of a monism that moved on into a flourishing school called Neo-Realism. If a piece of chalk is dropped on the lecture table, that interaction of chalk and table is different only in complexity from the perceptions and knowledges that fill our minds. The chalk knows the table just as the table knows the chalk. That is why the chalk stops at the table.
This is something of a caricature of a very subtly worked out position, but it nevertheless reveals that this difficult theory is answering quite the wrong question. We are not trying to explain how we interact with our environment, but rather the particular experience that we have in introspecting. The attractiveness of this kind of neo-realism was really a part of an historical epoch when the astonishing successes of particle physics were being talked of everywhere. The solidity of matter was being dissolved into mere mathematical relationships in space, and this seemed like the same unphysical quality as the relationship of individuals conscious of each other.
Consciousness as a Property of Protoplasm
The next most extensive solution asserts that consciousness is not in matter per se; rather it is the fundamental property of all living things. It is the very irritability of the smallest one-celled animals that has had a continuous and glorious evolution up through coelenterates, the protochordates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals to man. A wide variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists, including Charles Darwin and E. B. Titchener, found this thesis unquestionable, initiating in the first part of this century a great deal of excellent observation of lower organisms. The search for rudimentary consciousnesses was on. Books with titles such as The Animal Mind or The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms were eagerly written and eagerly read.4 And anyone who observes amoebas hunting food or responding to various stimuli, or paramecia avoiding obstacles or conjugating, will know the almost passionate temptation to apply human categories to such behavior.
And this brings us to a very important part of the problem ? our sympathy and identification with other living things. Whatever conclusions we may hold on the matter, it is certainly a part of our consciousness to ‘see’ into the consciousness of others, to identify with our friends and families so as to imagine what they are thinking and feeling. And so if animals are behaving such as we would in similar situations, so well are we trained in our human sympathies that it requires a particular vigor of mind to suppress such identifications when they are not warranted. The explanation for our imputing consciousness to protozoa is simply that we make this common and misleading identification. Yet the explanation for their behavior resides entirely in physical chemistry, not in introspective psychology.
Even in animals with synaptic nervous systems, the tendency to read consciousness into their behavior comes more from ourselves than from our observations. Most people will identify with a struggling worm. But as every boy who has baited a fish hook knows, if a worm is cut in two, the front half with its primitive brain seems not to mind as much as the back half, which writhes in ‘agony’.5 But surely if the worm felt pain as we do, surely it would be the part with the brain that would do the agonizing. The agony of the tail end is our agony, not the worm’s; its writhing is a mechanical release phenomenon, the motor nerves in the tail end firing in volleys at being disconnected from their normal inhibition by the cephalic ganglion.
Consciousness as Learning
To make consciousness coextensive with protoplasm leads, of course, to a discussion of the criterion by which consciousness can be inferred. And hence a third solution, which states that consciousness began not with matter, nor at the beginning of animal life, but at some specific time after life had evolved. It seemed obvious to almost all the active investigators of the subject that the criterion of when and where in evolution consciousness began was the appearance of associative memory or learning. If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of its experience, it must be having an experience; it must be conscious. Thus, if one wished to study the evolution of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning. This was indeed how I began my search for the origin of consciousness. My first experimental work was a youthful attempt to produce signal learning (or a conditional response) in an especially long suffering mimosa plant. The signal was an intense light; the response was the drooping of a leaf to a carefully calibrated tactile stimulus where it joined the stem. After over a thousand pairings of the light and the tactile stimulus, my patient plant was as green as ever. It was not conscious. That expected failure behind me, I moved on to protozoa, delicately running individual paramecia in a T-maze engraved in wax on black Bakelite, using direct current shock to punish the animal and spin it around if it went to the incorrect side. If paramecia could learn, I felt they had to be conscious. Moreover I was extremely interested in what would happen to the learning (and the consciousness) when the animal divided. A first suggestion of positive results was not borne out in later replications. After other failures to find learning in the lower phyla, I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution ofconsciousness.6
Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all. When we introspect, it is not upon any bundle of learning processes, and particularly not the types of learning denoted by conditioning and T-mazes. Why then did so many worthies in the lists of science equate consciousness and learning? And why had I been so lame of mind as to follow them?
The reason was the presence of a kind of huge historical neurosis. Psychology has many of them. And one of the reasons that the history of science is essential to the study of psychology is that it is the only way to get out of and above such intellectual disorders. The school of psychology known as Associationism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been so attractively presented and so peopled with prestigious champions that its basic error had become imbedded in common thought and language. That error was, and still is, that consciousness is an actual space inhabited by elements called sensations and ideas, and the association of these elements because they are like each other, or because they have been made by the external world to occur together, is indeed what learning is and what the mind is all about. So learning and consciousness are confused and muddled up with that vaguest of terms, experience. It is this confusion that lingered unseen behind my first struggles with the problem, as well as the huge emphasis on animal learning in the first half of the twentieth century. But it is now absolutely clear that in evolution the origin of learning and the origin of consciousness are two utterly separate problems. We shall be demonstrating this assertion with more evidence in the next chapter.