From Towards a Science of Consciousness 3
Section 9:
Phenomenology CogNet
Proceedings
The topic of self-knowledge has been central to Western philosophy
since its inception in ancient Greece. In the modern era the three
great philosophers, Descartes, Hume and Kant accordingly held that
self-knowledge should be expected to provide the "Archimedes'
point" for all knowledge, the "capitol or center" of all human
understanding, and the "supreme principle for all employment of the
understanding," respectively. Despite its continuing importance, the
topic has proven problematic, as Descartes, Hume, and Kant's own
analyses clearly illustrate. Descartes held with common sense that we
have clear intuitive knowledge of self as single, simple, and
continuing. Hume, responding to Descartes, looked within and argued
that he could find nothing at all corresponding to the notion, and
that it was thus empty of all significance. In return, Kant argued,
paradoxically, that both Descartes and Hume were correct: Descartes in
that we have to have such a self, and Hume in that there is no
possibility whatsoever of experiencing it, or indeed of knowing it as
anything but an abstract, vacuous cipher. Since subsequent
philosophical discussions of the self have largely been reaction to
these analyses and conclusions, it will be worth reviewing them
briefly here.
Descartes sought an indubitable ground for all knowledge, and concluded that he located it in awareness of his own self-existence. Cogito ergo sum, or, in modern English, "I am conscious, therefore I exist." 1 For, Descartes argued, one cannot coherently doubt one's own conscious existence, since the very act of doubting implies it. Or, put linguistically, one can never truly say "I do not exist." But if one necessarily exists, what is it that exists? Descartes concluded that the self that we know indubitably exists is a consciousness, the selfsame consciousness, single, simple and continuing throughout one's awareness. This view of course resonates deeply with our common sense. And we should note that it is not only our modern Western, "common sense" that this view accords with, but also that of very different cultures, as, for example, the arguments of Augustine in ancient Rome and Shankara in medieval India clearly show. 3
Hume's critique of Descartes, however, proved devastating to Descartes'sposition. For when he looked within he reported that he could not find anything in his experience corresponding to Descartes'ssingle, simple, continuing self: when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. (Hume, p. 252)
These results, of course, have accorded with those of almost every commentator since. Thus, while self is supposed to be "something simple and continu'd," and "that to which our several impressions are suppos'd to have a reference," it is introspectively clear that we have "not the least idea" of what such a thing could be. In short, our ordinary notion of self must be some kind of commonsensical "fiction."
What, then, on Hume's account is the self? Hume offered the first of what later came to be called logical construction theories (LCT's), which attempt to account for our concept of self entirely in terms of a "collection" or "bundle" of experiences connected by some "logical" relationship. This approach became the dominant one among English-speaking philosophers in our century. In Hume's original theory the relationships were contiguity and resemblances of our perceptions; later theorists often used complex sorts of memory relationships.
There are, however, real problems with this approach. Indeed, Hume himself rejected it in the famous "Appendix" to his Treatise where his critique and "collection" theory first appeared. The critical passages of this Appendix are very compact, and their argument is not transparent. But the basic idea is clear: the fact, as Hume argues, that each of our perceptions is "a distinct existence," separable (in principle, if not in fact) from all the others, implies that no perception can contain any content implying any real connection with the others. This, however, in turn implies that there is no possibility of properly deriving from the actual content of our perceptions any principle capable of unifying them into a "whole mind" or self. We will return to this line of argument in the next section. First let us now see how Kant's critique strengthened major aspects of both Hume's skeptical difficulty and Descartes'spositive claim.
Kant argued, with Hume, that no overall principle of unity can be derived from the content of any of our experiences. Nevertheless, he also argued that such an overall unity, which he called the transcendental unity of apperception, must be presupposed as "the supreme principle of all employment of the understanding." All of our experience, inner and outer, Kant argued, is extended in time, and all outer experience extended in space as well. Thus, for example, if an experience, whether inner or outer, had no temporal extension, it would be too short to be perceived, and if an outer experience had no spatial extension, it would be too small to be seen. Consequently, Kant argued, every experience, whether inner or outer, must have separate parts. Thus a visual experience, for example, must have a left and a right, and a top and a bottom, etc.
But for any experience to exist as a single experience, all of its parts must be given to a single experiencer. If you look at your hand and see it, you will necessarily see a left and a right aspect. These will be parts of your experience. If, for example, one person saw only the left aspect (say, the little finger) and another only the right (say, the thumb), then these would be different experiences (above and beyond being had by different people) than your original one. And even for each of these different experiences, a single person would have to see both the left and the right aspects, too, or that experience would not have existed either. Similarly, Kant argues, if each of a number of people (heard or) thought only a single word of an extended sentence, no one would experience of the entire sentence or thought. In ways such as these, Kant argued that self as single, simple, and abiding is the absolutely necessary precondition for the existence of any experience or thought whatsoever.
So far, then, Kant would support Descartes. But he also argued, strengthening Hume, that there is absolutely no possibility of having any experience, or even any definite concept, of this necessarily inferred unitary self. Kant's arguments here are complex, and not always clear. But his conclusions are. And one of his major conclusions about the self is that it cannot have any experiential quality if its own at all. That is, it has to be a "pure, original unchanging consciousness," a "bare consciousness" with "no distinguishing features" of its own. We will return to this conclusion in the next section. The next step of Kant's argument is easy to follow, however. For if all of our experience is of qualities extended in time and/or space (as argued above) and the self is necessarily qualityless with no distinguishing feature of its own, there is no possibility either of experiencing it, or even generating any graspable concept of it. Therefore the self, however necessary it might be, is knowable only as a blank abstraction, "a something = X," as he puts it, completely ungraspable, as well as unexperienceable, in itself.
Thus the paradox: self as single, simple and continuing is at once both absolutely necessary and absolutely unexperienceable and unknowable. In other words, Descartes and Hume are both importantly correctÑand this amounts to a paradox that, as Kant put it, "mocks and torments" even the wisest of men. In short, the concept of self is at once both (i) absolutely necessary and (ii) entirely vacuous and ungraspable.
Since the above argument is a bit abstract, let me give a concrete example. Suppose, in accord with Hume's original proposal, that every member of the collection of perceptions (supposedly) constituting one's self has to be related to the others by the relation R, "recognized spatial contiguity," that is, that all of one's perceptions must be connected by the recognized spatial contiguity of their content. This would make it impossible for one to become unconscious and wake up in an environment having no recognizable spatial relationship to the environment where one went to sleep. For one would then be having perceptions P outside the collection, defined by the contiguity-relation R, supposedly constituting the self. Yet we can easily imagine people having such spatial discontinuities in their experiences without having to be different selves. Indeed, people obviously sometimes do have such spatial discontinuities in their experience, as, for example, happens when people become unconscious and wake up in environments perceptually noncontiguous to those where they went to sleep. Ans surely no-one would want to say they had to become different individuals for having done so. Alternatively, consider a relation R' defined in terms of "perceived contiguity to one's (physical) body." This relation would imply that it couldn't be the case that one's body could be destroyed, and one find oneself in heaven, or reincarnated, or simply disembodied in some realm or other. Now it may be the case that one will in fact cease to exist if one's body is destroyed. But it is surely not impossible to imagine otherwise. Indeed, most of the people of the world indeed believe otherwise (i.e., that they will somehow survive bodily death). Thus it is clear that this R', too, is incapable of capturing our ordinary notion of self as something that can (at least logically, if not factually) undergo such a sequence of experiences.
Such examples can be multiplied without end. They illustrate that there is an important sense in which we conceive of ourselves purely as experiencers, capable in our conception, if not in objective fact, of being independent of any particular context and/or set of experiences. And this implies, as the above argument in terms of P's and R's showed in abstract general form, that our selves, as ordinarily conceived, cannot be captured by any set of experiences. In short, Hume's skeptical despair ever coming to an adequate account of self by virtue of any LCT whatsoever appears very well taken.
Let us now turn to Kant's conclusion that the self must be a "qualityless pure consciousness," a "bare consciousness" with "no distinguishing quality of its own." Kant's arguments are embedded in the details of his epistemological and psychological theories, and are, as noted, often difficult to follow. But the gist of his reasoning is easy to understand. Roughly put, he argues that the self has to be an aspect of (or at least connected to) all of one's possible experiences. Otherwise these experiences would not be one's own, and one would not be able to say of them "I have them," "I recognize them," "They are mine," etc. So far, this seems sensible enough. But, strikingly, in itself it seems to imply that the self must be qualityless. For suppose the self did have some distinguishing empirical quality Q. Then Q would have to be an ubiquitous quality, since self has to be an aspect of (or connected to) every part of every one of one's experiences, 3 and as the distinguishing characteristic of self, Q would have to be there, too. That is, it would be impossible for one to have any experience where Q was absent, and Q could never be identified as an empirical quality or distinguishing characteristic in the first place. Thus, by analogy, suppose the self to be the glass of one's glasses. If the glass had any color, say green, this color would color all experiences equally, and this would imply that the color would not be knowable as an empirical quality or distinguishable characteristic at all.
In short, Hume and Kant's analyses appear to lead to the striking conclusion that self cannot be experienced, or even defined, in terms of any empirical quality, or even any empirically significant set of empirical qualities, at all.
This is even easier to see if we turn our consideration from waking consciousness to that of dreams. One common type of dream involves experiencing oneself as having a different body than the one one has in reality. This dream-experienced "body" can even be a nonhuman type of body, such as that of an animal. Yet when one wakes and remembers the dream, one is sure that it was one's own dream, that one had the dream one is remembering. This makes it clear, again, that there is an important aspect of our commonsense notion of self that is independent of identification with one's body (various philosophical arguments for the necessity of body-grounded self-identification notwithstanding). Of course, the point here is not that one is, or even could in fact be, independent of one's body; it is just that people sometimes do experience themselves (as well as naturally conceive themselves) as being independent of it. This independence is made even clearer by the common sort of dream where one appears to be a disembodied spectator, watching the dream action from some vantage-point or other, like a video-camera.
The case of personality is similar. People often do things in dreams that they "wouldn't dream of" doing (in the waking state). In other words, we often do things in dreams that lie entirely outside our consciously conceived personality. Even more, it is also a common experience to observe the dream-action in a completely impersonal, emotionally neutral way when one finds oneself a disembodied dream-spectator. Nevertheless, even if there is neither body nor personality there (in the dream), one is sure that one was there, oneself, watching the action. But what was watching? It seems ungraspable.
These experiences, of course, are not universal. But they are very common. Each time, for example, I poll groups of philosophically innocent students, easily one-fourth or more say they have had the above experiences. At the very least these experiences show something of how discoordinated a basic aspect of our deeply held, naive commonsensical notions of self are from anything graspable in terms of body, personality or, indeed, any identifiable empirical qualities at all.
Such simple reflections on common sense in short make it clear that the puzzles about self generated by Descartes, Hume, and Kant's philosophical analyses are not off the mark. For a deep aspect of self as we ordinarily conceive it does seem to be both continuing ubiquitously throughout our experience and completely ungraspable in terms of empirical qualities whatsoever. It is thus not hard to see why Hume ended his analysis with skeptical despair, and Kant with mocking and tormenting paradox.
We should first note that nothing much can be said about the experience itself. For its identifying characteristic is that it is devoid of all empirical content. That is, as texts from many traditions emphasize, the experience has absolutely no discernible sensations, perceptions, images, thoughts, etc., in it. Indeed, by all reports, it does not even have a spatiotemporal manifold for such phenomenological objects to be located in. What than is the experience like? It is not like anything. What is it remembered as? Not as anything. Nevertheless it is remembered. One remembers having the experience, but there is nothing "to" it. No content, shape, structure, or anything else. Thus, not surprisingly, it is often referred to as "pure consciousness" (since there had to be consciousness for there to be a rememberable experience), "pure being" (since nothing positive can be said about it except that it was), and "pure void" (since it is utterly devoid of content).
More, of course, can be said about the procedures developed in different cultures and traditions to produce the experience. Many such procedures exist, with those of Zen and TM being the most widely known throughout the world. Some of these procedures are easy and widely applicable, others are very difficult and masterable only by a few people after years of dedicated work. The methods range, for example, from Zen's koan practices (concentration on intellectually unsolvable connundra to "freeze" the mind) and "doubt sensation" (to loosen one's attachment to everything) to TM's use of mantras (mental repetition of specific sounds to let one relax utterly, while remaining awake). Although less widely known, Western practices, such as Medieval Catholicism's focusing on "unknowing" (to cause all ordinary mental processes to stop), exist as well. The proponents of such procedures appear to be unanimous in their claims that the procedures actually have to be practiced to really be understood. Nevertheless something of their overall logic is easy to comprehend. For they are all designed allow one's attention to withdraw from all ordinary contents of awareness, including finally even the procedure itself, the idea being that once all phenomenological objects (including the components of the procedure itself) are gone from one's awarenessÑwhile one nevertheless stays awakeÑwhat remains can only be awareness or consciousness itself.
Thus, particularities of methods aside, what remains, according to a wide spectrum of traditional accounts, is what can be called pure qualityless conscious itself. Consider, for example, the following accounts from several different traditions. First, from Chinese Ch'an (Zen):
When the mind is reduced to impotency, it is compared in the Ch'an [Chinese Zen] texts to that of a withered log, an unconscious skull, a wooden horse, a stone girl and an incense burner in a deserted temple. . . . The mind, thus stripped of all its activities [thought, feeling, experiencing, etc. ], will be reduced to impotency and will vanish sooner or later. . . . This death of the mind leads to the resurrection of the self nature. (Luk, pp. 20Ð21)Japanese Zen:
The time comes when no reflection appears at all. One comes to notice nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing. . . But it is not vacant emptiness. Rather it is the purest condition of our existence. (Katsuki Sekida, in Austin, p. 473)The ancient Indian Mandukya Upanishad:
Turia [the "fourth" state of consciousness, after deep sleep, dreaming, and ordinary waking] is not that which cognizes the internal (objects), not that which cognizes the external (objects), not what cognizes both of them, not a mass of cognition, not cognitive, not non-cognitive. (It is) unseen, incapable of being spoken of, ungraspable, without any distinctive marks, unthinkable, unnamable. . . . The fourth [state, turia] is that which has no elements, which cannot be spoken of . . . non-dual. . . . He who knows it thus enters the self with his self. (Radhakrishnan, pp. 698 and 701)And modern Vedantan TM:
When the subject is left without an object of experience, having transcended the subtlest state of the object, he steps out of the process of experiencing and arrives as the state of Being . . . beyond all seeing, hearing, touching smelling and tastingÑbeyond all thinking and beyond all feeling. This state of . . . unmanifested, absolute, pure consciousness. . . ." (Maharishi, p. 52)From the above examples we can immediately see two things, first that texts from different traditions, in different cultures with different metaphysics, take great pains to emphasize that the experiences they are describing are to be understood as absolutely devoid of phenomenal content. Secondly, they also associate the experience with what they take to be the true, underlying nature of self. Similar descriptions, and similar claims of relation to the self, are also found (although, to be sure, less frequently) in Western texts as well, as in the following example from a Medieval version of Christianity's Pseudo-Dionysious:
Through. . . passing beyond yourself and every other thing (and thereby cleansing yourself from all worldly, physical, and natural love, and from everything that can be known by the normal processes of mind). . . . Enter into this darkness with love . . . this supreme and dazzling darkness . . . [and experience] the self in its naked, unmade, unbegun state. (Pseudo-Dionysius, pp. 209Ð213)Such texts and claims raise many questions of course. These include hermeneutical questions about the appropriateness of taking descriptions from different cultures as being of the same (type of) experience, and methodological questions about how seriously to take subjective reports of unusual experiences in the first place. We will return to these questions later. For now, however, let us turn to the question of the significance of the experience for our examination of the nature of self.
As we have seen, identification of the experience in question with a fundamental underlying stratum of self is quite common. However our concern here is not so much with how ancient traditions have interpreted the significance of the experience vis a vis the self, but only with how we should interpret it. 4 Nevertheless, the basic intuition underlying the common identification of the experience of pure qualityless awareness with the self is not difficult to understand. For, as noted above, from the perspective of common sense it seems apparent that if one takes everything away while remaining conscious, what remains has to be one's self.
It is also easy to see that the analyses of Descartes, Hume and Kant outlined above serve to identify the experience in question as experience of self. For it is obvious (i) that this experience, and only this experience, can fulfill Kant's otherwise paradoxical "pure consciousness," "bare consciousness" "devoid of all distinguishing marks. It is also (ii) the only experience that could give experiential significance to the notion of the commonsensical simple consciousness, underlying but distinct from all our changing perceptions, proposed by Descartes and Lock but rejected despairingly (as unexperienced) by Hume. And (iii) it is the only experience that could give experiential significance to the notion of self as independent of all collections of experiences, as implied by our analysis of common sense. In short, this and only this experience can allow us to resolve the relevant tensions within and between Descartes, Hume, and Kant, not to mention the tensions between these philosophical analyses and common sense, in an experientially significant way.
Thus, in sum, we can see both (1) how the expansion of the domain of experience provided by Eastern meditation techniques helps us resolve major Western philosophical problems about the self, and (2) how the same Western philosophical analyses in turn help identify the experience as being of self. 5 This analysis also (3) allows us to "save" common sense, at least to the extent indicated above. But common sense would naturally also ask: If this qualityless pure consciousness is the self, and it is ubiquitous, why is it so obscure? The answer, I think, is straightforward: it is ordinarily obscure precisely because it is (a) qualityless and (b) ubiquitous. It is a psychological commonplace that that which is constant in experience becomes "filtered out," with attention going to what is changing (compare information theory's definition of information as "news of a difference"). Thus if pure consciousness is constant, it is easy to see why it is not attended to until attention is drawn to itÑmuch, for example, as one is unlikely to notice the background temperature of a comfortable room. For since infancy our attention, in the name of functional efficiency, has been drawn to the ever-changing qualities of our environment in order to learn to deal with them properly. Moreover, because pure consciousness has no distinguishing characteristics at all, the only way to actually draw attention to it is to allow all the other objects of attention to be withdrawn from our awareness while we remain awake. (By analogy, one may be unlikely to notice anything but the images projected on the screen while a movie is playing, but one can easily be led to become aware of the flat imageless screen itself if the moving images are brought to a halt with the light still on.)
On this account, then, it should not be surprising that after one's attention has been drawn frequently to pure consciousness in meditation (with all other objects of awareness absent), it should become possible to recognize it at will afterward, even when the other ordinary components of experience have returned to one's awareness (much, perhaps, as one may notice the flatness of the screen even after the movie has started up again), as meditation traditions often report.
In short, these experiential reports suggest (1) that pure consciousness may well be an ubiquitous component of our experience, (2) that our ordinary (and ordinarily paradoxical) sense of self reflects a subliminal awareness of this ubiquitous pure consciousness, and (3) that after we become clearly aware of it as it is in and by itself in meditation, we can then come also to recognize it as ubiquitousÑas self is supposed to be.
(i) The hermeneutical critique is based on the following line of reasoning: All experience, as a matter of empirical fact, is shaped and constructed out of culture-dependent components (symbols, images, expectations, etc.). This is obviously implies that it is impossible to have the same experience across different cultures. This critique had been influential for a decade or more. Yet it is quite easy to respond to: The defining characteristic of the pure consciousness experience is the complete absence of all empirical content. Thus any experience properly identified as a pure consciousness experience is outside the range of all the components (symbols, images, expectations, etc.) hermeneutical thinkers are concerned with. Furthermore, it is easy to see that the pure consciousness experience is logically unique. For if two experiences are phenomenologically different, at least one of them must have some content and cannot be an instance of a pure consciousness experience. In short, any two experiences that fit the defining characteristic of pure consciousness experiences have to be the same, whatever the surrounding cultural context might be. 6
(ii) The phenomenological critique has more substance. For it is not implausible to suspect that putative examples of pure consciousness experiences might have some content, though too abstract to be noticed and identified by the ordinary observer. That is, there might be some content in the experience that would be apparent to one who had undergone sufficient phenomenological training to uncover typically unnoticed subtleties of one's experience. Here one can readily allow this logical possibility. Nevertheless, there would still be a family of closely related experiences well-defined here, and the members of this family would, at least to a first approximation, still serve (with slight modification) to fulfill the arguments about self outlined above. 7
(iii) The methodological question is, I think, the most important one, namely, how to tell if reports of pure consciousness experiences are anything more than mere reports. Here some kind of objective corroboration is needed. But how could this be possible for such contentless subjective experiences? The response is in terms of actual research on meditation subjects. Quite a bit has been done here, much of it on subjects practicing the TM technique (presumably, according to the research literature, because of the ease of the practice, consistency of results, and ready availability of experienced subjects). Here we have the ordinary methodological constraints on subjects' reports, typical of those in psychological research in general. More to the point, a variety of physiological correlates of the experiential reports has been observed, including unusual EEG coherence, marked reduction of metabolic activity, and, most strikingly, periods of complete cessation of respiration (measured, for example, by essentially flat pneumotachygraphic tracings) highly correlated (p < 10^10) in experimental settings with reports of the experience (Farrow and Hebert 1982). Furthermore, this same correlate (cessation of respiration) of the experience is reported and emphasized in meditation texts from ancient and contemporary China and India, in the contexts of Zen, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism.
Thus, when the same unusual experiential accounts, found in very different belief-contexts, are correlated with the same unusual (often unconscious) physiological parameters, it would strain credulity to think that these correlations occur just by chance. The reasonable inference is that the experiential accounts reflect the natural subjective response to the unusual correlated physiological state, rather than to the radically different, often opposing cultural, belief, and expectation-contexts in which the reports happen to be embedded. In short, the reasonable conclusion is that the reports do indeed reflect an objective phenomenon, namely, the culture-independent psychophysical state in question. Finally, we can also note that this common psychophysiological conjunction across very different cultures and belief-contexts reinforces the lack of relevance of the hermeneutical culture-embeddness objection, and the phenomenological objection as well. 8
All of this, one hopes, is enough to show something of the potential value for our traditional philosophical discussions of self and mind of taking into account the pure consciousness experience, widely discussed in Eastern, but not Western, philosophical traditions. For if the phenomenological analyses above are even roughly correct, it appears that this experience is capable of resolving some major Western issues about self, clarifies our commonsense intuition, and is properly identified by philosophical analysis as being experience of self itself.
An expanded version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . . (to be added in proof).
2. Thus the fashionable view, often expressed by philosophers from Ryle onward, that we modern Westerners find Descartes's view "commonsensical" only because of the influence of his views today, is clearly incorrect. For a discussion of the cross-cultural commonality of core components of our notions of self, see Shear 1996.
3. Indeed, as Kant put it, all of one's experiences are in one's self. Thus self has to be there wherever any part of any one of one's experiences exists.
4. This identification, to be sure, is not universal, and there are Buddhist traditions that, while clearly identifying the experience in question, also hold, in opposition to the Zen, that there is no true "self" to be discovered in the first place.
5. Thus this analysis also supports, with uniquely Western lines of reasoning, the identification of the experience with the self, common to many but not all Eastern traditions. That is, it gives independent grounds for siding with Yoga, Vedanta, and Zen, for example, which emphasize the identification of the experience and the fundamental nature of the self, versus Therevada Buddhism, for example, which emphasizes the (apparently opposing) doctrine of "nonself."
6. For extended discussions of the hermeneutical critique, see Shear 1990 and Forman 1990.
7. For further discussion of these phenomenological questions see Shear 1998.
8. For further discussion of these methodological questions see Shear 1998.
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