seekersandsought.com

 by Vwadek P. Marciniak

 Arriving late at the conference and finding it crowded with a group of illustrious scholars and writers on stage addressing the topic of consciousness, I was able to garner a seat and hear the opening remarks of the moderator. After each guest gave their opening comments, I began reviewing my notes during the question-answer period and realized I was more confused than when I entered. The attempts offered to define the consciousness left me uninformed since what was offered was an undifferentiated explanation, so general or obtuse as to leave one empty without satisfactory clarification. The well known names, from Searle to Churchland and Koch, ‘Dennett to Baars, Chalmers and Burrows, offered their thoughtful insights but there still remained little light as to agreed meaning. It was clear that simply equating consciousness with awareness would not do, even if it would follow a Cartesian base.

While this conference is fictional, the named thinkers are not, for consciousness remains one of the most discussed and confusing terms to attract intellectual interest this past half century. Further compounding these difficulties there has been an increasing if meaningless applications as in “absolute” consciousness, “wake” consciousness, “alternate”, “collective” or “class” consciousness among too many others that further expand a descriptive but confusing collage of this subjective, amorphous but significant idea. What is the meaning in speaking of black or national consciousness? Do we have a better understanding when we have an offering of feminist or gay consciousness? Does one wake up one morning and suddenly discover that they are female or black? It is never helpful when the answers are more confusing than the question. This should not be an Hegelian intellectual homecoming. Even John Locke expanded Descartes’ definition to include memory and thinking which at least is a step in the correct direction. This introduces how all three offer a time frame with aware as the present, memory for past and thinking the future.

The concept of consciousness deserves more consideration than these examples of an over-worked and over-distorted term now run amok in a mental mind-field. Part of the problem may be that those most concerned are too unwilling to take an historic approach, locking themselves into a fixed psychological exercise with philosophical definitions for a mental activity that is pure subjectivity and more dynamic complex which is still evolving than too often is not granted.

Given this situation, it would not be inappropriate to question from where consciousness arrived, how it may have evolved and what could be some of its roots? What in our historical mental transformation made it possible, at least for those who have experienced what may be called conscious states of mind, i.e. achieving a fully conscious experience? This last statement further implies that we have not always been conscious, that it may possible that it has not been necessary to be conscious. And finally, it may not be an absolute but rather occasional activity. It’s presence as a mental activity is only one of degrees, appearing rather recently and with relatively modern and postmodern beginnings, at least if we are cautious in our historical analysis.

The central tendency in defining consciousness as awareness poses, as noted, more problems than solutions. Animals and plants are capable of a certain type of awareness. One could call it an instinct but it still is a capacity to “know” that the animal should not jump from cliffs that most plants should not open their buds in the winter months. Even our genes have some type of awareness as to what is appropriate or not for both health and growth. Being aware may possibly be a component of consciousness, but it is not to be equated with consciousness. Awareness is too general and amorphous to offer meaningful clarification. Defining a confusing concept with another adds to the blind spots. For those who experienced this unique phenomena, especially to a high degree, equating it with awareness is more confusing than enlightening.

The concept consciousness has a history and since history and language are companions in their respective altering of our own understanding, a review of the history could offer some potentials for clarification. That the conceptual root of the historic term consciousness can be traced as far back as the Roman Empire further expands the potential for confusion. Those oriented toward the power of the word, the literary character of language, are more concerned with the relation of each of those words to each other as was originally used in documents and for creative purposes. Historians, on the other hand, are attracted more to the cultural relationship of a word to its own era as well as to the future usage as both a potential cause and effect for later adaption. Since “conscious” is itself the third incarnation from its original roots, its historical transition can reveal some basic fundamentals towards attempting clarification. A source for a clearer historical understanding can be found in the writings of C. S. Lewis who discovered its roots through scholarly analysis. The earliest documental appearance arrived around the first or second century A.D. with the marriage of two Latin terms, con and scire together giving us conscire and from which we acquire the noun conscientia. Allowing for difficulties that exist in all translations and therefore interpretations, especially when the term is so ancient, it is suggested that in the tying of the `with’ or con to that of scire or `know’, implies meaning knowledge between two parties, specifically, some form of secret knowledge. The idea of hidden information, that which is possessed exclusively by two parties, may well have been appropriate during the Roman Empire as it moved towards instability where increasing numbers of important and powerful citizens worked in secret with others to create family and clan stability. What is significant is that this is a knowledge that is anything but public which was an original and fundamental frame for all human references in the ancient world. Roman society, like the earlier Greeks, were dedicated to public life where citizens possessed duties rather than rights; this was a world without individuality as we now understand the concept. In Rome, a citizen was defined as being a member of a clan, a family and a community. The very modern concept of an individual self will take centuries before developing and will mature along side any modern concept of consciousness.

This is an appropriate and mandatory mental backdrop, especially when considering a world so distant and unlike our own. When discussing the vast difference between our world and where we have come from, it is necessary to comprehend how this distant world may have existed as a contribution to defining our present psychological pattern of existence. This understanding can be offered in contrast to the growing individuation and decline of the collective that now inheres in our modern lives since clans, tribes and family dominated our traditional frame of reference. There was no inner alienation or estrangement in a world without any inner self burdened by daily living. The mind of antiquity demanded nothing resembling any of the extreme complexities or abstractions of our world. The earlier the languages we examine and study, the more this is clearly expressed in its comparative simplicity. The organic and collective world of antiquity is now replaced by one of complex machines, singularity, estrangement and even isolation.

The change from its original meaning while retaining the rather unique sense of a secret but shared knowledge soon began to enter a theological metamorphosis into even more remarkable secret knowledge now tied to the Christian acquisition of an inner immortal soul that was indispensable for the Medieval Christian sense of salvation. This was a creative weaving of a new cloth to cover the old meaning which now became a unique and applicable activity in the form of “conscience”. What had been secret knowledge hidden from others and primarily passive was now radically transferred into an active transcending communion of secret knowledge between the Christian soul and an active God. This was more than secret knowledge, for now there was a reflection tied to the inner soul, hidden from all others since the issue was one of sin, a reflectively soiled soul only known to God. While the appearance of conscience in the Christian world was slow in developing, it found full birthing and given a central role in the new canonical rules of the early Fourth Latern Council of the Thirteenth Century when the confessional was made a mandatory annual sacrament.

Priests now found they needed training as to how to aid a penitent to review their secret knowledge (con\scire) of sin (conscience) and reflect upon a knowledge exclusively known by God which now would be revealed to the His intermediator, one’s confessor. Without reflection it would be impossible for the penitent to make a complete and satisfactory confession of their sins. This was so new that many generations will pass for the confessors (priests) to begin understanding this original and very strange phenomena of inner reflection. An inner examination, a turning into oneself as a primitive form of introspection began slowly, while it increasingly impacted on the late medieval psyche. The sinner and God (with the priest-church acting as intermediary) now have a shared secret knowledge that are confessed in order to return to the good grace of the Savior. In addition, this was clearly less a typically passive situation since these secrets must be activated and accepted first through the inner reflection followed by an open and voluntary expression of that newly acquaired knowledge. Both a more active and more inner state of thought was becoming a fundamental part of a changing western mentality.

This was not the only beginning steps of the idea of an inner and hidden existence since the very idea of a Christian inner being, a soul, already implied the creation of such a phenomenal condition. This soul retained a passive existence, however, since all moral acts, according to Augustine, the official theologian of the medieval church, were only attributable to the infinite grace of the Lord. Still, the interior soul and personal conscience would now run parallel to the revolutionary new mentality of a Christian communicant, creating an inner identity, one where consciousness will eventually find a home.

What was more striking was this movement towards an inner existence now manifested and supported by changes in the art of writing and reading, especially the newly discovered art of silent reading, followed by the creation of the printing press, making religious script even more personal and increasingly an inherently private activity.

Language originally being an oral experience from its earliest roots had naturally always been intended to be heard. The ears, not the eyes, were the natural organ for experiencing language. Early copy rooms in monasteries were known as mumbling rooms since monks read out loud whatever they were copying. But several medieval changes did begin to impact. First came our present written script, the Carolingian, which originated in the court of Charlegmane somewhere around the beginnings of the ninth century. This was followed by the monks in Ireland expanding the accessibility of writing by separating words into sentences, eventually creating punctuation marks; both of these additions contributed to the general comprehension for those other than professional scribes and making possible the delineation of sounds in order to facilitate one’s ability to join the world of the literate. This last component, the birth of silent reading which evolved throughout the High Middle Ages with its impact on enlarging our inner voice, cannot be overestimated, along with the earlier contributions of the concept of a soul or inner conscience.

When we can establish the existence of an intimate relationship with “The Word”, an individualized one in the interior of the mind, we have an arrow pointing to what will eventually be known as a “private” act as we take our first steps into the earliest hints of modernity. It was the Catholic confessional combined with the birth of a conscience and the skills of silent reading that made possible an early and enlarged reflectivity, our inner introspective mentality, one of the first contributions in creating the modern distinction between objective and subjective experiences.

The creation and acceptance of a nonmaterial but uniquely personal immortal soul with the development of one’s own hidden conscience, an inner place where the voice of a righteous god could reside privately along with the ability to read silently, removed western humanity from an exclusive dependence upon audio experiences. These are three early meaningful steps driving our mental capacities into breaking from ancient and early medieval frames of thought and a traditional understanding of our sense of reality. While there were earlier but more shallow roots, these three created a road map marking the unique historic events from the Renaissance and Reformation to the Scientific Revolution which for consciousness would find a powerful impetus in the writings of René Descartes.

Three early events, important pieces of this puzzle, occurred during the Renaissance: first the printing press with the other arriving from the hands of the artists who entertained the idea of foreshortening or depth of field, a radical new realism being expressed by the artist’s control of a visual and a human sense of place and time. Add to this the artists new practice of signing their art works in this revolutionary age of fine art and you have the beginnings of artists expressing their personal tie to their work and commiting the number one of the seven deadly sins - pride. While many have suggested that the printing press was the most important of invention for the topic of consciousness, it is suggested here that rather than the printing press, it was silent reading that may have played a far greater role since it was this process that offered a new parameter for understanding time and space, an inner and revolutionary new subjective ontology.

The leaders of the Reformation also added to this expanding horizon of self discovery in their demand that followers of the Protestant communion with Christ first develop this personal relation with His Word by their private reading of the newly accessible Bible. This was Protestants replacing the Roman Church with a new intermediary between the faithful and their Lord - God’s holy word. To bring conscience into an active state would require not the church but rather the interiorization of the Holy Word read in the silence of one’s growing personal space where the mind could embrace and absorb the message of salvation. The guide for moral conduct was becoming both more personal and private. This was the early foundations upon which the individual (public) and the self (private) could be framed to hold one’s personal consciousness.

The concept and creation of realistic rendering in the plastic arts meant among other things that one could now perceive an image with depth, that is, a rationally controlled sense of space and time, a spacious entity set in a specific time where we, the audience, are uniquely separated and yet in a certain sense a singular part of that very space. We look at a painting and see “it” standing with us “here” and this increasingly became the accepted view of an expanding Renaissance realism: The space in the painting is placed for us here in our eyes with the space we are residing in at a particular moment. This was not yet the modern notion of a clear distinction of subjective and objective but it was an important contribution to that soon to be an articulated discovery during the Scientific Revolution.

With the combination of the inner word with our new sense of space, a radical changing or our undestanding of our humanity, a new meaning could be found in the significant and brilliant genius of historic and humorous settings created by William Shakespeare. Such theatrical poetry is traditionally to be heard, to be approached with the ears, rather than simply read. It is common for students to be told that if they are to read an assigned poem they should do it orally, to hear its lyricism. Audiences in Elizabethan England enjoyed an audiovisual experience. Recent scholarship supports the concept that today one can acquire a great deal of pleasure and knowledge by simply reading Shakespeare quietly, visualizing and hearing inside one’s own mental home this profound theatrical and rhetorical experience, assuming we have such a capacity. If this were not the case one would be hard pressed to explain why it would be difficult if not nearly impossible to enter a book store and not find works of the Bard on the so many shelves.

Clearly, there has been an expansion in our ability to absorb and internalize aesthetic as well as practical experiences. The subjective inner life, the early stages of a developing self, our own subjective “here” versus the objective that is observed “there” did become a central contribution from and for the creation of modern science most clearly in the writings of Francis Bacon. His idea of “disengagement”, the separation of the observer from the observed, is a touchstone for the birth of the modern notion of objectivity without which science could not exist. If we can better know something by standing back from what it is we study, we can make ourselves an observer and by implication, someone unique as a thinker to match our unique soul or conscience. It was in this context that Descartes - defeating his doubts - made his contributions. His work as well as that of contemporaries, John Locke and Isaac Newton, created a radical new vision of space, time and motion which completely undermined traditional assumptions.

Offering more confusion than clarity, Descartes equates consciousness with the Germanic term of awareness. This had been an extremely important concept for Descartes since he made consciousness in our thinking a central component of his cogito. In other words, for cogito ergo sum to work, our being aware of our particular active cogito is required. The act of thinking is made part of our awareness in order to make those thoughts operational and useful. To have a thought is only the first part of the process of thinking for it is also necessary to make conscious that thought. A baby may have a thought but simply cannot bring it to a conscious state and thus for all practical purposes is without that very thought except perhaps for a non-reflective moment. What is all too often overlooked regarding Cartesian philosophy is that this idea of being conscious means an awareness of thinking what it is that we are actually thinking. This was the path which Descartes took to arrive at a new form of certainty that he hungered for. If I think and can be conscious of that thought I must be alive and so must exist. This was the key to his secular dualism that began to replace religious dualism. It is his “conscious” embracing of the implications of his cogito that gave him some comfort in a world that appeared to be increasingly flowndering in uncertainty. Which was the true religion? What to think of nascent new national governments. How to deal with religious wars? The times were changing and his thinking proved significant in the secularizing of the western mind, especially in turning away from an exclusive dualism of God and Satan or Heaven and Hell, those long held assumptions that had so underlined if not dominated our pre-modern psyche.

This newly evolved mental construct, methods for discovering our ability to think, reflectively aiding in createing something that we label with the term consciousness now made its appearance in England. John Locke expanded this new topical term by exploring many similar ideas from a more empirical rather than metaphysical assumption, creating a radical change in the understanding of how we know what it is that we know, and what knowing and knowing we know is all about. He also raised the bar for our understanding of consciousness by adding to Cartesian awareness our personal memory and the very act of thinking. Locke agreed in principle, therefore, with the earlier writings of Descartes that there was a consciousness, now a term established in English lexicography, and that what we mean by aware was in part a necessary component for any definition of consciousness.

The expansion of our vocabulary, writings, historical knowledge and printed works created a frame whereby remembering along with the act of thinking naturally added to awareness. This Lockean contribution created, therefore, more than a singular term offered in defining consciousness. That memory, thinking and awareness would dovetail into consciousness, created a serious expansion of meanings, since the activation of awareness implies that memory and thinking inhere at the moment of that activation. Memory implies a frame of reference drawn from our past and added to our present observations just as our aware state of mind must imply something that is equally believed to be presently activated. Here, memory is awareness of our experiences driven from a more passive to more cognitized state.

If Cartesian awareness is to be applied to our act of thinking, thinking in part inheres in the act of memory. It now becomes very difficult to separate awareness, memory and thinking, just as it becomes clear that there is something integrative here, something we could generally label as the act of being conscious as distinct from being cognitive.

A very odd and significant occurrence followed when Locke’s consciousness was translated into French early in the Enlightenment. Whether because Descartes used the medieval Latin term along with his French for consciousness, or if for some other reason, the French translator decided Locke’s English consciousness should appear as sentiment in French. Western mentality had long been very concerned with how to appropriately restrain people’s more anti-social or sinful behavior. From the role of the Church to the use of the Bible, restrictions applied; but now, in the growing secular world, how to pressure people to behave in an appropriate manner became an important issue. The traditional dualism of good vs. evil, God vs. Satan and life vs. death, had remained a central issue for western values. While deism and theism grew in popularity, however, the issue of a working guide for proper conduct remained an issue. Sentiment could play such a role to some extent since it implied for Eighteenth Century philosophes that human beings had an inherent capacity to sympathize and even empathize with others and thus would offer a secular but ethical frame for behavior. Could not this new rational approach replace the religious theology as social guidance?

As failures within the paradigm of rationality began to appear at the end of the Enlightenment, and serious reservations of Cartesian metaphysics and Lockean empiricism made their presence felt, what loosely was labeled the Romantic century began. Now the more contemporary meaning of sentiment began to apply to correct human behavior. Along with these caveats regarding human rational capacity, radically new scientific, political and economic ideas began pushing our thinking into a genuine break from Medieval residuals along with questioning simple blind trust in reason. This was a modern (post-modern?) world that would give us another problematic term - i.e. existential.

Whether it was reservations regarding the use or meaning of consciousness by Frederick Nietzsche or the question of its existence as once was suggested by William James, consciousness was now becoming an intellectual issue. With the mental creation of logical positivism and the later writings on behavioralism by thinkers like John B. Watson, consciousness fell out of favor since subjectivity was not a measurable phenomena. With the arrival and dominance of the social sciences and its child, behaviorism, there was little room for such an abstract and subjective idea as consciousness, making it relatively irrelevant for the first half of the twentieth century. Only after the experiences of massive world conflicts did the concept return and come to dominate so much of our psychological, neurophysiological and philosophical studies.

What began in antiquity as little more than a secret shared knowledge finally became an intellectual issue of great import for understanding the inner and subjective state of our mental activities. This now proved to be truly shared secret knowledge, so secret in fact that there have been and still remain some serious thinkers who raise the interesting question as to how can something even exist that is so non-observable.[1] Others raise questions as to this being a state of mind existing only occasionally or only present in various degrees depending upon the person and/or circumstance.[2] And finally, it has also been suggested that machines will some day be conscious while others suggest this is a term we will never be able to definitively explain.[3] This brief historical journey does disservice to this confusing concept but necessary in order to support a more historical approach to something so complex and evolving.

If we are capable to some degree to make conscious choices, and only at certain times and only historically more recently, the question also needs to be asked as to whether there is any point for such a capacity.[4] Professional athletes, musicians and actors would find being conscious an interference to their performance. Those making very quick and difficult decisions under pressure would also find reflective conscious choices irrelevant if not a potential hindrance. It is easier to argue against rather than in favor of its existence, at least from a practical point of view. From the pragmatists to the utilitarians, one can only wonder as to what the point of consciousness could be. We can reflect and introspect within our inner selves, taking an existential position at the moment, but is it necessary to also be conscious in doing so? Jean Paul Sartre appears to have thought so and there are others who would agree. Nietzsche also had earlier raised serious questions in this regard, and we now find ourselves with more wonder than answers.

Perhaps one of the results of this transformation of such a fundamental concept has been the challenge it offers to traditional conflicting dualistic assumptions that has so powerfully driven much of western thought. We may have entered an age so complex in its technical changes including a life potentially lived in outer-space that the very idea of simple good versus evil and right versus wrong has become rather antique absolutes if not potentially quaint.

For the average citizen, this may not be applicable. But what of those more rare individuals; the artists and intellectuals who push the envelope of understanding and creativity beyond the horizon of everyday functional existence? Are the great geniuses by nature closer to the edge of conscious and subjective reality, somehow transcending the mendacity of daily living? Is creativity the space that appears between those times of deep conscious reflective existence? And, finally, are some people capable of being more than singularly conscious, moving into a new realm of multi-consciousness, as perhaps in poly-consciousness?

Beating old dead horses of equating consciousness with awareness will not enlighten. The roots and complexities are necessary components in any eventual clarification if it is to come.

Individuation, the singularity of the self and the isolation of the individual is a burden that the lone voice expresses within the mind, that interior conversation we alone have remaining private and hidden; this is our own phenomenal mental reality that no one else can ever come to know.

I would suggest that the concept of consciousness is so large and dynamic as both a topic for consideration and an activity exercised, that for it to be left only to the most narrow scholarly fields of study notwithstanding whatever contributions their’s have been or might be is inadequate.

FOOTNOTES

1. This idea of consciousness being unmeasurable being totally subjective is a position for those dusk

behind behavioralism

2. The idea of consciousness being a matter of degrees and only occasionally occurring is the position of this writer.

3. The idea that machines may someday become conscious is one suggested by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained.

4. That one must wonder if consciousness plays any meaningful role in our lives was suggested by Julian Jaynes in Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

 

PAX/LOVE

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