How your needs invent your consciousness
Looking for “Dasein” creates consciousness in retrospective memory
“What is consciousness?” is an ongoing cliché in popular philosophy. Behind this question, however, lies a more intriguing question of how you discover the truth about something like consciousness. Whatever the answer to the first question may be, the fact that you are asking implies you don’t know the answer, and are trying to find it. But where could you possibly look for the answer? From what source of information could you hope to uncover this obscure information?
The most natural way to think about discovering truth in general, one which you probably turn to instinctively, is to assume there must be a static entity that exists beyond your perception, and that this entity is being gradually revealed to you through your experiences. The “thing” — e.g. consciousness — is “there”, and you are merely perceiving it. We already discussed certain limitations of this approach in another post, (e.g. that it does not account for how you can learn about time). In this post we will take the next natural step, and explain how the act of identification, even of subjective entities like consciousness, is an inventive process rather than a perception of anything real or objective.
That consciousness has no objective reality should already be self-evident, since it is by definition subjective. Barring a step change in technology, no one will ever see your consciousness, and you can never prove its existence to them. Only from the inside can you know about experiences like the feeling of a particular piece of music, the indescribable quality of the colour red, or the emotional affect of being afraid. Consciousness is part of this larger pool of subjective experiences; perhaps it’s a superset or umbrella category.
And in saying so, we have already made our first mistake. We have so far been speaking about “consciousness” as though it were an self-sufficient entity; and the same for “experiences” and “feelings”. This tendency to convert everything you think about into “things” or objects is difficult to avoid, because to think about anything is by definition to make it into an entity. That is the only way you can have some thing to think about. But this natural proclivity can be misleading. Consider the concept of a war. A war is, linguistically at least, treated as an entity, even though it is actually a series of loosely related events and changes, with no clear start or end. It only becomes an entity when you want to think about or discuss it as such. The very act of understanding requires that you first carve out a piece of experience from your larger flow of experiences. You must isolate that piece from the rest of the flow, with which it was otherwise tightly integrated.
What I’m describing is a part of our natural human tendency towards essentialism. Essentialism is the philosophical position that holds that there is an essential reality in every object, one that persists through its many changes. For example, a tree is still essentially the same tree throughout its lifetime of alterations and evolutions; gaining new branches and leaves, growing twisted and gnarled, etc. The essentialist stance is intuitively appealing; even children find it easy to think this way. It arises naturally in every mind, since in order to make any experience explicit — i.e. consciously known — the mind must condense it into a “thing” that can be discussed and interpreted¹. The very act of asserting anything, for example “that tree is brown”, requires that you first define the entity involved — “that tree”.
Consciousness, like the tree, is ever-changing. All you really have access to are a kaleidoscope of experiences that almost never repeat themselves. Yet to discuss it or think about it, it has to first become a noun, a thing, a substance, even a fixed dynamic. It has to have continuity beyond a single moment. Otherwise what are you discussing? Why talk about a moment in time that will vanish instantly, and never come again? You must freeze your experience of life into a static object of study. The bias this creates is unavoidable in all your assertions about it. Even just calling it “consciousness” already skews your thinking about “it” by making the target seem static and singular. Consciousness could, like war, be a series of one-off events that is only viewed as a unity by the people trying to understand it.
This brings us back to the original question of where and how you learn about consciousness. When learning about trees, you have a plausible avenue: your eyes and other senses give you empirical information about it. But introspective entities like consciousness or self present a different challenge, since you can’t “sense” them by any classical definition of sense. Your knowledge of consciousness doesn’t come via a single, uniquely identifiable input, but rather via an awareness of all inputs at all times, including all you see, hear, and think.
One possible way around this problem is to assume that you don’t sense consciousness at all, but rather that you logically reason your way towards knowing about it. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to logically deduce the existence of consciousness, since in the process of reasoning you’d have to invent an entirely new concept that didn’t otherwise exist. Logical deductions are only good at rearranging concepts that were already given in their premises. When I say that “all swans are white, Greg is a swan, therefore Greg is white”, I have not introduced any new entities in the conclusion that weren’t already present. Logical inductions and abductions merely raise the original question anew — where did the novel concept come from?
Despite the fact that I don’t sense consciousness empirically, and that I can’t plausibly reason my way to it, I still feel a strong intuition that I should believe that consciousness exists. It’s right in front of me. Admitting this feels unavoidable.
Or is it? We know from lab experiments that changing the brain — through brain damage, cranial stimulation, or neural degeneration — can also change your thoughts. What would happen if, hypothetically, you altered a person’s brain while they were conscious, and specifically removed the all thought or belief that they were conscious? What if you changed their brain so they believed they weren’t conscious, and they said as much? Is this even possible, i.e. does it make logical sense? Or would you have to erase their mind entirely to accomplish it?
The thought that you are conscious is, in the end, an explicit assertion or belief. You may be continually conscious, but recognizing this as a fact only happens at certain moments in time. You are not constantly going around thinking “I am conscious”. Most of the time you are engrossed in the task immediately at hand. It’s the same as recognizing that you see colours: although you are continually seeing colours throughout the day, you must take a moment to explicitly pay attention and recognize this fact. In such moments you become self-reflexively aware of the nature of colour sensations and give it a name — “colours”. You may also make assertions about it, even if the assertion is just that you can’t explain what colours are.
In the same way, there are moments when you become aware you are conscious. In such moments you begin to condense it into a “thing”, to give it a name and a consistent essence. You may start to study it. Some people will come to the conclusion that consciousness is a fundamental truth of existence; others will think it’s an epiphenomenon of material reality. Both will form such thoughts at various points in time, when they are self-reflexively thinking about their own consciousness. Whether or not consciousness has any truth or existence in itself is not in question here. What we are asking is how you learn about consciousness, and how you make explicit statements about it. Your thoughts about consciousness entail an ongoing series of mental changes over time; and the cause and nature of those changes is worth investigating.
Earlier I mentioned that the existence of colours is something you need to direct your attention to in order to become aware of it. On reading that, you likely started to notice the colours around you. The trigger for doing so was that you read that line and became curious about your own sensations. A need arose in you, which drove that subsequent awareness. The awareness didn’t come out of thin air. The specific colours around you that you then noticed presumably addressed this need, and this need specifically. You didn’t notice shapes or sounds, or the meaning of the words before you; you noticed colours, and you noticed them with heightened clarity. So what you discovered was determined by what you were trying to discover.
The same can be said of consciousness; when you turn your attention and notice that you are conscious, you first become aware of the immediate experiences around you. But this awareness has a specific configuration; it is not as general as it at first appears. Even though you are always noticing the experiences around you — such as when you are hammering a nail, or speaking to a cashier — your current interest in consciousness specifically framed this awareness in a selective way. Namely, you now notice yourself as part of the frame. In addition to what was around you, you may have been aware of your hands and arms, or you felt your face and eyes as you looked ahead, or imagined your head or brain, etc. Focusing on consciousness, in contrast to focusing on colours, necessarily includes yourself in the picture, in the set of things you become aware of. This is a noteworthy observation — we have discovered a reliable pattern which perhaps can be expanded to gain a greater understanding of consciousness.
When you turn your attention to your own consciousness you are making a sort of request to identify it. Your mind is looking for something, and consequently it is creating moments of awareness to capture specific things it wanted to find. Whatever caused you to turn your attention to colours was different from that which turned your attention to consciousness, and so it captured different things as a result. It’s like the difference between searching for your keys and searching for your child — your mind notices different aspects of your experiences.
So what is the need that is driving this search for consciousness? What triggers you to want to sense that you are conscious? The answer is not immediately apparent. The need that drives any act of awareness doesn’t leave its signature on the product. The best way to find this hidden motive then is to ask the following: what would happen if I, for some reason, was unable to locate “consciousness”? How would that make me feel?
A clue to the answer was given earlier when we noted that you yourself are always included in your thoughts about consciousness. No awareness of consciousness can exclude you from its content. The desire to become aware of your own consciousness seems to be tied to the desire to be present, to “be there”, to be included as an experiencing agent in the world. This is the meaning and spirit of Heidegger’s Dasein (“being there”). To say you are not conscious is to say you are absent from the world, and you will not experience the things you want in it. There is a feeling of being excluded that seems to go along with the relegation of this privilege. Thus people often get heated when they discuss the topic. To be aware of yourself, your body, in the midst of the act of experiencing things is perhaps the only way to resolve this tension. It is like seeing a photo of yourself at a party or on a nature hike — the photo reassures you that you were included, that you experienced it.
The statement “I am conscious” is therefore a statement of universal, existential inclusion. But when put into language it also entails an additional feature which goes beyond mere awareness. Consciousness as an explicit assertion (in words) is an interpretation added on top of the original awareness of being there. The word “consciousness” is now being attached to experiences in the same way as the concept of colour might be: just as you may assign the word “colour” to individual colours you notice, you assign the word “consciousness” to individual experiences that you interpret or identify as such. All the features, properties, and arguments you derive about consciousness are subsequent attempts to explain, or publicly justify, this assertion that you are “there”.
To say that asserting that you are conscious is driven by a need for public justification, rather than an introspective, personal search, may seem odd. It’s true that originally you are questioning only yourself regarding your presence among the rest of the world — people and objects alike. Once you assert that, however, it becomes a proclamation, and anything expressed as language is driven by social motives.
As you discuss your own consciousness with others you may at first harbour a solipsistic notion of it — i.e. that you are the only one who is conscious. But others’ swift counter-arguments to this assertion quickly change your tune. They will not countenance the idea that you might be the only one that is conscious. The question then becomes: what definition or understanding of consciousness would explain why we are all conscious, all “present”? You now find yourself engaged in a communal activity, aimed at deriving a shared sense of significance, of “being there”. To continue the analogy from above, this is like trying to figure out what bus you should all take to get to a party, so that all are included.
All definitions of consciousness must allow for a consciousness that is basically homogeneous among all people — i.e. your consciousness is equal to mine. Despite the fact that you can only sense your own consciousness, your definition of it is not permitted to assert that your own is superior to anyone else’s. Eventually this communal definition gets pulled back into your own personal introspection, and thus you invent a named substance called “consciousness”; a substance that is not just your own, but also shared with other people.
The above process sketches how, even without having an internal sense for consciousness, you can develop and expand your own concept of it. There need not be a “consciousness-substance” within you that you are inherently sensing when you do this. Consciousness has no objective, substantial reality. It is the sum total of all your experiences, and your thoughts about those experiences. Your faculty of understanding unifies these into a single object in order to give your experiences significance, to name them, and to explore this shared equity with others. The fundamental nature of human understanding still requires that you perceive everything as an entity, so consciousness will necessarily feel like a “thing”, despite the fact that you may intellectually recognize that it’s not. This is inevitable, because in truth consciousness is a “thing”. But truth itself is not reality; it is what you can know or assert about reality.
By this point we have reduced consciousness to a selective awareness and interpretation of your experiences. This, however, seems to have only pushed the question back one step. When we now turn our attention to those experiences — for example, the feel of a colour, it’s qualia — and try to see what that “is”, new questions arise. These questions are similar to those for consciousness: what made you turn your attention to questions of qualia? What did you notice, and why? How is this different from questions about, say, shape? What is that need searching for? Why does it unify it into a single, shared interpretation? These are the fundamental questions to ask about moment-to-moment thinking.
Even if you disagree with all that has been written so far, the same pattern applies to your disagreement as well. You are responding to a need — a need to understand the phenomenon under discussion, or a need to assert an alternative. These will trigger you to notice new and different things, to become aware of a competing point of view. The content of your resulting thoughts will be at the intersection of what satisfies that need, and what the world makes available to you. All of knowledge, belief, and thinking, is a continual process of creating new thoughts out of such moments of awareness. This process is the totality of what we call your stream of consciousness.
¹The incongruity between reality and how you think about it has been a contentious issue in philosophy since the time of the pre-Socratics. There was an ongoing debate between those of the early philosophers that argued that reality was constantly changing (e.g. Heraclitus), and those that asserted that it was stable and immutable (e.g. Parmenides). The truth about truth, of course, is that it is both changing and static. Reality itself is in constant flux, since no moment ever repeats itself; but any truth that a mind can comprehend or assert must first embed that flux into a self-consistent, well-defined pattern. So reality may be in flux, but the truth you understand is static.
