The Protean Consciousness
A critique of introspection
Most of us value the feeling of being conscious. It seems to be the only thing separating us from death. Despite this, we often feel we have little insight into what it is, where it comes from, or why it goes away. It’s a fascinating, if uncomfortable mystery.
The question of what exactly consciousness “is” can be a slippery one. A lot of intellectual effort has been spent trying to come up with a language to describe consciousness and to discuss it with others. This unending struggle has given rise to what is commonly called the “hard problem”:
Why does consciousness feel like something instead of nothing?
What is less frequently discussed is the introspective tool that’s doing the investigation in the first place. This, I think, deserves a little more of the spotlight, since everything you know about your subjective feeling of consciousness depends entirely on this tool. And just as the first step to investigating what galaxies are is to check that your telescope is working correctly, an investigator of consciousness should be at least a little curious of what your mind is doing when it looks into itself.
The goal of this article is to pick apart that tool — often taken for granted — called introspection.
“Sensing” Consciousness
Some objects in the natural world emit deadly forms of gamma radiation. Your body can’t sense this kind of radiation, so it’s invisible to you. This radiation exists, and it can kill you, but you might never know it was there.
The above example shows that, in general just because something exists, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can sense it. Even if you were, in fact, conscious, that doesn’t necessarily mean you would know about it. In the same way that other people’s mental life is invisible to you, your own could just as easily have been invisible or unknown to you.
In fact, if you think back to your childhood, you didn’t always explicitly know that you were conscious—that knowledge was at best implicit. As a specific piece of knowledge, you must have learned about it or logically inferred it at some point; likely during those little moments in life when you became ‘aware’ that you were conscious.
Without such moments of introspection you could never tell people that you were conscious, or even that you had mental events of any kind, because you would never know it yourself. Even if the truth that you are conscious were always present, like the background hum of a fan, it is only in such moments you pay attention, look, and learn that your consciousness is in fact there. And you remember that.
You may take this ability to see your own mind for granted, most people do. When Descartes reasoned “I think, therefore I am”, he assumed without question that he had some way to know that he “thinks” in the first place. But that truth wasn’t directly visible to anyone else; it was his own special ability to see his own mind.
So whenever you claim that you are conscious, you are actually claiming two separate things. First, that you are conscious, and second that you have some capability, some faculty to sense, learn, and remember the fact you are conscious. Just as you can be aware — or unaware — of parts of the world around you, you can be aware or unaware of your own mind, including your own “awareness” itself. This ability is restricted to your own mind; it can’t see into other people’s thoughts or consciousness.
Let’s call this faculty your inner eye. Your inner eye looks into your mind, at your thoughts and experiences, even at itself. There it senses, recognizes, identifies, or logically infers something that you call “consciousness”. Without your inner eye, you could never know anything about your inner life, including the fact that you are conscious.
Since so much of the mystery of consciousness rests on what your inner eye is telling you, it’s worth asking what exactly the inner eye is. How and why is it telling you that you are conscious?
Also, why do you believe it? You no doubt have had moments when your eyes were fooled by optical illusions or magic tricks. You’d be right to be a little bit skeptical of them by now. Maybe you should also be skeptical of the information you get through your inner eye. Could you ever be fooled about the nature of your own consciousness?
Questioning the Inner Eye
There are a few reasons to be at least a little skeptical of your inner eye. Firstly, any information you get from your inner eye is probably an interpretation, not a direct truth about consciousness.
As an analogy, your two eyes don’t see colours because colours exist in the world. Your eyes interpret colours. The feeling of heat is your body’s interpretation of a chemical reaction in your skin. Your sense of consciousness may be like the feeling of heat, your inner eye’s interpretation of what is actually happening. The actual “object” may be something completely different.
In fact, your eyes go far beyond just interpreting what exists: they create your experience of colours and shapes. As a result your experiences of colour are as limited as your eyes are. Some people are colourblind.
In the same way, your inner eye creates your sense of consciousness. Anything you know about your mind, including your consciousness is composed by that inner eye. Even the concept of consciousness as a ‘thing’, in the same way a car or tree is a ‘thing’, is an invention of your inner eye.
Day to day experiences may trigger your inner eye to create this feeling or idea of consciousness, just as light hitting your eyes triggers your sense of colours. Ultimately, your inner eye is the one that tells you, indeed convinces you, that you have consciousness. It automatically implants this knowledge and its associated confidence in your mind without first asking you if you approve. It’s like you have no choice in the matter. This is why many people are so sure about the fact that they have consciousness, and say that consciousness is the only irrefutable truth.
But you can’t refute the experience of consciousness itself, you can only refute a belief about consciousness. The two are distinct, and not necessarily connected. Your inner eye may have convinced you, both introspectively and logically, that you are conscious. But the same process that formed that conviction could perhaps, through a perversion of logic, create the opposite belief too. Or some future technology could let you go into your own brain and manipulate your beliefs, so that if anyone asked you if you were conscious you would say “no”.
Therefore the critical question isn’t “what is consciousness?” it’s “how do I know what I know about consciousness?” Any beliefs about it, no matter how logically compelling and incontestable, could be at least partially wrong, or they may have been framed incorrectly.
How Do You Know Anything About Consciousness?
Look back at the question posed near the start of this article:
“Why does consciousness feel like something instead of nothing?”
Based on what we said above, a better question would be:
“How do I know that consciousness feels like something instead of nothing?”
Asking how you know something is the same as asking how a particular piece of knowledge came to be inserted into your mind. For instance, asking how you know what cheese tastes like is the same as asking “how did my mouth and brain create this knowledge about the taste of cheese?”
So another way to phrase the question is:
“How does my inner eye create the knowledge in me that consciousness feels like something?”
This last question turns the problem around. Instead of asking consciousness to give an explanation of itself, it asks how you know the things you know about it. It turns the question back onto your inner eye, and asks how you know things in general.
When you hear the word “swan”, your mind may produce an image of a swan. At some point in life you learned to associate the image of a swan with the word “swan”. This is, roughly speaking, a piece of knowledge. Everything you know or believe about the world, and about your own mind, is some type of thought-connection, i.e. a connection from one thought to another.
Even what something feels like, such as that a cat feels fuzzy, or that ice cream feels cold, is ultimately a piece of knowledge that your senses and your brain have created for you.
But a piece of knowledge only holds true if what it reflects in the world remains consistent. If the facts constantly change, such as the answer to “what day of the week is it today?” then you would frequently be compelled to break or update the mental connection.
The same is true of everything you know about consciousness. Your inner eye may be trying to tell you whatever it can about it. It’s forming thought-connections where there is something consistent (i.e. true) to be known about consciousness. But unlike the example of the swan, the results for consciousness are… ambiguous.
Why is Consciousness so Ambiguous?
What does consciousness feel like? What should consciousness feel like?
It’s curious that these questions have no clear answers. This may indicate that it’s difficult for your inner eye to collect any consistent beliefs on the topic. In the same way that asking what “tomorrow” is only gives rise to a vague feeling, if it is difficult to learn something specific about a topic the result seems to be a general, non-specific feeling.
Why does consciousness not feel like anything specific? Why are you left with this ambiguous feeling? To dig into that question, let’s look at a few more facts surrounding your day-to-day experience of consciousness.
Consciousness always has content. In any given moment you are always conscious of something. You may be conscious of your immediate surroundings, of a chair, of your thoughts and feelings, of your existence in general. You can even be conscious of your own consciousness.
As you shift your awareness to different things, how your consciousness feels also changes. When you become aware of ice cream, your consciousness may feel ‘delicious’. When you become aware of your own existence, your consciousness will feel like ‘my existence’. These are all flavours of consciousness, with varying content. Consciousness is like the celluloid on which the movie of your experiences is printed.
The process goes something like this:
Step 1: “There is a painting” (this is what I’m thinking)
Step 2: “I am currently aware of a painting” (self-awareness, i.e. consciousness)
This loop can continue:
Step 3 and beyond: “I am currently aware that I am currently aware of a painting…” etc
It seems that there are at least two steps in being conscious. The first is when you think about or become aware of some thing: a painting, your thoughts, whatever. The second step is when your inner eye looks at the first step, and tells you that you are aware of something, and what that something is. The second step is that moment when your inner eye informs you of your own awareness. In all cases there is content to consciousness: it is whatever you are aware of at the moment, even if it’s your own mind.
What would happen if you tried to strip away all the content of your awareness and focused your inner eye on the sense of awareness itself? This is akin to looking at the celluloid under the movie. What could your inner eye tell you about it?
Could your inner eye, for example tell you that awareness is red? Or that it has ten fingers? Or that it contains freedom and love? No, it couldn’t, because these belong to the content of awareness, not to awareness itself. Like the frames of the movie, the things you are aware of are constantly changing. Trying to directly see the celluloid underneath it all is perhaps impossible, since the only way you even know the celluloid exists is because of the content.
The Proteus
Imagine a fantastical shape-shifting object. Let’s call it a “Proteus”. Every time you learn something about the Proteus, it immediately changes so that what you know is now wrong. For example, once you learn that the Proteus flies, it would no longer fly. Once you learn that it’s red, it would become multicoloured or transparent. Once you learn there is only one Proteus, it would become five. Once you establish that the Proteus is right, it would become wrong. Once you are convinced that they Proteus feels good, it would change to feel uncomfortable.
What would it be like to meet a Proteus? What knowledge would you have about it? It would be highly confusing. The Proteus would be like nothing and everything at the same time. And even though underneath all the changes you may believe that the Proteus does indeed exist, that’s about all you could say. Everything else you know would be wrong.
If you’re like me, you get the same ambiguous feeling thinking about the Proteus as when you think about consciousness. You sense there is something there, underneath it all, but nothing else is permanently true, except maybe that it is “you”.
When your inner eye is trying to get a handle on your consciousness in order to give you knowledge about it, all it has to go on is what you are aware of at the moment. The content of your consciousness changes as the content of your thoughts change. It is as diverse, novel, weird, concrete, abstract, good or bad, as your thoughts are. It is as expansive and all-encompassing as your past, present, and even future self. At any one moment your belief about it may be stable, as long as you are only aware of one thing. But that doesn’t last long before a new awareness comes, and the old belief is broken.
Your inner eye, therefore, is baffled and confused, thrown around from one belief to another, creating one belief, then changing it, trying to find some consistency in what is by definition inconsistent. You can never form any lasting knowledge about consciousness. All you can say is that it is the same as your awareness. If you try to nail it down any further, you’d be trying to nail down everything you have ever been aware of and ever will be.
Is it any wonder, then, that it’s difficult to define what consciousness is, that it feels “mysterious”? As with the Proteus, you have nothing stable to go on. Even how it feels changes from moment to moment. After a while of chasing your own tail, your mind usually gives up, and goes to focus on something concrete, something consistent.
The Hard Problem
Much of the confusion about consciousness comes from the idea that you can control what you believe about it. But when you are looking at something blue, you can’t convince your mind that it’s red. Your eyes are showing you something blue, and embedding that thought-connection into your memories, without asking for your consent.
In the same way, when your inner eye shows you your own thoughts and feelings, you are compelled to know about their existence. You can’t convince yourself they don’t exist, and no one can convince you of that either. Nor would they be right to do so. Every property and detail you know about it comes what what your inner eye tells you, or fails to tell you about your inner life.
For most people, nothing in this article will change their mind about consciousness; nor should it. That was not my intention when I wrote it. My goal was to describe what it is you and I seem to be compelled to believe, how it came into your mind, and why it feels the way it does.
The question this article set out to answer was:
“How does my inner eye create the knowledge that consciousness feels like something?”
The answer to this question can be arrived at by cataloguing all the things your inner eye will tell you about consciousness. These are:
- Your thoughts and awareness do in fact happen — they are “there”.
- You are aware of different things at different times.
- What you are aware of changes too frequently to feel like anything specific for long. It will always feel like something, but not anything specific.
Put together, these all convince you that consciousness should feel like something non-specific. In none of the above beliefs do you have any choice in the matter. They are what you are compelled to believe, both as an experience and as a logical deduction. That is why you believe them. How could you believe anything else?
