Language and Objects - Location of Consciousness

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Consciousness, Descartes, Rene, Language, Object, Velmans, Max |

Even though a concept like consciousness has no location or extension in space (as Descartes famously noted) we nevertheless feel an almost irresistable urge to provide it with one. Just as the description of a solid object feels incomplete without a location for that object, and just as part of the ontology of a person’s body is whereabouts that body happens to be standing (hence the ASL convention in online communication), so the description of an abstract entity feels similarly incomplete until we can conceive of a location for it. This tendency to locate abstract entities in space usually happens non-consciously, but the fact that it is taking place is revealed in our language and gesture.

In filling in the location attribute for the particular ‘-ness’ of consciousness we adopt a number of strategies. We might point to the skull of people around us and say, perhaps a little unconvincingly, that it is in those bone boxes: unconvincing because we can never really know and have no sensory evidence that it exists in those places. Alternatively we might point to our own meat head, which feels more intuitively valid since there does seem to be a kind of ‘feeling of being’ at the end of our pointing finger. However, this can feel unsatisying in another way since we cannot help but notice that everyone around is pointing to totally different places, their own heads, and since they are clearly wrong, then maybe I am similarly deluded. If we are spiritually inclined, or if we are familiar with the reflexive monism of Max Velmans for example, we might make vague, hand-waving gestures in the air around us and make noise about consciousness ‘emerging’ in the interplay between subject and object, as if consciousness were a kind of invisible gas leaking from our sense organs and permeating the space around us. The really ambitious amongst us might even throw open their arms to their fullest extent, claiming that consciousness is everywhere and in everything within and without that embrace.

Usually we adopt a mixed strategy for the location of the weird ‘-ness’ of aware being, expanding and contracting it pretty much at will and as circumstances dictate. Sometimes it is contained within as the ‘I’ inside, and sometimes it is shared among family and friends as the royal ‘we’ of our interpersonal kingdom. Sometimes it is all there is. And at this ultimate point of extension, where, as Pascal said, the location of the centre is everywhere and periphery is nowhere, I personally would not be speaking of I personally at all. Here is the ground. Here is being.