Body Mind Consciousness

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

We are used to considering the world of experience as intuitively divided into two parts. We are, as Paul Bloom notes, ‘natural born dualists’, an observation given some neurological support in the idea/mechanism of the ‘binary operator’ of Newberg and D’Aquili, one of the automatic world-ordering processes which are responsible for the cognitive sense we make of the world. In the case of the binary operator, the sense-making is that of a division into the various binaries of this/that, figure/ground, self/other etc. One of the primary divisions, perhaps the primary division, associated with Descartes is the binary distinction between matter and spirit, res extensa and res cogitans, which in more modern parlance we might express as a distinction between body and mind, or possibly even brain and mind, cognition and consciousness.

In many ways this distinction is institutionalised in the separation of science and religion, rational atheism and intuitive spirituality. These two areas of thought are often radically separate and often incompatible, an incompatibility which too often manifests as conflict, denial, or distancing, as in the conceiving of these realms as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ (Gould, 1997). Even when the incompatability between science and religion is minimised, as in the moves by the Dalai Lama toward neuroscience and by the Templeton Foundation to support religiously oriented scientific research, there is always a sense that this hand-holding is tentative and could be withdrawn at any point.

One possible shift that has taken place recently is the construction of areas of knowledge which are as inaccessible to science as ’spiritual’ matters but do not have the religious trappings or the cultural and institutional baggage. Consciousness studies is probably the best example of this domain. Although some may deny it, Consciousness Studies contains at its heart a ‘hard problem’ (Chalmers) whcih is that we simply cannot imagine what a satisfactory explanation of consciousness might be. Whatever it is, a description of it will always fall short of our experience of it. Whilst it is clearly evident that the study of consciousness has relationships to material science, particularly neuroscience and psychology, there is no evidence that science will empty the concept and unweave that particular rainbow. The relationships between (some areas of) Consciousness Studies and the other physical sciences is multivalent and parallels those developed between religion and science. As with religion, some scientists would deny that consciousness exists at all, while others would deny that the ‘hard problem’ exists (which amounts to the same thing). Conversely, some who study consciousness would point to the role of cognition and awareness in the construction of reality, questioning the objectivity of the science. Still other go for the hand-holding approach and look to the fringes of science for areas o overlap: to quantum physics, chaos, complexity, feeling a similar sense of wierdness emanating from these theories as they feel when thinking about consciousness and assuming a connection where there is only correspondence. A kind of awe-struck doctrine of signatures.

The development of Consciousness Studies as a domain of the unknowable is an interesting and significant development. It may be the first area of study, outside of religious practices, in which the object of study is truly ineffable and is, by some at least, acknowledged to be ineffable from the outset. In breaking the binary of matter/spirit by introducing itself as a third term, consciousness opens up the possibility of other areas of the unknowable becoming available, and also of a redefinition of some existing areas of practice as unknowable but still credible areas of study. I anticipate that much contemporary science, political thought, linguistics, and philosophy could easily make this shift.

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Fechner’s ‘Day View’

November 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Gustav Fechner, the 19th century philosopher and pioneer psychologist, is most known for developing the science of psychophysics, the investigation of the relationships between physical events and stimuli and the appearance of these stimuli in consciousness. In addition to this work, (which he apparently regarded as something of a diversion to his major interests), Fechner is primarily associated with a metaphysics which attempts to unite concepts of body and mind. Echoing some of the monist ideas of Spinoza, and latterly Muller and others, Fechner regarded all phenomona as having both a physical and a psychological dimension. In the language of his day Fechner referred to this psychic dimension as ’soul’, although there is no absolute necessity to embrace the full theological implications of this terms to appreciate the distinction he is making. In looking out into the world, Fechner would claim, our experience is not only of the material substances that make up that world but also a kind of ‘liveness’ which animates that experience. This does not apply only to those aspects of experience which we usually associate with liveness, plants and animals predominantly, but that this liveness is a component of being itself. Fechner goes on to critique what he saw as an overly materialistic and empiricist way of looking at the world which he felt denied this liveness, and referred to this way of looking as the ‘night view’, a sterile and ultimately bleak way of looking which evacuated the world of meaningfulness, in contrast to what he called the ‘day view’ in which the world is witnessed in its full liveness. It is important to note that this quasi-panpsychist viewpoint that Fechner argued for does not attribute the world, or the materials of the world, with specific agency; he is not arguing for a crudely animist way of looking in which spirits haunt every rock and tree, but of a more abstract and distributed notion of what we would now refer to as consciousness. This has some resonance with the work of David Chalmers, for example, in contemporary consciousness studies, who similarly argues against theories of consciousness as an emergent phenomena and in favour of a conception of it as a omnipresent aspect of being.

Posted in Chalmers, David, Enlightenment, Fechner, Gustav, Liveness, Panpsychism | No Comments »