Through a Glass Concretely

September 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

It seem likely that the consciousness we have of the world ‘out there’ is not achieved through process of simulation, in which we somehow reproduce an image of the world inside our heads and refer to this image, but rather that the world itself, as presented to the senses, is its own image (Velmans etc). This is not to say however, that we do not produce abstract models of the world, models which are inevitably partial, contingent and purposive. The purposive nature of mental modelling comes from the logic that the ability to produce such models can only have been provided by evolution, and evolutionary parsimony would limit such modelling to the concrete needs of physical survival. Our inability to directly model an image of those elements of the world which are not concrete, which in the complex world of human culture is probably the majority of experience, means that the world is reflected in our mind but the reflection is imperfect. The mirror of consciousness is constructed with ancient tools; embodied cognition and the limited senses that produce it, and these tools cannot model ‘justice’, ‘love’, or any other abstraction literally. The representation we build of the mind through the use of these tools is of a world as seen ‘through a glass darkly’.

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Language and Objects - Location of Consciousness

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

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.

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