Tag Archives: Descartes

The Stove of Consciousness

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I’ve been reading A.C. Grayling’s biography of Descartes: he advances the novel theory that Descartes was a spy. This is actually a rather shrewd suggestion which makes quite a lot of sense given Descartes’ wandering, secretive life. On balance I think he probably wasn’t conducting secret espionage missions – it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure, of course – but I think it’s certainly an idea any future biographer will have to address.

I was interested, though, to see what Grayling made of the stove.  Descartes himself tells us that when held up in Germany by the advance of winter, he spent the day alone in a stove, and that was where his radical rebuilding of his own beliefs began.  This famous incident has the sort of place in the history of philosophy that the apple falling on Newton’s head has in the history of science: and it has been doubted and queried in a similar way. But Descartes seems pretty clear about it: “je demeurais tout le jour enfermé seul dans un poêle, où j’avais tout le loisir m’entretenir de mes pensées”.

Some say it must in fact have been a bread-oven or a similarly large affair: Descartes was not a large man and he was particularly averse to cold and disturbance, but it would surely have to have been a commodious stove for him to have been comfortable in there all day. Some say that Bavarian houses of the period had large stoves, and certainly in the baroque palaces of the region one can see vast ornate ones that look as if they might have had room for a diminutive French philosopher. Some commonsensical people say that “un poêle” must simply have meant a stove-heated room; and this is in fact the view which Grayling adopts firmly and without discussion.

Personally I’m inclined to take Descartes’ words at face value; but really the question of whether he really sat in a real stove misses the point. Why does Descartes, a rather secretive man, even mention the matter at all? It must be because, true or not, it has metaphorical significance; it gives us additional keys to Descartes’ meaning which we ought not to discard out of literal-mindedness. (Grayling, in fairness, is writing history, not philosophy.)

For one thing Descartes’ isolation in the stove functions as a sort of thought-experiment. He wants to be able to doubt everything, but it’s hard to dismiss the world as a set of illusions when it’s battering away at your senses: so suppose we were in a place that was warm, dark, and silent?  Second, it recalls Plato’s cave metaphor. Plato had his unfortunate exemplar chained in a cave where his only knowledge of the world outside came from flickering shadows on the wall; he wanted to suggest that what we take to be the real world is a similarly poor reflection of a majestic eternal reality. Descartes wants to work up a similar metaphor to a quite different conclusion, ultimately vindicating our senses and the physical world; perhaps this points up his rebellion against ancient authority. Third, in a way congenial to modern thinking and probably not unacceptable to Descartes, the isolation in the stove resembles and evokes the isolation of the brain in the skull.

The stove metaphor has other possible implications, but for us the most interesting thing is perhaps how it embodies and possibly helped to consolidate one of the most persistent metaphors about consciousness, one that has figured strongly in discussion for centuries, remains dominant, yet is really quite unwarranted. This is that consciousness is internal. We routinely talk about “the external world” when discussing mental experience. The external world is what the senses are supposed to tell us about, but sometimes fail to; it is distinct from an internal world where we receive the messages and where things like emotions and intentions have their existence. The impression of consciousness being inside looking out is strongly reinforced by the way the ears and the brain seem to feed straight into the brain: but we know that impression of being located in the head would be the same if human anatomy actually put the brain in the stomach, so long as the eyes and ears remained where they are. In fact our discussions would make just as much sense if we described consciousness as external and the physical world as internal (or consciousness as ‘above’ and the physical world as ‘below’ or vice versa)

If we take consciousness to be a neural process there is of course, a sense in which it is certainly in the brain; but only in the sense that my money is in the bank’s computer (though I can’t get it out with a hammer) or Pride and Prejudice is in the pages of that book over there (and not, after all, in my head). Strictly or properly, stories and totals don’t have the property of physical location, and nor, really, does consciousness.

Does it matter if the metaphor is convenient? Well, it may well be that the traditional inside view encourages us to fall into certain errors. It has often been argued (and still is) for example that because we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re seeing or hearing, we must in fact only ever see an intermediate representation, never the  real world itself. I think this is a mistake, but it’s one that the internal/external view helps to make plausible.  It may well be, in my opinion, that habitually thinking of consciousness as having a simple physical location makes it more difficult for us to understand it properly.

So perhaps we ought to make a concerted effort to stop, but to be honest I think the metaphor is just too deeply rooted. At the end of the day you can take the thinker out of the stove, but you can’t take the stove out of the thinker.

The Unity of Consciousness

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UnityThe unity of the soul is an ancient doctrine from which we have inherited a strong belief in the unity of consciousness. In certain lights this assumption of unity seems unquestionable, but it has actually been a continual problem; it could almost be argued that the history of understanding the mind has been a history of giving up on unity.

Like other persuasive doctrines that have turned out to be problematic in the long run, we can trace this one back to Aristotle, but it is tied in to a widely-held set of scholastic/ancient ideas about metaphysics. I believe the argument runs more or less like this: the soul is not physical, therefore it lacks extension (which is a physical property); if it lacks extension it necessarily lacks parts, and if it lacks parts it must be single and unified. The soul is a substance, in the old philosophical sense of something incapable of being analysed or broken down. Substances in this sense used to be considered necessary building blocks of reality, required in order to have a secure ontological foothold.  Otherwise the process of analysis would be bottomless and unending, and nothing would ever be completely clarified, which would be intolerable (although I notice contemporary physics seems to tolerate a position not altogether unlike this).  Readers may well by now feel parts of their own souls waving urgent hands to attract attention to a host of salient objections, but let’s avoid getting bogged down in this treacherous territory and move on a bit.

Descartes, say what you will about his dualism, effected a radical change for the better when he restricted the interventions of the soul to the pineal gland: on his view it did its stuff there and the rest of the body worked like a machine, according to the same physical laws as any inanimate stuff. Until then it had been largely assumed that the soul directly activated the body without needing any kind of transmission mechanism. Now I say ‘until then’, but the remarkable fact is that people went on thinking that way for a long time afterwards. As late as 1850, Helmoltz’s measurement of the speed of nerve impulses was resisted by some on the grounds that the vital impulse must act throughout the body simultaneously. When your arm moved, it was because you wanted it to, and it, as part of you, wanted to too.  I believe there was a school of thought that held out for a middling point of view, accepting that in principle the brain controlled the body by nerve impulses, but confidently expecting that they would be too blindingly fast to ever be measured. This, of course, proved to be quite wrong, but the nineteenth-century debate is in some ways quite reminiscent of the more recent discussion of Libet. Muller and others thought Helmholtz must be wrong because he was introducing a delay between will and act; people suppose Libet must be wrong because he introduces a delay between deciding to act and awareness. All such delays are intolerable if we insist on the absolute unity of the conscious mind because you can’t have a delay between a thing and itself.

Another prominent example of the problems flowing from unity is the vexed issue of the binding problem. Given that sensory inputs come in by different pathways at different speeds and get processed in different ways in different parts of the brain, how is it we end up with a smoothly integrated picture of reality which assigns the right qualities to the right objects and unrolls steadily in real time without jumps, pauses, or lipsynch errors? There are various ways, more or less satisfactory or problematic, in which the brain might ensure everything is properly put together when it arrives in consciousness, but if we’re not assuming consciousness is a single united destination, the problem wouldn’t arise in the first place.

Perhaps, though, the binding problem gives us a clue about why unity seems so undeniable – because the contents of consciousness look united. Isn’t that it?

Well, sort of, but when I sit down and conscientiously introspect, I don’t really detect a lot of unity. At the moment I have strings of explicit words running through my mind a moment before I type them: I moment ago as I sat in uffish thought, I had thoughts about the same subject which were wordless. Half an hour ago I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, though I was certainly conscious, and a bit before that I was largely absorbed by experiencing the taste of scrambled egg. An hour before that I was dreaming and some time before that in a blank state of which I can’t say for sure whether I remember it or not.

It’s worse than that, because at all these times there were also things in the penumbra of my mind which I was aware, or perhaps only pre-aware or potentially aware of. Hume famously said that when he looked into his mind he found only a bundle of sensations; but how simple it would be if the sensations were really always bundled; if they were always of the same broad kind; and if they were all merely sensations, instead of including bits of broken intentionality, fragments of half-or potentially meaningful intimations, things that might be the phenomenally detectable end of affordances, incipient recognitions and implicatures and an exquisitely ineffable and shadily located intimation that there may soon be the emergence of what we can call a gut feeling finely balanced on the cusp between the affective and the merely digestive. A bundle? Really a heap, or even a cloud, would be far more orderly and unified than my subjective experience.

What does bind things together is a kind of bird’s nest framework of memory linking now to then, and then to some other experience, and so on; but this is not all that useful. For one thing these linkages are loose – what they provide is the kind of tangled and ad hoc unity the cables behind my stereo have achieved unbidden – and they are fallible, not part of the essence of consciousness. I see nothing absurd about the idea of my  having moments of consciousness which are neither remembered nor involve remembering.

Yet even so I find it intuitively impossible to abandon the idea of some unity somewhere, even if I can’t quite put my finger on it at the moment. Things would be so much easier if we didn’t exist, but there we are.

 

Old skool consciousness

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Picture: Hobbes and Descartes. There’s an illuminating new piece in the  SEP about 17th century theories of consciousness. (via) Your first reaction might be ‘what 17th century theories of consciousness?’; the discussion in those days was framed rather differently and it typically requires a degree of interpretation to work out what philosophers of the period actually thought about ‘consciousness’.  In fact, according to Larry M. Jorgensen, who wrote the entry, the 17th century saw the first emergence of the concept of consciousness as distinct from conscience: in many languages the same word is still used for both.

Hobbes apparently sets this out quite explicitly (somehow this interesting bit must have passed me by when I read Leviathan because it left no impression on my memory); he has conscience originally referring to something which two people knew about (‘knew together’), and then metaphorically for the knowledge of one’s own secret facts and secret thoughts. Jorgensen tells us that the Cambridge Platonists had a role in developing the modern usage in English where ‘conscience’ refers to knowledge of one’s own moral nature while ‘consciousness’ means simply knowledge of one’s own mental content.

That idea, of having knowledge of one’s own mental content, seems to have a reflexive element – we know about what we know; and this was an issue for philosophers of the period, notably Descartes. For Descartes it was essential that my having a thought involved me knowing that I had a thought; but for some this seemed to suggest a second-order theory in which a thought becomes conscious only when accompanied by another thought about the first.  Descartes could not accept this: for one thing if knowledge of my own thoughts is not direct, the cogito, Descartes’ most famous argument is threatened. The cogito claims that I cannot possibly be wrong about the fact that I am thinking, but if the knowledge of my thought is separate from the thought itself this no longer seems unassailably true.

It seems that while Descartes accepted that awareness of our own thought required some sort of reflection, he denied that the reflection was separate from the thought. He said that [T]he initial thought by means of which we become aware of something does not differ from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware of it.

This can’t help but seem a little like cheating – sneaking in an extra thought for nothing.  I think the best way to imagine it might be through analogy with a searchlight. We can swing the light around, illuminating here a building, there a tree, just as we can direct our conscious awareness towards different objects. Then Descartes might ask: do we need a second light in order to see the first light? No, of course not, because the light is already illuminated; if the light lights up other objects it must itself be illuminated (if perhaps in not quite the same way).

A surprising amount of Jorgensen’s exposition seems to be relevant to current discussions, and not solely because he is, necessarily, reinterpreting it in terms of modern concerns. In some ways I’m afraid we haven’t moved on all that much.

Cogito and Consciousness

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Picture: Descartes.

Le 'Dennettian Novelist' n'existe pas...

Poor Descartes, as I have remarked before, usually comes in for a ritual denunciation in books about consciousness, blamed for having espoused or even invented dualism, the doctrine of the separation of body and spirit. I think it would be more accurate to see him as presenting a new secular and rational perspective on the conception of the soul which was then prevalent (and to a considerable extent, still is); one which actually narrowed down its sphere of influence to the pineal gland. It seems perverse to me to suggest that later European thinkers got their dualism from Descartes rather than from the common Christian heritage, though that seems to be the way most people see it

But Descartes is relevant to the current debate about consciousness in other ways, too. In particular, I think his most famous argument, the ‘cogito’, challenges some currently-popular perspectives in a way which is well worth considering.

The cogito (‘cogito ergo sum’ – I think, therefore I am) is surely the most well-known argument in philosophy – it occupies the kind of place in its field which the Mona Lisa, Hamlet’s soliloquy, or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, occupy in theirs. This kind of mass popularity can, paradoxically become a barrier to proper appreciation. In order to draw out its importance for consciousness, I should like to focus on two points about it: first, it isn’t original; second, it isn’t logical.

Not original, because the same argument can actually be found in St Augustine. I don’t think anyone knows for sure whether Descartes found it there or came up with it independently, but the obvious question is – if St Augustine came up with it first, why aren’t we all talking about St Augustine’s cogito?

The reason, I think, is that the argument was of no great importance to St Augustine. He was in pursuit of faith, not doubt, and was more interested in God’s existence than his own. He puts no particular stress on the cogito argument, and readers who aren’t particularly looking out for it could easily read it without noticing its signficance. For Descartes, by contrast, everything depended on it. He needed a point of certainty from which to begin the construction of his metaphysics: St Augustine already had a source of certainty in God. Descartes also turned to God as a guarantor of knowledge, of course, but in his case, unprecedentedly, God did not come first. In this respect, modern philosophers are mostly in the same boat as Descartes, and if they want certainty, they have to undertake a similar exploration.

Not logical? I don’t, of course, mean that the cogito is illogical, or contains flawed reasoning. But the cogito is often interpreted as a piece of pure logic, an a priori argument whose truth does not depend on observation, like the truths of mathematics. This is a mistake.

Suppose the characters ‘2 + 2 = 4’ were to appear by chance in the pattern of clouds in the sky: the statement they represent would still be true. But if the clouds somehow lined up to form the words ‘cogito ergo sum’, it would be false – the clouds are not doing any thinking. Descartes is not offering a logical proof, but making a claim that certain kinds of perception, or thought, are immune from error. In particular, when I perceive my own existence, I cannot be wrong, because if I didn’t exist no perceiving would be going on. Even doubting my own existence actually proves it, because only entities which exist can doubt their own reality.

There may be just a few other perceptions which have a similar immunity from error. Arguably, you can’t be wrong about being in pain, for example, though you might be wrong about the existence of the dentist. But I digress…

The point here is that if you’re looking for philosophical certainty, and you can’t get it from God, it can only be found in the first-person view, and in the self. But the first-person view, and the reality of the self, are just what many modern thinkers about consciousness would want to do without. These days, we look to empirical science for the truth, and distrust our own inner phenomenal experience, although all our knowledge of the world, and of science, actually derives in the final analysis from interpretation of our own subjective phenomenal experiences (doesn’t it?).

It wasn’t always quite like this. In Brentano’s day it was natural to think that the business of psychology included the classification and study of one’s own inner, subjective sensations: but the disastrous over-development and subsequent collapse of introspectionist psychology functioned like a nuclear explosion, not merely destroying the existing structures, but rendering the whole territory of phenomenal experience uninhabitable and even unvisitable for a generation. During the era of Behaviourism, subjective experience and even consciousness itself was actually denied as a result. Those days have passed, but many still feel that if something can’t be investigated from the third-person point of view, it can’t be brought within respectable science at all.

I suppose this epitomises the dilemma of consciousness as it exists today: direct, first-person investigation of phenomenal experience seems to lead nowhere, but certain key aspects of consciousness – qualia, meaning, selfhood, and so on – seem to have no place in the objective third-person account.

Some, of course, are bold enough to offer eliminative accounts of these intractable phenomena: for them, the Cartesian suggestion that all knowledge ultimately springs from phenomenal experience must surely be profoundly unpalatable. Could this be one of the reasons why Descartes keeps getting such a drubbing?