What “Self” and “Consciousness” Mean to an Old-School Pragmatist-Behaviorist
The goal of this short essay is to lay out some basic pragmatist concepts for making sense of what many philosophers talk about in terms of “self’ and “consciousness.” This is also partly a response to the writings of my friend Daniel Tarpy and to discussions we’ve had on this topic.
Daniel, for example, in an essay on the self and consciousness, explains three related terms: self, consciousness, and the consciousness field. Briefly, the self is what perceives, consciousness is the activity of perceiving, and the consciousness field is what is perceived. Daniel, furthermore, writes that the self has “three irreducible though inseparable aspects of experientiality, awareness, and agency” (p. 5). The self experiences, it knows that it experiences, and it causes itself to act. The self is “the locus, focal point, and wellspring of consciousness,” and “experiences itself as a dot in the center of everything” (p. 5).
About consciousness Daniel writes, “When we say something is sentient, that something is conscious, we mean that there is some inner subject having some inner experience and possessing the awareness that they are having this experience” (p. 3; emphasis added).
I think many philosophers of mind would agree with Daniel’s basic outline of the subject-matter. But there are certain, perhaps subtle ways, in which I’ll disagree with it. In the following I’m going to approach this subject-matter of self and consciousness from the perspective of my rather old-fashioned pragmatism and behaviorism (on my influences, see here). This should begin to clarify the ways in which my views differ from traditional formulations of the problem of consciousness.
As the reader will see, I replace Daniel’s three terms with at least four. You’ll also notice that I avoid the word “consciousness” as a technical term. I find that “consciousness” has been used for so long in so many contradictory discourses that it’s become effectively meaningless. “Experience,” as I use the term, replaces Daniel’s terms “consciousness” and “consciousness field.” In the pragmatist formulation there is originally no difference between the experiencing of something and what is experienced. The word “experience” covers all of this together.
“Self” is another so-meaninged-as-to-be-meaningless term (I generally call such words “wicked words,” on analogy with “wicked problems”). However, I feel compelled to retain this word in a very specific sense which is different from Daniel’s. I do not believe there is a self in the sense of an inner subject of experience (if I understand correctly how Daniel would define this phrase). There is only a living body which, as we’ll see, can have many selves.
Basic Terms: The Organism, Selves, Roles, Environment, and Experience
In place of Daniel’s self, consciousness, and consciousness field — terms shared by many philosophers and psychologists — I will relate at least four terms: the organism or body, the self, environment, and experience; to complete the picture I’ll also mention roles alongside selves.
THE ORGANISM AND EXPERIENCE: The organism or living body is what acts and experiences (has agency or sentience or consciousness, as some people use those terms). In Dewey’s terms, it is what does and undergoes. I’ll give a sense of how it experiences later. The important point here is that the body as a whole experiences. One part of the organism may more strongly be involved in a particular experience than another, but any experience involves adjustments to the whole body. (This is not to say that all bodies need to have the same parts and that all these parts need to be functional. But whatever is there and is functional is involved in having experience in one way or another.)
THE ORGANISM, EXPERIENCE, AND ENVIRONMENT: What the body experiences is the environment (what Daniel calls the consciousness field). The body is itself part of this environment, as when you have a visual experience of your hand reaching for something, or feel the pressure of one hand pushing against another. Experience occurs because organisms are always falling out of step with their environments: the environment is always changing, as is the organism (it ages, it uses up its store of nutrients, etc.). The organism constantly needs to readjust itself, and experience is the cause and consequence of this readjustment. Because the organism is stimulated by its environment and its own bodily processes (has experience), it acts; and because it acts, it undergoes further experience. In a world without change, there would be no experience (though also no life). I will consider another time whether only organisms with central nervous systems can be said to have experience, as opposed to a kind of vegetative reactivity or sentience; but deciding this issue is not terribly important to my project here.
BODIES AND SELVES: The organismic body also contains selves. Actually (as mentioned above) I would prefer to avoid using the word “self” like I avoid the word “consciousness” because it has a number of different important meanings. But it is useful to contrast self and role, so I will retain the word with a very particular meaning. And the meaning of self here is an interest with associated behaviors. To say that a body has many selves is to say that a person has many abiding interests around which she has developed different repertoires of behavior. We can speak of an economic self, a familial self, a romantic self, an artistic self, and so on. Each of these selves is a combination of a particular interest (making and spending money, raising a family, romancing others, etc.) with the behaviors needed to pursue that interest. To use Thomas Carlyle’s helpful formulation, a self is a union of inward capability (interest) and outward capability (skilled behavior).
These selves are states or sets or habit-systems of the body. When a particular interest is engaged it makes certain behaviors more likely to occur and certain experiences more likely to be undergone. When economic interest comes to the fore, one experiences the world through the lens of that interest: one notices opportunities for making or spending money, one acts in terms of things to be bought or sold, one enjoys the accumulation of profit or suffers its refusal to appear.
In some people (organisms) these selves can take on a hierarchic organization. We sometimes describe such people as “called” or “obsessed” or “monomaniacal.” One interest enslaves the others. This need not be the case, however, and selves can be ordered heterarchically, or in various shifting and complex ways. (The philosopher Jay Ogilvy speaks of a polytheism of selves.)
To relate this again to experience, we might agree with Daniel that a self experiences, but the precise meaning here is that a self is a set of the body that affords experiences of a certain kind. Different selves produce different experiences, but ultimately it is the body in contact with the environment that has the experience.
SELVES AND ROLES: A brief word should be said about roles. Roles are social functions, or socially-useful patterns of behavior. These may or may not be tied to interest. A person may take on a role that expresses her interest, as when a familial or reproductive interest is expressed by one’s taking on the socially-recognized role of mother or father. On the other hand, one may take on the role of parent even if one has no inherent familial or reproductive interest (though the interest may, of course, develop later).
PRIMARY EXPERIENCE: There are many kinds of experience, but we need to emphasize one basic distinction: that between primary experience and reflective experience. Primary experience is the affective perception of a world that has meaning and value for the organism. In primary experience, the organism senses and perceives a world to which it must behaviorally respond (the domain of meaning) and which produces suffering and enjoyment (the domain of value).
Primary experience has degrees of subjective involvement (i.e., organismic sensation). In other words, the organism may be felt to be part of primary experience in greater or lesser degrees. At one extreme are experiences of exciting events or of aesthetic objects which capture attention so totally that all that remains of the organism is the particular perspective (the area within space) from which the experience is had. The organism becomes transparent to itself. At the other extreme are experiences of intense discomfort or pleasure in which the organism is all that is felt. A middle kind of experience might be found in an activity like jogging, where the organism’s focus oscillates between the environment that must be safely navigated and itself as a locus of tension or fatigue or elation.
REFLECTIVE EXPERIENCE: Reflective experience piggybacks on primary experience. It is at least available to creatures (humans) that have developed language, though it is possible that other animals may develop a kind of reflective experience.
There are two basic forms of reflective experience. The more fundamental may be described as displaced experience, or as experience about experience. It occurs when we remember or imagine what an experience was like or could be like.
We need not make a mystery of memory or imagination. These activities make use of our normal perceptual equipment but occur without the presence of the objects perceived. Once one has seen the Eiffel Tower (in real life or in a picture or even in a verbal representation), the body can then be put into a state as if it is seeing the Eiffel Tower; we reinstate the bodily conditions that pertained when actually seeing the Eiffel Tower. Dewey calls this “an intra-organic re-enactment.” Necessarily such a displaced experience or intra-organic re-enactment is less precise than an emplaced or fully transactional experience.
Piggybacking on experience about experience is verbalization about experience. Just as memory and imagination let us experience things which are not present, or experience things from a perspective which is not ours at the moment, language lets us talk about what is not present. This is one function of verbal-reflective experience. Another is drawing attention to features of the environment which are perceived by one member of the social group but not by all.
To an extent, primary experience is innate. An human infant which somehow survived outside of human society would likely have primary experience of some sort. Reflective experience, on the other hand, is almost certainly exclusively social. We learn how to reflect under social pressure. I sometimes call this the “Mulberry Street effect,” after a book by Dr. Seuss. In the book a father asks his son to report on what the son sees while walking home from school. This is paradigmatic of how we learn to reflect. We are constantly asking each other, “Did you see that?” “Did you hear that?” “What did you do today?” “What did you do yesterday?” “What do you think will happen tomorrow?” and so on.
I believe that when we talk about “awareness of experience” we are mainly talking about verbalized reflective experience. Primary experience is not aware of itself. To get a sense of this, try to experience your environment for a few moments without thinking (a challenge for us modern folks, I know). Just look, listen, smell, feel. This is being aware of the world without being aware of the awareness. Now make yourself aware that you are experiencing the environment. I believe you will begin to utter to yourself, “Now I see I car going by,” or “Now I hear a bird chirp,” etc. (Some people, on the other hand, might imagine how they must look at the moment from a third-person perspective — another form of reflective experience, as we’ve seen.)
The function of reflection, whether imagistic or verbal, is to help us solve problems more easily or safely than can be done through direct action and primary experience. Consider the difference between unreflective trial-and-error learning, which may be time-consuming and hazardous, and discussing and imagining possible courses of action and their consequences.
For modern humans, reflective experience is nearly constant while awake. Ernest Becker described this as an “inner newsreel” that plays incessantly as we go about our lives. (But be careful with this word “inner” — the inner newsreel is “inner” only in the sense that it is a behavior on such a small scale that other people cannot normally observe it.) I believe the pervasiveness of reflective experience is due to the fact that modern life is so complicated. Because many of us live in a world with so many choices the outcomes of which are so hard to predict, we are forced to live in a kind of “augmented reality,” in which reflective experience is persistently layered on top of primary experience.
The downside of having a constant inner newsreel is that we tend to lose touch with primary experience. Indeed, the very fact that primary experience is nonverbal makes it tough to talk about. Some philosophers talk about primary experience as “what it is like” to be a certain organism. But this way of speaking can confuse the issue. From the perspective of the organism, experience is not “like” anything; it is simply what it is and feels how it feels. Only in reflection can we say that one experience is “like” another, or that experiencing, say, a sunset has a certain quality of feeling.
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This is the basic structure of how I would explain human experience (what some people call “consciousness”). There is, of course, much more to be said about each of my terms (organism, self, experience, environment, interest, imagination, etc.). But I leave this for future opportunities. In subsequent essays I will consider various controversies in philosophy of mind from the point of view outlined here.