1.1 Introduction
This book is about consciousness. That is to say it is about experiences. I am not so much interested here in the difference between being awake and being asleep (although that matters an awful lot) as I am in the nature and explanation of experiences. That is to say, particular experiences, because that will help us with many of the problems we encounter here. I want to explain particular experiences. This book is not about what has been called “embodied cognition”, which is, instead the causal or constitutive role bodies (outside of the nervous system) play in cognition. My interest here is how we experience our bodies, and only how we experience our bodies.
This, I take it, is part of the broader project of understanding what we are and how we fit into the world. It matters at least as much as understanding the origins of the universe, the nature of life and how some people can still hold that we ought to be market anarchists. My approach here is to attempt to explain a particular type of experience, which I call the feeling of embodiment. This is the culmination of a decade or so of work in psychology and philosophy. Much of what you will read here you may also find in my previously published papers. One of things I am doing is taking the opportunity to correct some mistakes I made along the way, so I ask that this, rather than the papers be considered the canonical statement of my current views. You are, of course, free to agree with current me, past me or neither.
The approach I take is a rigorously naturalistic approach. I have been convinced that the best way to do philosophy (and treating theoretical psychology as a part of philosophy in the broadest sense) involves using all the resources available to us to understand ourselves and the rest of the world. I’m not going to try and convince you of that here, any more than I will try and convince you that the mind is a representational/computational device, although I work from that basis too.1 I don’t think that either of these assumptions is deeply problematic, but you might, so it’s worth being honest about my prior commitments.
In saying I am taking a naturalistic approach I mean two things. First, that experiences are not supernatural2 phenomena. They are a part of the natural world as much as gold, planets and societies are. Second, that theorising should proceed on the basis of fact. This includes, of course, plenty of room to question the interpretation of facts, the relevance of particular facts, the assumptions which lead to their discovery et cetera. My approach has been to gather as many facts as possible about the feeling of embodiment and, in the spirit of transcendental inference (Flanagan, 1984, pp. 182–183), hypothesise as to what the world is like in order to explain those facts. The hypothesis developed is examined to determine any predictions which follow regarding undiscovered facts and then those predictions are tested. Such is how this book proceeds. But first, what is the problem I am trying to solve: this problem of consciousness?
1.2 The Real Problem of Consciousness
The Real problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining experiences. There are, as we shall see as this book progresses, a great deal of worrisome sub-problems, particularly in regards to measurement and acquiring sufficient evidence that a particular experience is occurring or not. These worries are profound and have deep implications for the nature of consciousness, as we shall see in later discussions of confabulation. That said, I see no reason to assume, as the powerful in philosophy commonly do, that consciousness poses a special “Hard Problem” (Chalmers, 1995) or presents an insurmountable “explanatory gap” (Levine, 1983) making consciousness necessarily mysterious. My reason for this, in rough shot, is that arguments for such special kinds of problems assume that consciousness is somehow a supernatural phenomenon or at least assume that consciousness poses a special kind of problem (Carruthers & Schier, 2017). Seeing no reason to believe in the supernatural and finding unconvincing arguments which assume their conclusion, I see no reason to think that consciousness must be mysterious.
Concerns such as the Hard Problem and the explanatory gap are supposed to leave us worrying about the possibility of a science of consciousness. I take it that this book (along with many others) is an existence proof sufficient to overcome that worry. None-the-less I do not think that advocates of such problems are stupid, nor wilfully blind. If underlying these concerns about the possibility of a science of consciousness are worries about how sufficient evidence can be acquired, or the adequacy of particular hypotheses in explaining all the facts about experience, then there is much common ground. As I argue in later chapters such worries have profound implications about the nature of consciousness. But they do not lead to any sort of mysterianism, nor to the conclusion that consciousness is supernatural. Why do people think that they do? What are the traditional worries about consciousness and the possibility of studying it which I am avoiding?
Traditional problems of consciousness go beyond the problem of explaining experience and build in worries about the very possibility of consciousness being a part of the natural world. Advocates of these problems deny, or raise concerns about, or are unconvinced by, naturalism (often called materialism or physicalism) about consciousness. Instead they posit that consciousness is, or could be, or must be, supernatural. The reason for building in these worries is the difficulty of seeing any continuity between typical natural phenomena and consciousness. It seems like consciousness is a very different kind of thing which just cannot be explicable in terms of natural things.
1.2.1 Descartes Then the “Hard Problem”
Descartes is a common place to start when raising such concerns. Not the only place by any means, and certainly one that is problematic in that it reinforces traditional power structures in philosophy. None-the-less, as my aim here is to distinguish the Real Problem of consciousness from traditional worries, I have little room to move. It is the community and not I alone that determines what tradition is, and so I will work within the community’s constraints.
Traditional worries about consciousness as a supernatural phenomenon are expressed by Descartes in the Meditations on First Philosophy.3 Although they are not the central concern of the text, which is a response to a kind of radical skepticism, they are well developed. Descartes’ concerns were expressed more as worries that the mind or self (the “I”), rather than just consciousness, must be different from the natural world. But, as he held that consciousness was not only a part of the mind, but, indeed, essential too it (at least in the meditations), the concerns obviously apply to experiences. As we will see the examples he gives of “thoughts”, which are essential to the mind or self, are all experiences.
As early as the synopsis of the Meditations following Descartes’ letter to the Sorbonne we see that central to Descartes’ arguments is the difference in the way the mind appears to him and how bodies (natural things) appear:
This conclusion [that mind and body are different substances – GC] is confirmed in the same Meditation by the fact that we cannot understand a body except as being divisible, while by contrast we cannot understand a mind except as being indivisible. (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 9 [13])
This purported difference between mind and body (natural thing) is based on the appearance of mind and body to Descartes. That is, on how such things seemed to him. Specifically, he compares how his mind appears to how a piece of bee’s wax appears. Bee’s wax appears to him to be divisible into smaller sections, whereas the mind appears to him as a unified whole. However, that natural things are divisible, and minds are not is not the only difference which Descartes proposes.
Descartes supposes, by way of radically skeptical thought experiments (the famous “evil demon” for example) that the existence of bodies (natural things) can be sensibly doubted (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, pp. 15 [22–23], 18 [26–27]). In contrast, the existence of the self (the “I”) or mind cannot be doubted, for the very act of doubting proves that it must exist (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, pp. 16–17 [24–25]).
Furthermore, bodies are defined by a set of properties. In discussing his “mental conception” of bodies (i.e. natural things), Descartes says:
… by a body I understand whatever has a determinable shape and definable location and can occupy a space in such a way as to exclude any other body; it can be perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell, and can be moved in various ways, not by itself but by whatever else it comes into contact with. (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 17 [26])
In contrast, the self (“I”) or mind is essentially a thinking thing (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 18 [27]). Where thoughts are understood as conscious thoughts, but also include what many today would consider as experiences distinct from thinking:
But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 19 [28])
Playing with a piece of wax Descartes concludes that bodies (things) are different to minds. Bodies, like wax, are extended in space and are thus divisible (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 59 [85–86]) and changeable (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, pp. 20–21 [30–31]). Later he extends this list of properties such that bodies are understood to have shape, location, motion, temporal extension, quantity, and substance (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 30 [43]). Based on how the mind appears to him, i.e. on introspection, Descartes concludes that some of these properties are shared by the conscious self, but it is not the case that the conscious self [or mind, or conscious thoughts which are essential to the self (the “I”)] is necessarily spatially extended. Thus, it is not essential that the mind has shape, position, or motion (Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 30 [44]). However, as the mind is a substance, albeit of a very different kind (the famous “substance dualism” Descartes & Cottingham, 1996, p. 30 [44]), it i...