The Mystery of Consciousness
by Rollie Smith
Many students and writers contend that consciousness is a mystery. If you are a religious type, you link it to the immortal soul or spirit given by the Creator (Nature, the Universe, God) at conception or sometime before or at birth. If you are a philosopher, you might consider consciousness as the cogito, the capacity to think, linked to the brain through the pineal gland or to the Mind, the faculty of Reason. If you are a psychoanalyst, you might uncover the consciousness by distinguishing the Ego overseen by the Superego on the base of the Id, or by stimulating memories of the past and lessons from dreams, or by identifying the ideals or architypes found in myths and dreams. If you are a scientist, you seek to explain it through the nervous system centered in the brain through neurons and synapses by tracing electric charges in the brain. If you are a teacher or community organizer, you try to expand it through information and action in the world. And if you are a poet, you might understand consciousness as Love which appears in the act of being cared for and held on arrival into the world.
Consciousness appears to us in everyday life as an “inner sense” of ourselves individually and collectively. Except when we lose it by a severe knock on the head, or by an anesthesia or other drug, or by death.
Death — perhaps that is the question that drives us to understand consciousness.
Consciousness and Knowing. French translates consciousness as conscience, the same for the English word conscience. Science from the Latin word scire, to know; and con or with. Con-science is the perception of self that accompanies knowledge whether theoretical (consciousness) or practical (conscience).
Knowing for us humans is the inter-connection between our organism and our environment. Knowing is our body in touch with our world perceived through our corporal senses — feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, e.g., experiencing. Knowing is perceiving phenomena in the environment and naming them as things. Naming as in formulating, imagining, signing, articulating, or, more generally, symbolizing phenomena. The naming is a categorizing, putting things together under an accessible image or idea, e.g., being, organism, animal, tiger
Symbolic Behavior as Lived. Thinking, according to Douglas Hofstadter, is using a figure of speech, I.e., a metaphor, analogy, or some other image as a categorization to depict both commonalities and distinctions among phenomena. What science adds to the experience and forming of phenomena is a judgment as to whether our categories or formulations are true, i.e., real, ascertained by evidence through experimentation and the consensus of others in a particular field of inquiry.
The human body interacting in its environment uses images to stop and cut out of the flow of sensation, phenomena which appear as things in the world as cookie cutters make forms in dough. Those who study phenomena (i.e., phenomenologists ), discover that human reception of experiencing and forming of things are one and the same activity of the human body in and to the world. Knowledge starts with experience, data we encounter through our senses from the “outside,” from the visible, material, objective world. An object is a thing or reality when we distinguish a piece of data from other data by using a symbol that links it to other similar objects we have experienced. For instance, “tiger in the bush.” Me here. Run!
Intentionality. In the same moment of the perception of the visible or sensed object, e.g., the “tiger,” there is also an invisible or non-sensed perception of the personal act of my body sensing the object in the world “Me here, Run.” I feel my self encountering and speaking not as a visible or out-in-the-world object but as an invisible subject. My various senses of phenomena outside are coordinated in a direct unspoken feeling of the I who is objectifying the object in the world while subjectifying the who-I-am. Thus, I integrate my outer and inner sense perceptions. My consciousness is the invisible inner in the visible outer. Consciousness is the inner sense of the person as agent, the personal self, naming and externalizing the phenomenon that allows things to appear to me and to others to whom I point them out. Consciousness arises with the evolved and given ability to acquire, create, and use symbols to know the world.
Inter-subjectivity. Moreover, this symbolic assertion which is “I acting to my world,” I as agent using the words and other symbols that have been given to me by others who are agents formulating a world. Hence, I am present not only to my self as activity but to others. “Tiger. Run!” These others I may perceive as objects, but if I allow myself to imitate them and go through their symbolic activities, I come in contact with not only the words, or art pieces, or formulas, or civilizations they are producing but also with their bodily acts of producing language, art, science, love, and community. By even for a moment acting with them — as I do when I passionately watch a ballet, sing along a ballad, or carefully read a poem — , I discover the inner sense of the who they are being. I encounter their consciousness, their spirit, their soul, their orientation to the world. I experience with them and in them by recreating them in myself. They are with me no longer as objects, but rather as agents.
Presence. Consciousness is the awareness and integration of my sensing body in the world as inner and outer, subject and object, agent and patient, personal self and others, memories and intentions, space and time. Being conscious is being present to myself, to others, to the world, to objects in the world, memories of the past and intentions to the future. Presence: here, now, with, and to come.
Transcendence. There is a dynamic of theoretical and practical consciousness to which philosophy points but can not explain. That dynamic is the human ability to live shared with most living organisms, to know the human self and world, and to act symbolically which is a specifically human way to live, to act, to grow and perfect the human being and world. These drives can be related to the Greeks articulation of human desires: for life, for meaning, and for respect — which in turn can be related to livelihood or economy, to meaning related to knowledge or culture, and to power, the ability to act with others or politics. Transcendence is the drive of consciousness to be, to know, and to act. From passivity to agency, between past and future, from object thing to subject person.
Mystery. Consciousness arising from the ability to perceive and act in the world through images cannot itself be objectified and so scientifically explained since it is the very act of objectification of realities in the world by which we together subjectify ourselves in living, knowing, and acting. Consciousness is, therefore a “mystery” to be revealed in intersubjective action, not a problem to be solved by solipsistic clairvoyance. The mysterious transparency of consciousness to itself does not make it supernatural. The components and conditions for consciousness are natural and are being explained through biology, neuroscience, quantum mechanics, evolutionary psychology and anthropology. And with philosophy attempting to point to and provide images for inquiring various ways in which humans experience, understand, and know themselves and their worlds through stories, art, religion, science, and politics.
The quest for consciousness, however we label it, Mind, Soul, Character, Spirit, is the endeavor of a lifetime no matter how long. The words I have used to describe it are inadequate, not only because of my personal limitations but because of the condition and nature of being human, that is, our given condition and our specific way of existing in the world. Some might think it is frustrating and ultimately meaningless to follow the unending quest of Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill only to have it fall back so to start the futile process all over again. But as Camus says there is that pause as Sisyphus walks down to start over with the rock. It is in that pause that he imagines Sisyphus as happy. It is that pause in which Sisyphus is most conscious.
End Notes:
My mentors are mainly in the tradition of the American pragmatic tradition, the Continental phenomenological tradition, and Zen Buddhism.
In a further meditation I will discuss the relationships among intersubjectivity, empathy, and love as a foundation of politics and social justice.