Consciousness

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Chapter One – What’s the problem?

What is the world made of?

The problem of consciousness is related to some of the oldest questions

in philosophy: What is the world made of? How did it get here? Who or
what am I? What is the point of it all? In particular it is related to the
mind–body problem; that is, what is the relationship between the physi-
cal and the mental?
In the early twenty-first century many people use the term ‘conscious-
ness’ quite unproblematically in everyday language to refer to their inner
experience or awareness. It is no longer synony-
mous with ‘mind’, which has many other mean-
ings and uses, and seems to have lost some of
its mystery. At the same time we are rapidly
learning how the brain works. We know about
the effects of brain damage and drugs, about
neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, and
about how changes in the firing of brain cells
accompany changes in a person’s experience.
We might expect all this knowledge to have
clarified the nature of conscious awareness, but
it doesn’t seem to have done so. Consciousness
remains a mystery.
In many other areas of science increasing
Figure 1.1
knowledge has made old philosophical ques-
tions obsolete. For example, no one now ago-
nises over the question ‘what is life?’. The old
theories of a ‘vital spirit’ or élan vital are superfluous when you under-
‘There is nothing stand how biological processes make living things out of non-living mat-
that we know ter. As the American philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, ‘the recursive
more intimately intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make élan vital about
as interesting as Superman’s dread kryptonite’ (Dennett, 1991, p 25). The
than conscious difference is not that we now know what élan vital is but that we don’t
experience, but there need it any more. The same is true of the ‘caloric fluid’ which was once
is nothing that is needed to explain the nature of heat. Now that we think of heat as a form
of energy, and know how various types of energy are transformed into
harder to explain.’ each other, we no longer need the idea of ‘caloric fluid’.
(Chalmers, 1995a: 200)
Might the same happen with consciousness? The American philosopher
Patricia Churchland thinks so, arguing that when our framework for under-
standing consciousness has evolved, consciousness ‘... may have gone the
way of “caloric fluid” or “vital spirit”’ (1988, p 301). Maybe it will. But so
far it has not. Indeed, the more we learn about the brain and behaviour,
the more obviously difficult the problem of consciousness seems to be.
8
In essence it is this. Whichever way we try to wriggle out of it, in
our everyday language or in our scientific and philosophical thinking, we

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 seem to end up with some kind of impossible dualism. Whether it is spirit ‘There exists
and matter, or mind and brain, whether it is inner and outer, or subjective
and objective, we seem to end up talking about two incompatible kinds of no accepted
stuff. You may disagree. You may, for example, say that you are a materi- definition of
alist – that you think there is only one kind of stuff in the world and that consciousness’
mind is simply the workings of that stuff – problem solved. I suggest that
(Dietrich, 2007: 5)
if you take this line, or many other popular ways of tackling the problem,
you will only find that in thinking about consciousness the dualism pops

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

up somewhere else. Let’s take an example.
Pick some simple object you have to hand and take a good look at
it. You might choose a chair or table, the cat curled up on your desk, or
a book. Anything will do. Let’s take a pencil. You can pick it up, turn it
round, play with it, write with it, put it down in front of you. Now ask
yourself some basic questions. What do you think it is made of? What will
happen if you hold it two feet above the floor and let go? If you leave the
room and come back will it still be there?
Now think about your experience of the pencil. You may have felt its
sharp point and texture, smelt its distinctive smell when you sharpened
it, seen its colour and shape, and written with it. These experiences are
yours alone. When you hold the pencil at arm’s length you see the pencil
from your own unique perspective. No one else can have exactly the same
pencil-watching experience as you are having now. And what about the
colour? How do you know that the way you see that yellow paint would
be the same for someone else? You don’t. This is what we mean by con-
sciousness. It is your private experience. No one else can know what it is
like. No one else can get it from you. You can try to tell them, but words
can never quite capture what it is like for you to be holding that pencil
right now.
So where has this got us? It has forced us into thinking about the
world in two completely different ways. On the one hand there is our
private and intimately known experience of holding the pencil, and
on the other there is the real pencil out there in the world. How can
unsharable, private sensations be related to real, existing objects in
space? Does the activity in the visual cortex of your brain cause the pri-
vate experience of pencil watching? If so, how? What makes the smell
like this for you?
Probably everyone has a different sticking point on this. For me it is
this – I find that I have to believe both in subjective experiences (because
I seem unquestionably to have them) and an objective world (because
otherwise I cannot possibly explain why the pencil will drop when I let
go, will still be here when I get back, or why you and I can agree that it
is blunt and needs sharpening). Even with all my understanding of brain
function, I cannot understand how subjective, private, ineffable suchness
of experience arises from an objective world of actual pencils and living
brain cells. These subjective and objective worlds seem to be too different
from each other to be related at all. This is my own version of the problem 9
of consciousness – my own sticking point. You should look hard at the
pencil and find out where yours lies.

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 Consciousness

Practice – Am I conscious now?

For this first exercise I shall give you more detailed guidance than for future ones. All the rest
build on the same foundation, so you should find that if you practise this one frequently all
the others will be easier.
The task is simply this.
As many times as you can, every day, ask yourself ‘Am I conscious now?’.
The idea is not to provide an answer – for example ‘Yes’ – twenty or a hundred times a day,
but to begin looking into your own consciousness. When do you answer ‘Yes’ and when
‘No’?. What does your answer mean?
You might like to ask the question and then just hold it for a little while, observing being
conscious now. Since this whole book is about consciousness, this exercise is simply
intended to get you to look at what consciousness is, as well as to think and argue about it
intellectually.
This sounds easy but it is not. Try it and see. After a day of practising or, if you are working
through the book, before you go on to the next chapter, make notes on the following:
● How many times did you do the practice?
● What happened?

● Did you find yourself asking other questions as well? If so, what were they?

● Was it difficult to remember to do it? If so, why do you think this is?

You may have found that you had intended to do the practice but then forgot. If you need
reminding you might try these simple tricks:
● Ask the question whenever you hear or read the word ‘consciousness’.
● Always ask the question when you go to the toilet.
● Write the question on stickers and place them around your home or office.

● Discuss the practice with a friend. You may help remind each other.

These may help. Even so, you may still find that you forget. This is odd because there is
no very good excuse. After all, this little practice does not take up valuable time when you
could be doing something more useful. It is not like having to write another essay, read
another paper, or understand a difficult argument. You can ask the question in the middle
of doing any of these things. You can ask it while walking along or waiting for the bus, while
washing up or cooking, while cleaning your teeth or listening to music. It takes no time away
from anything else you do. You just keep on doing it, pose the question and watch for a
moment or two.
You must be interested in consciousness to be reading this book. So why is it so hard just
to look at your own consciousness?
Are you conscious now?

10

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 Philosophical theories
Philosophers over the millennia have struggled with versions of this prob-
lem. Their solutions can be roughly divided into monist theories – which
assert that there is only one kind of stuff in the world – and dualist theo-
ries – which propose two kinds of stuff.
Among the monist theories, some claim that the mental world is

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

fundamental and others that the physical world is. So, for example, you
might doubt that real pencils actually exist out there and decide that only
ideas or perceptions of pencils exist – making you a mentalist or an ide-
alist. This does away with the awkward division but makes it very hard
to understand why physical objects seem to have enduring qualities that
we can all agree upon – or indeed how science is possible at all. Even
so, there have been many philosophical theories of this kind. The British
empiricist George Berkeley (1685–1753), for example, replaced matter
with sensations in minds.
At the other extreme are materialists who argue that there is only mat-
ter, and that the physical universe is causally closed. This means that the
laws governing the interactions between matter and energy exhaust all
the forces of the universe, so there is no room for non-physical minds or
consciousness to intervene. Materialism includes identity theory, which
makes mental states identical with physical states, and functionalism,
which equates mental states with functional states. In these theories there
is no mind, or mental force, apart from matter. Note that materialism
does not necessarily imply that consciousness can be reduced to physi-
cal properties. For example, consciousness might supervene on matter,
meaning that any difference in consciousness must be accompanied by a
difference in the brain, but the reverse is not true. So the same conscious
experience might be possible given two different brain states.
Some people find materialism unattractive as a theory of conscious-
ness because it seems to take away the very phenomenon, subjective
experience, that it was trying to explain. In particular, the powerful feel-
ing we have that our conscious decisions cause our actions is reduced to
purely physical causes. Another problem is the difficulty of understanding
how thoughts and feelings and mental images can really be matter when
they seem to be so different. Materialism makes it hard to find any way of
talking about consciousness that does justice to the way it feels.
The doctrine of epiphenomenalism is the idea that mental states are
produced by physical events but have no causal role to play. In other
words, physical events cause or give rise to mental events, but mental
events have no effect on physical events. This idea is sometimes attrib-
uted to Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748), whose book Machine Man hor-
rified eighteenth-century French readers. He claimed that human bodies
are clever machines and that ‘the diverse states of the soul are always cor-
relative with those of the body’. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), the
11
English biologist and paleontologist who did so much to promote Darwin’s

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 Consciousness

theory of evolution by natural selection, was

Profile one of the best known epiphenomenalists. He
René Descartes did not deny the existence of consciousness
(1596–1650) or of subjective experiences but denied them
any causal influence. They were powerless to
Descartes was born near Tours in
France, educated at a Jesuit college
affect the machinery of the human brain and
and was a staunch believer in an omnipotent and body, just as the sound of a locomotive’s steam
benevolent God. On 11 November 1619 he had a whistle cannot influence its machinery, or a
series of dreams which inspired him with the idea shadow cannot affect the person who casts
of a completely new philosophical and scientific it. He referred to animals, including humans,
system based on mechanical principles. He was as ‘conscious automata’. One problem with
not only a great philosopher, now often called ‘the epiphenomenalism is this: if conscious expe-
father of modern philosophy’, but also a physicist, riences can have no effect on anything what-
physiologist and mathematician. He was the first to soever, then we should never know about or
draw graphs, and invented Cartesian coordinates, be able to speak about them since this would
which remain a central concept in mathematics.
mean they had had an effect. Another difficulty
He is best known for his saying, ‘I think, therefore
I am’ (je pense, donc je suis), which he arrived at
is that if mind is a by-product or side effect of
using his ‘method of doubt’. He tried to reject every- the physical world but is not actually physical
thing which could be doubted and accept only that itself, then epiphenomenalism is really a kind
which was beyond doubt, which brought him to the of dualism. Nevertheless, scientific or methodo-
fact that he, himself, was doubting. He described logical behaviourism is built on one version of
the human body entirely as a machine made of this idea.
‘extended substance’ (res extensa), but concluded Trying to avoid the extremes of materialism
that the mind or soul must be a separate entity
and idealism are various kinds of ‘neutral mon-
made of a non-spatial and indivisible ‘thinking sub-
ism’, which claim that the world is all made
stance’ (res cogitans) that affected the brain through
the pineal gland. This theory became known as of one kind of stuff but a stuff that cannot be
Cartesian dualism. For the last twenty years of his classified as either mental or physical. William
life he lived mostly in Holland. He died of pneumonia James started with ‘the supposition that there is
in Sweden in 1650. only one primal stuff or material in the world, a
stuff of which everything is composed’ (James,
1904, p 477). He suggested a world of possible
or actual sense-data or ‘pure experience’ to avoid reducing mind to
matter or doing away with matter altogether. ‘A science of the relations of
mind and brain must show how the elementary ingredients of the former
correspond to the elementary functions of the latter,’ (James, 1890, i, p 28)
he said, but he did not underestimate the difficulty of this task.
Another attractive way of trying to get round the problem is panpsy-
chism, the view that all material things have associated awareness or
mental properties, however primitive. In some versions this means that
everything in the universe is conscious, including electrons, clouds, rivers
and cockroaches. In other versions everything has mental properties but
this can include both conscious and unconscious minds. Panpsychism
raises difficult questions: Is a stone aware? If so, is each of its molecules
also separately aware? Are the loose bits on the edge of the stone sepa-
rately aware when they are just hanging on or only when they are com-
pletely knocked off? What would it mean for something as simple as an
12 electron to have mental attributes? In some versions panpsychism implies

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 that everything has both physical and mental properties, and in this case
it is really a form of dualism and hasn’t avoided the problem at all.
Given the difficulty of uniting the world it is not surprising that dualism
remains enduringly popular, in everyday language if not in philosophy. The
best-known version is that of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century
French philosopher, and is therefore called Cartesian dualism. Descartes
wanted to base his philosophy only on firm foundations that were beyond
doubt. If he had been holding your pencil he might have imagined that

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

it did not exist and that his senses were deceiving him, or even that an
evil demon was systematically trying to fool him. But, he argued, in a
famous passage in The Meditations (1641), even the cleverest deceiver
would have to deceive someone. And the fact that he, Descartes, was
thinking about this was proof that he, the thinker, existed. In this way he
came to his famous dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’. Descartes concluded
that this thinking self was not material, like the physical body that moves
about mechanically and takes up space. In his view the world consists of
two different kinds of stuff – the extended stuff of which physical bodies
are made, and the unextended, thinking stuff of which minds are made.
Descartes’ theory is a form of substance dualism, which can be con-
trasted with property dualism or dual aspect theory. According to prop-
erty dualism, the same thing (e.g. a human
being) can be described using mental
terms or physical terms, but one descrip-
tion cannot be reduced to the other. So, for
example, if you are in pain, this fact can be
described in mental terms, such as how it
feels to you, or in physical terms, such as
which sorts of neurons are firing where in
your nervous system. This theory avoids
the need for two different substances but
leaves open many questions about the
relationship between the physical and
mental properties, and therefore comes in
many different versions.
The insuperable problem for substance
dualism is how the mind interacts with the
body when the two are made of different
substances. For the whole theory to work
the interaction has to be in both direc-
tions. Physical events in the world and the
brain must somehow give rise to experi-
ences of that world – to thoughts, images,
decisions, longings, and all the other con-
tents of our mental life. In the other direc- Figure 1.2 According to Descartes, the physical brain worked by
tion, thoughts and feelings must be able the flow of animal spirits through its cavities. The immaterial soul was
to influence the physical stuff. How could connected to the body and brain through the pineal gland which lies
either of these work? Descartes supposed in the midline. 13

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 Consciousness

that the two interacted through the pineal gland in the centre of the brain,
but proposing a place where it happens does not solve the mystery. If
thoughts can affect brain cells then either they work by magic or they
must be using some kind of energy or matter. In this case they are also
physical stuff and not purely mental.
Dualism does not work. Almost all contemporary scientists and philos-
ophers agree on this. In 1949 the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle derided
dualism as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’ – a phrase that has
entered into common parlance. He argued that when we talk of the mind
as an entity that does things we are making a category mistake – turning
it into something it is not. Instead he saw mental activities as processes,
or as the properties and dispositions of people.
This kind of view is apparent in many modern descriptions of mind
and self: ‘Minds are simply what brains do’ (Minsky, 1986, p 287); ‘“Mind”
is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out’ (Claxton,
1994, p 37); mind is ‘the personalization of the physical brain’ (Greenfield,
2000, p 14) and self is ‘not what the brain is, but what it does’ (Feinberg,
2009, p xxi). Such descriptions make it possible to talk about some mental
Figure 1.3 Gilbert Ryle activities and mental abilities without supposing that there is a separate
dubbed the Cartesian view mind. This is probably how most psychologists and neuroscientists think
of mind ‘the dogma of the of ‘mind’ today, and they do not agonise about what ‘mind’ really is. But
Ghost in the Machine’. there is much less agreement when it comes to ‘consciousness’.
There are very few dualists today. In the last century, philosopher of
‘Human science Sir Karl Popper and neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles (1977) pro-
consciousness is posed a theory of dualist interactionism. They argued that the critical
just about the last processes in the synapses of the brain are so finely poised that they can be
influenced by a non-physical, thinking and feeling self. Thus the self really
surviving mystery.’ does control its brain (Eccles, 1994). How it does so they admit remains
(Dennett, 1991: 21) mysterious. More recently, Benjamin Libet (1916–2007) proposed that
a non-physical ‘conscious mental field’ is responsible for the unity and
continuity of subjective experience and for free
will (Libet, 2004). Somewhat like known physi-
Activity y – What is consciousness? cal force fields it emerges from brain activity
but can then communicate within the cerebral
There is no generally recognised definition of con-
sciousness, which is why I have not given one here. See cortex without using the neural connections
whether you can find your own. and pathways. But how it does this he does not
First get into pairs. One person proposes a definition of explain.
consciousness. Then the other finds something wrong It seems that dualism, in its many forms,
with it. Don’t be shy or think too long – even the silliest
always arrives in the end at magic, or mystery,
suggestions can be fun to try. So just throw up one idea
and wait for it to be knocked down. Then swap over. Do or something that science can never approach.
this as quickly as you reasonably can until each of you As Dennett puts it, ‘accepting dualism is giv-
has had several turns. ing up’ (Dennett, 1991, p 37). But avoiding it
Get back together into the group and find out what is not easy.
kinds of objections you all came up with.
Given the lurking spectre of dualism it
Why is defining consciousness so hard when we all is not surprising that psychology, as a disci-
think we know what it is?
14 pline, has had such trouble with the concept of
consciousness.

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 Consciousness in psychology
The term ‘psychology’ first appeared in the eighteenth century to describe
the philosophy of mental life, but it was towards the end of the nineteenth
century that psychology first became a science. At that time several differ-
ent approaches to the study of the mind were emerging. Some were more
concerned with physiology and the idea of psychology as an objective sci-

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

ence, and some were more concerned with the inner life, or studying sub-
jective experience, but there was, as yet, no great split between the two.
William James’s (1890) classic text The Principles of Psychology
(perhaps the most famous book in the history of psychology) begins
‘Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and
their conditions’. James includes among these phenomena feelings,
desires, cognitions, reasonings and volitions – in other words, the stuff
of consciousness. Another contemporary textbook defines psychology, or
‘Mental Science’ as ‘the science that investigates and explains the phe-
nomena of mind, or the inner world of our conscious experience. These
phenomena include our feelings of joy and sorrow, love, etc. ...our con-
scious impulses and volitions, our perceptions of external objects as men-
tal acts, and so forth’ (Sully, 1892, i, p 1).
With his monist approach James dismissed the dualist concepts of a
soul or of ‘mind-stuff’, and quickly pointed out that consciousness can
be abolished by injury to the brain or altered by taking alcohol, opium
or hasheesh. So he assumed that a certain amount of brain physiology
must be included in psychology. Nevertheless, consciousness was at the
heart of his psychology. He coined the phrase ‘the stream of conscious-
ness’ to describe the apparently ever-changing and flowing succession of
thoughts, ideas, images and feelings. His psychology was therefore very
much an integrated science of mental life. Consciousness was at its heart,
but was not divorced either from the results of experiments on attention,
memory and sensation, or from physiological study of the brain and nerv-
ous system.
James was able to build on a large body of research in anatomy, physi-
ology and psychophysics. Psychophysics was the study of the relation-
ship between physical stimuli and reportable sensations – or, you could
say, between outer events and inner experience. Psychophysicists such
as Ernst Weber (1795–1878) and Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) studied
the relationships between physical luminance and perceived brightness,
weight and sensations of heaviness, or sound pressure and loudness.
From this came the famous Weber–Fechner Law relating sensation to the
intensity of a stimulus. Fechner also wanted to be able to relate sensa-
tions to excitations within the brain, but in his time this was simply not
possible.
In 1850 Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) made the first meas-
urement of the speed of conduction of nerve signals. This was popularly
15
referred to as the ‘velocity of thought’, although in fact he had measured

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 Consciousness

peripheral processes and reaction times, and argued that conscious

Am I conscious
thought and the interaction of physical and mental processes goes on in
now?
the brain. He was especially interested in visual illusions and the tricks
that our senses can play, and he proposed the new and shocking idea
that perceptions are ‘unconscious inferences’. This is close to the British
psychologist Richard Gregory’s (1966) much later notion that perceptions
are hypotheses, or guesses about the world, and it fits well with much
of modern neuroscience. James (1902) also talked about ‘unconscious
cerebration’.
This idea, that much of what goes on in the nervous system is uncon-
scious and that our conscious experiences depend upon unconscious
processing, seems quite natural to us today. Yet it was deeply disturbing
to many Victorian scientists who assumed that inference and thinking, as
well as ethics and morality, require consciousness. To them, the idea that
thinking could go on without consciousness seemed to undermine the
moral or spiritual superiority of ‘Man’.
Note that this notion of the unconscious, derived from physiological
studies, predated the psychodynamic notion of the unconscious devel-
oped by Freud (1856–1939). In Freud’s theory the unconscious con-
sisted of the impulses of the ‘id’, including biological desires and needs,
the defence mechanisms and neurotic processes of the ‘ego’, and all
the mass of unwanted or unacceptable material that was repressed by
the ‘superego’ – a part of the mind acquired through education in child-
hood and the source of conscience and guilt. The effects of all these
unconscious feelings, images or forbidden wishes might then appear in
dreams or cause neurotic symptoms. Although Freud was trained as a
neurologist, and frequently referred to his work as a ‘new science’, his
theories were derived almost entirely from case studies of psychiatric
patients and from his self-analysis. They were not based on scientific
research and have not stood the test of time. In the late twentieth cen-
tury Freud’s unconscious was replaced by the idea of a ‘cognitive uncon-
scious’ capable of many types of thinking, learning and memory without
awareness, and then by what is sometimes called the ‘new unconscious’,
which expands this notion to emphasise emotions, motivation and con-
trol (Hassin et al, 2005).
Other notable developments in Europe included the emergence of
existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology is both a philoso-
phy and a psychology based on putting subjective experience first. The
German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) argued for going back
to ‘the things themselves’ by a systematic inquiry into immediate con-
scious experience. This was to be done without preconceptions by sus-
pending or ‘bracketing’ any scientific and logical inferences about the
world. This suspension of judgement he called the phenomenological
reduction or epoché (see Chapter 25).
Husserl’s phenomenology built on the earlier work of Franz Brentano
16 (1838–1917) whose theory of consciousness was based on the idea that

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 every subjective experience is an act of reference. Conscious experiences
are about objects or events, while physical objects are not about anything.
For example, I might have a belief about horses, but a horse itself is not
about anything. This ‘aboutness’ he called ‘intentionality’.
It is most important to realise that this awkward word gets used in
many different senses. By and large philosophers use it in Brentano’s
sense, as meaning, reference or aboutness. In psychology (and in ordi-
nary language when it is used at all) intentionality usually means ‘hav-

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

ing intentions’ or having plans or goals or aims. If you come across this
word, ask yourself which meaning is intended, so you can avoid getting
confused and will be able to spot some of the amusing muddles created
by people who mix them up.
A separate approach to studying subjective experience was that of
introspectionism, initially developed by the German physiologist Wilhelm
Wundt. Wundt founded the first laboratory of experimental psychology in
1879, and for this he is often called the father of experimental psychol-
ogy. While the physiology in which he was trained studied living systems
from the outside, he wanted to build a psychology based on studying
from the inside – in other words, introspection. This study had to be
systematic and rigorous and so he trained people to make precise and
reliable observations of their inner experience. Others, such as Wundt’s
student Edward Titchener (1867–1927), carried on these methods of
introspectionism, primarily studying sensation and attention.
Wundt claimed to find that there were two kinds of ‘psychical ele-
ments’: the objective elements or sensations such as tones, heat or light,
and the subjective elements or simple feelings. Every conscious experi-
ence depended on a union of these two types. Like many others around
this time, he hoped to be able to build up a science of consciousness by
understanding the units or atoms of experience which made it up (an
atomistic approach to consciousness that William James utterly rejected).
Although psychoanalysis, phenomenology and introspectionism all had
the benefit of dealing directly with inner experience (or at least, with
what people said about their inner experience), they faced apparently
insuperable problems in dealing with disagreements. When one person
claims to observe some private experience quite differently from another,
how can you decide between them?
This was just one of the reasons why introspectionism fell out of
favour and behaviourism became so successful. In 1913 its founder,
the American psychologist John B. Watson, wrote: ‘Psychology, as the
behaviourist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural
science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemis-
try and physics’ (Watson, 1913). He proposed to abolish such nonsense
as introspection and consciousness and establish a psychology whose
goal was the prediction and control of behaviour. One advantage of this
new approach was that behaviour can be measured much more relia-
bly than introspections can. Also, human psychology could build on the 17

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 Consciousness

considerable knowledge of the behaviour of other animals. As Watson

proclaimed, behaviourism ‘recognizes no dividing line between man and
brute’ (Watson, 1913, p 158).
Although Watson is usually credited with – or blamed for – the expul-
sion of consciousness from psychology, similar views were already gaining
ground long before. In 1890 James wrote: ‘I have heard a most intelligent
biologist say: “It is high time for scientific men to protest against the rec-
ognition of any such thing as consciousness in a scientific investigation”’
(James, 1890, vol 1, p 134).
Watson built many of his ideas on the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936),
the Russian physiologist famous for his work on reflexes and classical con-
ditioning. He studied the way that repetition increased the probability of
various behaviours and assumed that almost everything we do, including
language and speech, is learned in this way. Subsequently the emphasis
in behaviourism shifted to the study of operant conditioning, with B.F.
Skinner’s studies of rats and pigeons that learned by being rewarded or
punished for their actions. For Skinner, human behaviour was shaped by
the history of reinforcements, and he believed that with the right reinforce-
ment schedules a human utopia could be created (Skinner, 1948). As for
consciousness, he believed it was just an epiphenomenon and its study
should not be the task of psychology. In the words of Watson’s biographer
David Cohen, ‘Behaviourism was a self-conscious revolution against con-
sciousness’ (Cohen, 1987, p 72).

Figure 1.4 When the rat presses the lever it may receive a food pellet or a sip of water. Rats,
pigeons and many other animals can easily learn to press a certain number of times, or only when a
green light is on, or when a bell sounds. This is known as operant conditioning. Many behaviourists
18 believed that studying animal learning was the best way to understand the human mind.

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 Behaviourism was enormously successful in explaining some kinds of ‘… accepting
behaviour, particularly in the areas of learning and memory, but it more
or less abolished the study of consciousness from psychology, and even dualism is
the use of the word ‘consciousness’ became unacceptable. Also, in sweep- giving up.’
ing away the worst excesses of introspectionism, behaviourism threw out (Dennett, 1991: 37)
the much more even-handed mind–body approach of William James’s
‘science of mental life’. This led to half a century of a very restricted kind
of psychology indeed.

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

By the 1960s behaviourism was losing its power and influence, and
cognitive psychology, with its emphasis on internal representations and
information processing, was taking over, but ‘consciousness’ was still
something of a dirty word. In his widely read history Psychology: The
Science of Mental Life, George Miller (1962) warned: ‘Consciousness is a
word worn smooth by a million tongues. Depending upon the figure of
speech chosen it is a state of being, a substance, a process, a place, an
epiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter, or the only true real-
ity. Maybe we should ban the word for a decade or two until we can
develop more precise terms for the several uses which “consciousness”
now obscures’ (Miller, 1962, p 40).
No one formally banned its use, but it was certainly more than a
decade before the word ‘consciousness’ became acceptable again in psy-
chology. It began creeping back in the 1970s with, for example, research
on mental imagery (see Chapter 4), on altered states of consciousness
such as sleep and drug-induced states (see Section 8) and in the disputes
over hypnosis (see Chapter 4), and with the beginnings of computer sci-
ence. But it was nearly three decades before the sudden explosion of
interest in the 1990s.
Now we still cannot define consciousness (Dietrich, 2007), but at least
we are allowed to talk about it.

The mysterious gap

‘Human consciousness is just about the last
surviving mystery’, says Dennett (1991, p 21).
He defines a mystery as a phenomenon that
people don’t know how to think about – yet.
Once upon a time the origin of the universe,
the nature of life, the source of design in the
universe, and the nature of space and time
were all mysteries. Now, although we do not
have answers to all the questions about these
phenomena, we do know how to think about
them and where to look for answers. With
consciousness, however, we are still in that Figure 1.5 19

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 Consciousness

delightful – or dreadful – state of mystification. Our understanding of

consciousness is a muddle.
The cause of that mystification, as we have seen in our quick look at
the history of consciousness, seems to be a gap. But what sort of a gap
is it?
‘“A motion became a feeling!” – no phrase that our lips can frame
is so devoid of apprehensible meaning.’ This is how William James
describes what he calls the ‘“chasm” between the inner and the outer
worlds’ (James, 1890, i, p 146). Before him, Tyndall had famously
proclaimed: ‘The passage from the physics of the brain to the corre-
sponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable’ (James, 1890, i, p 147).
Charles Mercier, in his The Nervous System and the Mind, referred to ‘the
fathomless abyss’ and advised the student of psychology to ponder the
fact that a change of consciousness never takes place without a change
in the brain, and a change in the brain never without a change in con-
sciousness. ‘Having firmly and tenaciously grasped these two notions,
of the absolute separateness of mind and matter, and of the invariable
concomitance of a mental change with a bodily change, the student will
enter on the study of psychology with half his difficulties surmounted’
(Mercier, 1888, p 11).
‘Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say,’ remarks James.
‘For this “concomitance” in the midst of “absolute separateness” is an
utterly irrational notion’ (James, 1890, i, p 136). He quotes the British
philosopher Herbert Spencer as saying, ‘Suppose it to have become quite
clear that a shock in consciousness and a molecular motion are the sub-
jective and objective faces of the same thing; we continue utterly inca-
pable of uniting the two, so as to conceive that reality of which they are
the opposite faces’ (James, 1890, p 147). To James it was inconceivable
that consciousness should have nothing to do with events that it always
accompanied. He urged his readers to reject both the automaton theory
and the ‘mind-stuff’ theory and, in the terms of his neutral monism, pon-
der the how and why of the relationship between physiology and con-
sciousness (James, 1904).
‘The hard problem ... As we have seen, the automaton theory gained ground and behaviour-
is the question ism, with its thorough-going rejection of consciousness, held sway over most
of how physical of psychology for half a century or more. Behaviourists had no need to worry
about the great gulf because they simply avoided mentioning conscious-
processes in the ness, subjective experience or inner worlds. It was only when this period
brain give rise was over that the problem became obvious again. In 1983 the American
to subjective philosopher Joseph Levine coined the phrase ‘the explanatory gap’, describ-
ing it as ‘a metaphysical gap between physical phenomena and conscious
experience.’ experience’ (Levine, 2001, p 78). Consciousness had been allowed back into
(Chalmers, 1995b: 63) science and the mysterious gap had opened up once more.
Then in 1994 a young Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, pre-
sented a paper at the first Tucson conference on consciousness. Before
20 getting into the technicalities of his argument against reductionism

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 he wanted to clarify what he thought was an
obvious point – that the many problems of Concept – The hard problem
consciousness can be divided into the ‘easy’
problems and the truly ‘hard problem’. To his The hard problem is to explain how physical
surprise, his term ‘the hard problem’ stuck, processes in the brain give rise to subjective
provoking numerous debates and four spe- experience. The term was coined in 1994
cial issues in the newly established Journal of by David Chalmers, who distinguished it
Consciousness Studies (Shear, 1997). from the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness.
These include the ability to discriminate, cat-

Chapter One – What’s the problem?

According to Chalmers, the easy problems egorise and react to stimuli, the integration of
are those that are susceptible to the standard information by cognitive systems, the report-
methods of cognitive science and might be ability of mental states, the focus of attention,
solved, for example, by understanding the com- deliberate control of behaviour and the dif-
putational or neural mechanisms involved. They ference between wakefulness and sleep. By
include the discrimination of stimuli, focusing contrast, the hard problem concerns experi-
of attention, accessing and reporting mental ence itself, that is subjectivity or ‘what it is
states, deliberate control of behaviour, or differ- like to be...’.
ences between waking and sleep. All of these
phenomena are in some way associated with The hard problem can be seen as a modern
the notion of consciousness, but they are not version, or aspect, of the traditional mind–
deeply mysterious. In principle (even though it body problem. It is the problem of cross-
may not really be ‘easy’), we know how to set ing the ‘fathomless abyss’ or ‘chasm’, or of
about answering them scientifically. The really bridging the ‘explanatory gap’ between the
hard problem, by contrast, is experience: what it objective material brain and the subjective
is like to be an organism, or to be in a given men- world of experience.
tal state, to experience the quality of deep blue Mysterians say that the hard problem can
or the sensation of middle C. ‘If any problem never be solved. Some argue that new phys-
qualifies as the problem of consciousness,’ says ical principles are needed to solve it, while
Chalmers ‘it is this one ...even when we have many neuroscientists believe that once we
explained the performance of all the cognitive understand the easy problems, the hard
and behavioral functions in the vicinity of expe- problem will disappear (see Chapter 2).
rience – perceptual discrimination, categoriza-
tion, internal access, verbal report – there may
still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these
functions accompanied by experience? ...Why doesn’t all this information-
processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?’ (1995a, pp 201–203). Stated
at its most succinct: ‘The hard problem ...is the question of how physi-
cal processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience’ (Chalmers,
1995b, p 63). This is the latest incarnation of the mysterious gap.

Further Reading
Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A. and Wilken, P. (2009) The Oxford Companion
to Consciousness, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hundreds of short
entries by over 200 authors on everything from access consciousness to
zombies; provides an idea of the scope of consciousness studies. 21

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 Consciousness
C
Co nsciousn

Chalmers, D.J. (1995b) The puzzle of conscious experience. Scientific

American, Dec. 1995, 62–68. The easiest version of Chalmers’ ‘hard prob-
lem’. For more detail read Chalmers 1995a and 1996.
Dennett, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA, and London;
Little, Brown and Co. Read Chapter 2 for the mystery of consciousness
and the problems of dualism.
Gregory, R.L. (2004) The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford,
Oxford University Press. Contains short entries on most authors and
ideas presented here, and a multi-author section on consciousness. Non-
philosophers will find it helpful to look up philosophical concepts.

22

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