Stream of Consciousness

Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience

Barry Dainton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415379298
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134593491
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Stream of Consciousness is about the phenomenology of conscious experience. Barry Dainton shows us that stream of consciousness is not a mosaic of discrete fragments of experience, but rather an interconnected flowing whole. Through a deep probing into the nature of awareness, introspection, phenomenal space and time consciousness, Dainton offers a truly original understanding of the nature of consciousness.

1 Introduction

1.1 The phenomenal

Since my main topic is the way experiences are interrelated within streams of consciousness, some preliminary clarifications concerning what I mean by ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’ are in order. There is of course a limit on what can be said on this topic: if you do not know what it is like to have experience, words will not help, and there is probably no ‘you’ there to find out. But although ‘consciousness’ and ‘experience’ are to some extent primitive notions, they are also as hotly contested as any in philosophy. The literature is full of distinctions between different types of consciousness, theories about what can and cannot be said about consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. In this opening chapter I will indicate where I stand on a few of these issues, those that are relevant to what follows. In particular, I will have something to say about two distinctive types of experience, the experience of understanding and perceptual experience. I focus on the latter to avoid possible misunderstandings, and on the former because it is often ignored altogether. Also, as I will be spending a good deal of time trying to describe various features of our experience, I make some general comments on phenomenology and related matters.

I shall not try to defend the positions I endorse here in any detail, partly because some of issues I mention will be taken up in subsequent chapters, but more importantly, because defending the general policy I adopt of taking experience seriously is a considerable undertaking in its own right. By ‘taking experience seriously’ I mean adopting a stance of robust, full-blooded realism about consciousness. This means taking consciousness as seriously as we take science. From this perspective, sensory experiences, bodily sensations and conscious thoughts are regarded as just as real as paradigmatic physical things such as mountains, houses and trees, and perhaps more real than the some of the currently postulated occupants of the microphysical realm. It also means rejecting all attempts to reduce the experiential to the non-experiential. (So, for example, contrary to what some functionalists would say, there is more to

being an experiential state than being a state with certain causal powers; an experience has certain intrinsic features over and above any causal powers it may have.) A good many philosophers think there are good reasons for not taking experience seriously. Although I think these philosophers are wrong, I will not engage with their arguments here. This has been done effectively by others, for example Foster (1991), McGinn (1991), Searle (1992), Flanagan (1992), Robinson (1994), Strawson (1994) and Chalmers (1996).

By ‘consciousness’ I mean phenomenal consciousness; by ‘experiences’ I mean states or items with a phenomenal character. The ‘phenomenal character’ of an experience refers to the distinctive feel the experience has. A state has a phenomenal character when there is something that it is like to have or undergo that state. A sudden severe stomach cramp that causes one to bend over double feels very different from a gentle tickle; the cramp and the tickle are sensations with a different phenomenal character. There is ‘something it is like’ to feel a raging anger, to see a magnolia coloured wall, to hear a cello tone, to struggle with a piece of mental arithmetic, to remember one’s first day at school, to smell a roasting chicken, to imagine the flavour of ginger. These are all experiences, they all have different phenomenal characters.

Some experiences are more noticeable than others. In thinking of ‘experiences’ we tend to think first of what we can see and hear, our thoughts or memories, our more memorable pains and pleasures. We easily overlook the presence of those bodily sensations that form the backdrop of our consciousness: gentle sensations of texture and pressure (e.g. from our clothing), feelings of warmth or coolness, along with feelings in our muscles, organs and joints, and our sense of balance (standing upright feels different from standing on one’s head). But these various bodily feelings all have their own distinctive phenomenal character, they all belong to the realm of experience.

As examples of items possessing phenomenal character I have referred to particular experiences, but experiences do not typically occur in isolation from one another. A stream of consciousness is an ensemble of experiences that is unified both at and over time, both synchronically and diachronically. The expression ‘the unity of consciousness’ is occasionally used to refer to the unity of the mind as a whole. Taken in this way, the topic is the way in which mental states of all kinds, experiential and non-experiential, are inter-related when they belong to the same mind. Since by ‘consciousness’ I mean phenomenal consciousness, by the ‘unity of consciousness’ I mean the unity of experience. Let us pause to consider this unity in a little more detail.

Imagine a party game: participants are blindfolded and handed an object, and they have to work out what the object is relying on touch alone. It is your turn, and panic is starting to set in; your three minutes are nearly up and you still have no idea what your object is; the taunts and laughter from your audience are starting to annoy. The thing you are handling is quite small, made of plastic, and obviously a contraption of some kind, it has several moveable parts, some hinged. You suspect there is a way to get the whole thing to fold up, but the various extremities can move in a bewildering number of directions, and you have been unable to manoeuvre them into any recognizable shape. Your best guess is that it is some sort of puzzle, an executive toy or some such thing. But too late: jeers erupt, your time has run out. Tearing off the blindfold you look at the mysterious object, only to find that you are still no wiser. Anger now surges—how could you hope to identify by touch an object you don’t recognize when you see it?

Consider a few snapshots of your stream of consciousness during these few minutes; each snapshot consists of your experience over a brief interval.

1. As you start to manipulate the object you have tactile sensations in your hands and fingers. These do not occur by themselves, but are continuous with the rest of your bodily experience (e.g. your body-image: sitting hunched in a chair). You are also having some thoughts—‘What is this damned thing?’—emotional feelings (mounting frustration), and mental images (you are trying to find an image to fit the feel). These thoughts and images do not occur in isolation from one another, they are experienced together—they are co-conscious—both with one another (thought +emotional feeling+mental image) and your various bodily experiences.
2. The audience was silent at first, but has now started to make its presence felt; you try not to pay attention to the racket they are making, but can hear them nonetheless. So now there are auditory experiences which are co-conscious with your thoughts, mental images, emotional feelings and bodily sensations.
3. You have just removed the blindfold, so visual experiences now enter the mix; these are co-conscious with all your other experience: what you hear and feel in your body, what you are thinking and feeling emotionally (a mixture of anger, frustration and puzzlement).

Each of these brief cross-sections is an instance of simultaneous experiences being experienced together, or bearing the relationship of co-consciousness to one another. As the example makes plain, experiences of different sorts can be, and typically are, co-conscious; indeed, at least as a first approximation, it seems likely that all our experiences at any given moment are mutually co-conscious.

But experience is also unified over time, at least over fairly brief intervals, of the duration of the so-called specious present. Handling the contraption while blindfolded produced a sequence of tactile sensations. As you trace a contour with a finger you feel a continuous sensation of smoothness, not a succession of discrete bursts of sensation. As you try to visualize what you are holding you imagine one object after another; each image lasts a short while, and when one object replaces another the transition itself is experienced. When the audience becomes restless you hear a rumbling of muttering and murmuring, a flow of sound which as it runs on is continually renewed. And all the while, there is the constant presence of bodily feeling and emotion: these too constitute a continuous presence. This constant flow or turnover of experience is one reason the ‘stream’ metaphor seems apt. A stream of consciousness is a continuous succession of experiences, and what gives the stream its unity from one moment to the next is the fact that this succession is itself experienced.

My main concern in this book is co-consciousness, in both its synchronic and diachronic forms. I shall try to elucidate its characteristics, and see what can be said about it. As I noted in the Preface, a phenomenological approach is unavoidable, for the unity I am concerned with is a unity in consciousness itself. There is no denying that our streams of consciousness do display a distinctive sort of unity, and this unity does not just consist in a relationship between certain experiences, it consists in a relationship between experiences that is itself experienced. To investigate this unity I do not need to suppose that anything external to my consciousness exists at all. Irrespective of whether I am a human being, a brain-in-a-vat or an immaterial soul, I have certain experiences which, as they occur, are experienced together. The question is: when experiences are co-conscious, what is the nature of this relationship, what can be said about this purely experiential phenomenon? Scientific studies of the brain are largely irrelevant to this question. Consider the so-called binding problem with which neuroscientists are currently wrestling (cf. Horgan 1994:72–8). At the most general level, the problem is how the scattered neuronal activity within a single brain manages to generate unified states of consciousness. Given that the neural processes known to be associated with auditory, bodily and visual experience are located in different parts of the brain, how (or where) do these processes manage to create a single unified experience? Then there are more specific problems. When I hear you speak I hear your words as meaningful; there are a number of different neural processes involved in speech perception—how do they manage to integrate their outputs? When I see a blue cube, how do parts of the brain responsible for shape perception and colour perception get their act together so as to produce what I see? These are all interesting problems. But it is clear that while solutions to these problems might tell us something about the physical conditions that are sufficient (and perhaps necessary) for human beings to enjoy unified streams of consciousness, they would not tell us much about what the unity and continuity of consciousness involves at a purely experiential level. For this we need to turn to phenomenology.

Experience gives rise to a more familiar and more widely discussed puzzle: what is the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and the physical world? So far as I can see, at the present time this relationship remains as mysterious as ever, but we do not need to resolve this mystery in order to describe and try to make sense of our experience. This said, the general stance taken on the matter-consciousness question is relevant to certain issues with which I will be concerned—one such is the issue of how experiences are to be individuated. Since this question cannot be ignored altogether, I will briefly sketch the general position which seems to me most reasonable, and which I will be assuming henceforth.

1.2 The phenomenal and the physical

The matter-consciousness problem is easy to state: how can physical particles and fields, when organized as they are in living brains, manage to produce experiences possessing phenomenal characteristics? Where do the phenomenal characteristics come from? Think back to the time before matter had collapsed into the first stars. Since the universe at this time consisted of simple particles randomly scattered through vast reaches of space, it seems unlikely that there was experience anywhere to be found. If the universe in this condition was wholly experience-free, how can simply re-arranging the same elementary particles have given birth to something fundamentally new and different: consciousness? How can the bringing together of non-experiential things ever produce an experience? Even the simplest experience seems to be something wholly other than a collection of physical atoms. Yet, if the evolutionary story is to be believed, this is precisely what did happen: consciousness (of a rudimentary kind) abruptly emerged on the scene as soon as matter achieved a certain type of organization. This aspect of the mind-brain problem seems uniquely baffling. The relationship between matter and experience can seem utterly mysterious in a way that the relationship between matter and computation, or matter and cognition, is not. Hence the claim that the matter-cognition problem is trivial in comparison with the matter-consciousness problem. The latter is so hard the former can seem relatively easy.¹

As for solutions to the matter-consciousness problem, the history of philosophy is littered with them; but if we adopt a robust realism about both the physical world and experience, which I do here, some can be ignored. Experiential realism rules out eliminativism and reductionism: it is not an option to say experiences do not exist, or are identical with physical processes which lack phenomenal characteristics. Accepting physical realism means it is not an option to say the physical world does not exist at all (e.g. some idealisms) or that all physical facts can in some manner be reduced to purely experiential facts (e.g. classical phenomenalism). But this leaves a good many other options open.

Dualism is one such. Substance dualism is the doctrine that experiences are states of objects which are non-physical or immaterial; property dualism, in one common form, is the doctrine that experiences are immaterial particulars which are generated by (or at least correlated) with physical occurrences. Both versions of dualism hold that experiences are non-physical; the divergence occurs over whether or not experiences are attributes or modes of a nonphysical substance. Given that the relationship between matter and consciousness is at present an unresolved mystery, I do not think that we are in a position to rule out any half-way intelligible theory about this relationship with any confidence. This said, I will generally assume that Cartesian-style substance dualism is false. Not because I think the doctrine is less than halfway intelligible—it has its problems, but so do the alternatives—but because the doctrine has distinctive implications concerning the unity of consciousness, and so far as possible, I want to see what can be said about the unity of consciousness without committing myself to any particular view of the matter-consciousness relationship.

It is easy to see why substance dualists tend not to regard the unity of consciousness as especially problematic. If we are immaterial substances whose essence is to be conscious, experiences that belong to the same subject are modes of a single immaterial substance; since the essence of this substance is consciousness, it is not surprising that our experiences are unified—they are unified because they are coinstantiated in the same conscious substance. But this is too quick and easy. The availability of coinstantiation as an explanation of the unity in consciousness means substance dualists tend not to inquire any further into the nature of this unity, which—as we shall see—has some strange and remarkable properties, properties which only come to light when the easy answer to the question is not taken as the last word on the matter. Dualists also tend to ignore certain other relevant questions. If experiences are properties of immaterial substances, is it impossible for a single immaterial substance to sustain two distinct streams of consciousness at a given time? If this is not impossible, then coinstantiation cannot explain the unity of the experiences in each of the two streams and some further explanation is needed. If it is impossible, why is it impossible? I have one further reason for regarding substance dualism with suspicion: like Hume, I think the doctrine is suspect on purely phenomenological grounds—a point I will be returning to in Chapter 2.

If we leave substance dualism out of the picture, what other options remain? Property dualism is one possibility, but there are non-dualistic approaches which are live options too. One of these non-dualistic approaches is rooted in the fact that the scientific picture of the world is in one respect a very limited one. Physics has a lot to say about the size, shape and causal powers of different sorts of physical item, but what does it have to say about the intrinsic nature of space-time, or of fundamental particles such as electrons or neutrinos? Strange as it may initially seem, it has nothing whatsoever to say about these matters. General relativity tells us that space-time is a medium whose intrinsic geometry is partly dependent upon the distribution of mass-energy within it; it tells us nothing of the intrinsic nature of space-time itself. Physics tells us of the size and mass of particles, it tells us of the various ways they causally interact with other particles (and each other), but this is all: it has nothing to say about the nature of the stuff from which these particles are constituted. The same will surely apply to as-yet undiscovered particles (and fields), including those which turn out to be basic. Assuming that at least some physical items must have some sort of intrinsic character, an intriguing possibility opens up: what is there to rule out the possibility that the intrinsic character of at least some physical items is phenomenal? The obvious candidates are the parts of the nervous system that we know to be correlated with the occurrence of experiences.

This view, which for obvious reasons I will call phenomenalized materialism (or P-materialism for short) solves several problems at once. It situates the experiential firmly within the physical realm; it explains how the phenomenal can causally interact with the physical and vice-versa; it also allows us to say something about the intrinsic nature of at least some parts of the physical world.²

But the theory also faces a number of difficulties. Is P-materialism committed to panpsychism? Do rocks and puddles possess even a faint glimmer of consciousness? Most people find this idea very strange. But if the matter in the brain is conscious, can we be certain that puddles do not possess some slight degree of consciousness? After all, brains and puddles are constructed from the same basic material constituents, elementary particles and their associated fields. If matter is intrinsically conscious, then must not these elementary ingredients possess phenomenal features in some form, no matter how dim? In which case, will not every material thing possess some form of consciousness? Then there is the so-called ‘grain problem’.³ What portion of the brain could be identical with the visual experience one has when one looks at a white sheet of paper? Whereas the relevant visual experience is a smooth region of phenomenal whiteness, the neural structures associated with this experience are far from homogeneous (just think what a tangle of neurones looks like). The same applies to the elementary particles neurones are composed of. Where in the brain do we find something with the same structure as a smooth expanse of pure phenomenal white? The physical constituents of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Unity, Introspection and Awareness
• 3. Phenomenal Space
• 4. Transitivity
• 5. Phenomenal Time: Problems and Principles
• 6. Broad and Husserl
• 7. The Overlap Model
• 8. Phenomenal Interdependence
• 9. The Ramifications of Co-Consciousness
• Notes
• Bibliography