Living Consciousness

The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

G. William Barnard

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438439594
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Transpersonal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2012 Godbey Authors' Awards presented by the Godbey Lecture Series in Southern Methodist University's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Living Consciousness examines the brilliant, but now largely ignored, insights of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Presenting a detailed and accessible analysis of Bergson's thought, G. William Barnard highlights how Bergson's understanding of the nature of consciousness and, in particular, its relationship to the physical world remain strikingly relevant to numerous contemporary fields. These range from quantum physics and process thought to philosophy of mind, depth psychology, transpersonal theory, and religious studies. Bergson's notion of consciousness as a ceaselessly dynamic, inherently temporal substance of reality itself provides a vision that can function as a persuasive alternative to mechanistic and reductionistic understandings of consciousness and reality. Throughout the work, Barnard offers "ruminations" or neo-Bergsonian responses to a series of vitally important questions such as: What does it mean to live consciously, authentically, and attuned to our inner depths? Is there a philosophically sophisticated way to claim that the survival of consciousness after physical death is not only possible but likely?

SECTION TWO

THE MATTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF MATTER

13

CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDINGS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

REMEMBERING MATTER AND MEMORY

Although it was published in 1896, Matter and Memory remains a revolutionary work. In it, Bergson articulates a creative and persuasive solution to what has to be one of the most stubborn and tenacious problems in Western philosophy: the mind-body problem.¹ Sadly, however, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most Western philosophers and psychologists act as if Matter and Memory was never written. What makes this omission in the collective memory of the academy particularly troubling is that during the last several decades, after a prolonged positivist/behaviorist period in which conversations about the nature of consciousness were in essence relegated to the philosophical and psychological garbage heap, there has been a resurgence in interest in the relationship between the mind/consciousness and the body/brain. Numerous highly respected thinkers have taken up the mind-body problem with renewed zeal, each writing texts that approach this difficult issue from her or his particular vantage point. However, in this torrent of philosophical and psychological speculation, it is rare to find even a brief mention of the work of Bergson.

This philosophical lacuna would be understandable if, after serious and careful consideration, there had been a consensus that Bergson's arguments in Matter and Memory were fatally flawed and it was therefore only worthy of notice as a historical relic superseded by far more sophisticated perspectives. But this negative assessment never happened. Matter and Memory, even in Bergson's own time, was never (with certain exceptions) adequately examined or properly understood by the majority of the philosophers and psychologists of that period. Instead, it was simply ignored and then forgotten (for reasons that I attempted to describe in the bio-historical preamble). Therefore, far from being outmoded, Matter and Memory has yet to be fully understood, let alone appreciated. It is my contention that a detailed critical examination of Bergson's perspective on the mind-body issue, especially as it is presented in Matter and Memory, is urgently needed in today's philosophical and psychological climate. If taken seriously it has the potential to open up several potentially fruitful new avenues of inquiry.

However, before I dive into the difficult-to-navigate waters of Matter and Memory, it would be helpful first to offer a relatively terse, inevitably oversimplified, overview of some of the central issues that have arisen in the discussions on the nature of consciousness during the last several decades. This overview will make it easier to see exactly how Matter and Memory fits into the current conversation and will also help to clarify how its powerful, dense, idiosyncratic, and seemingly counterintuitive perspective might actually have the capacity to untangle the tightly cinched knot of the mind-body problem.²

BECOMING CONSCIOUS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When discussing the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world, it can be helpful to begin with an often-overlooked insight, that is, that there are two seemingly irreconcilable ways to know the world. First, we can know something from the outside. For example, the small wooden statue of St. Francis on my desk can be weighed, measured, probed, and examined by a wide variety of people, all of whom (given a modicum of intelligence, mental health, and educational background) would probably come to a rough consensus about the basic facts of what it is made of, who made it, what wood it was carved from, and so on. The statue is, undeniably, a physical object in a physical world and can be publicly known by others as such. But at the same time, as I look at the statue, or as I hold it, I am having a unique, utterly private, nonsharable, intimate, inner experience of that statue. No one else will have, or can have, exactly this quality of experience—an experience that is inherently subjective and intrinsically ineffable.³ We might be able to imagine what someone else's experience of the statue would be, but our own experience itself, from the inside, is ours alone. A scientist might tell us that our inner experience of the textures and shapes and colors and smells of the statue is nothing more than a complex neurochemical interaction taking place within our brain, but as far as we are concerned, our experience has nothing to do with neurochemical cerebral activity. In-and-of-itself, our experience simply is what it is—it has its own unique quality, or better yet our experience consists of this quality. (philosophers often use the technical term qualia to indicate the private, subjective, phenomenological quality of consciousness—what an experience is like, on its own terms, instead of what physical properties, allegedly, are its cause.)

The problem is how our inner, private, subjective experiences (our qualia) are related to the physical world that seems so external, public, and objective. This conundrum is, not surprisingly, virtually identical to the cartesian impasse: how is it possible that the mind (which, according to descartes, is “unextended,” i.e., nonspatial and inner) is related to matter (which, according to descartes, is “extended,” i.e., spatial and outer). When I perceive something in my mind (let's say, a television), how is my immaterial consciousness of the television related to the heavy, bulky material object sitting across from me? That television has a specific location (let's say, six feet from the sofa), but where is my consciousness of the television? my consciousness of the television does not seem to be anywhere in particular. (it is certainly not six feet from my consciousness of the sofa.)⁴ Similarly, the television can be weighed and measured, but what about my consciousness of the television? consciousness, as such, appears to be inherently nonspatial, that is, “unextended,” whereas matter seems to be inherently spatial, that is, “extended.” The big question, therefore, is this: how are these two very different “stuffs” related?

A modern variation of this cartesian conundrum is what david chalmers calls the “hard problem”; that is, exactly how do “physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience”?⁵ The “hard problem” forces us to confront and explain how it is possible that each of us at every moment manages, in Susan Blackmore's words, to cross the “fathomless abyss” or “chasm” that exists “between the objective material brain and the subjective world of experience.”⁶ As Ed Kelly points out, “the fundamental question before us now reduces starkly to this: can everything we know about the mind be explained in terms of brain processes?”⁷ In other words, how is it possible that an “extended” object (like our brain and nervous system), which is physical, external, measurable, wet, and pulpy, can create the wide variety of “unextended” qualia that make up our conscious experience? For example, how do the electromagnetic waves of light entering my eyes become my consciousness of the tree outside my office window? How does this physical, measurable, vibratory reality become transformed into a nonphysical, nonlocatable, immeasurable conscious experience? We can talk as much as we want to about molecular movements in the rods and cones in the retina and neural activity in the visual centers in the brain, but how do these physical and seemingly nonconscious processes miraculously transform themselves into my conscious visual experiences? as A. A. Luce archly notes, “the eye forms images. So does a camera; yet we do not credit the camera with the power of seeing the images it has made.”⁸

THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: DUALISM

Although there are numerous complex philosophical theories that attempt to bridge the chasm between matter and the mind, or between the brain and consciousness, for simplicity's sake, I am going to focus on the three major theories of the mind-body relation that were prominent during Bergson's time: dualism, materialism, and epiphenomenalism. Contemporary philosophers of mind have tweaked these three perspectives, adding several subtly different variations, but these three theoretical positions will serve as a useful starting point.

Descartes' theory of the mind-body relationship is basically a form of dualism, technically known as “substance dualism.” dualism acknowledges that both the mind and the body exist, but it also asserts that they are completely different and separate substances, one (the body) extended and the other (the mind) unextended. The basic assumption of dualism is that the mind (or soul or consciousness) somehow (rather mysteriously) interacts with the body in and through the brain.

The primary advantage of dualism (or “interactionism,” as it is sometimes called), is that it affirms what introspection tells us, very clearly: consciousness exists (although, as we will see soon, some philosophical theories deny the value and validity of our introspective awareness of our own consciousness) and consciousness both affects, and is affected by, the external world around it (e.g., my consciousness tells my fingers to begin typing and they do; I drink a few beers and my consciousness becomes altered). The major problem with substance dualism however is that it is not at all clear how physical occurrences in a physical world and a physical brain could possibly create or influence our nonphysical conscious experiences of that world, or how our nonphysical conscious experiences (e.g., willing ourselves to press the keys on a computer keyboard) could possibly have any effect on our clearly physical brains and equally physical external world. The perspectives of some ardent supporters of dualism remain active in contemporary philosophical debates (e.g., the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper; quantum physicists, such as Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli; and neurophysiologists, such as Wilder Penfield, John Eccles, and Roger Sperry). However, it is safe to say that dualism is rarely given much credence in current mainstream philosophical and scientific circles.

THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: EPIPHENOMENALISM

During Bergson's time there was another widely held theory of the relationship between the mind and the body. This theory, epiphenomenalism, like dualism, acknowledged the intrinsic difference between our conscious experience and the external physical world. But unlike dualism, epiphenomenalism asserted that consciousness is simply a superfluous by-product of material processes. Many late nineteenth-century epiphenomenalists (including Thomas Huxley, who is credited with coining the term) argued that although it does seem to be true that certain animal species (including human beings) possess conscious awareness, nonetheless, consciousness as such is utterly powerless to affect physical reality. As milič Čapek puts it, according to these thinkers, “the consciousness of higher living beings merely accompanies certain neural processes without influencing them; it supposedly has as little effect on them as a steam whistle on the motion of a locomotive.”⁹

While epiphenomenalism was very influential in Bergson's time, there are few serious advocates for this position today. One of the most serious difficulties of epiphenomenalism, which William James pointed out in 1880, is that if the physiological processes of the brain and nervous system take place regardless of whether consciousness is present or not, if consciousness has absolutely no power to alter our cerebral functioning in any way, then it is almost impossible to understand how consciousness could have emerged during the process of evolution. Čapek echoes this concern when he notes, “the mechanism of natural selection preserves only those features which represent some survival value”; therefore, if consciousness actually is as utterly powerless as the epiphenomenalists claim, it becomes difficult to see how something with so little survival value would ever have been preserved.¹⁰

Epiphenomenalism has one further theoretical difficulty, a difficulty that (as we will soon see) it shares with materialism. The difficulty is this: our everyday actions and experiences repeatedly and powerfully affirm that our consciousness can and does affect our physical body. While driving a car, we decide to turn left and our body turns the steering wheel in the proper direction. Epiphenomenalists such as Huxley, however, claimed that this introspective awareness of the power of our intentions to influence the actions of our body is simply mistaken. According to Huxley, whether we know it or not, we are “conscious automata”; that is, we are simply robotic physical beings who, mysteriously, are also conscious. While this assertion was (and is) implicitly affirmed by generations of psychologists and philosophers, a handful of contemporary theorists have rebelled against this claim that our conscious intentions have no effect on our physical actions. For instance, Ted Honderich notes that the argument made by epiphenomenalists that consciousness has no effect on the body is immediately self-refuting: the very act of speaking or writing about epiphenomenalism could not have occurred without having been catalyzed by the supposedly powerless conscious beliefs held by the epiphenomenalists themselves.¹¹

THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: MATERIALISM

A similar argument can be made against reductive materialism (or physicalism), currently the most influential theoretical understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body. For materialists, there is only one “stuff” in the universe: physical matter in various forms. If there is only one “stuff” out of which everything is made, then there can be no interaction between the mind and the body, because what we call “the mind” is in actuality simply an alternative way of describing the neurochemical activities of the brain. Therefore, to talk about consciousness as if it were something separate from matter is, according to materialism, a category mistake, since everything that we think, feel, say, and do is reducible to physical activities in the brain/body. For materialists, “minds are simply what brains do,”¹² or mind is nothing more than “the personalization of the physical brain.”¹³

Materialists tend to argue that our commonsense dualist understanding that our consciousness is an active agent that can and does initiate physical changes in our body is nothing more than a superstitious relic of earlier, more ignorant, time periods. Therefore, they are happy to follow the advice of British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who in 1949 urged scientists and philosophers to ignore the “ghost in the machine” (i.e., consciousness in the body). Exorcising this ghost means that we acknowledge that our normal understandings of consciousness are completely mistaken. For instance, according to certain materialists (i.e., “eliminative” materialists), consciousness as we normally think about it does not really exist: our consciousness does not influence our body in any way. Our consciousness is not even caused by, nor does it interact with, the neurochemical processes of our body. Instead, our conscious experience is nothing more than, or is reducible to, the highly complex neurochemical activity in our bodies.

This understanding of the nature of consciousness is voiced by Francis Crick (who, along with James D. Watson, uncovered the structure of DNA), when he claims that we are mistaken when we imagine that our conscious experiences are something more than, or distinct from, our physicality. Instead, our sorrows, memories, ambitions, our sense of personal identity and free will are “in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”¹⁴ Eliminative materialists, astonishingly, assert that we are mistaken when we think that our conscious experiences, or qualia, even exist. As Blackmore points out, “you may think that it is unquestionable that qualia exist…. Most theorists would agree with you, but some think you would be wrong.”¹⁵ For instance, one of Daniel Dennett's primary tasks as an eliminative materialist is “to convince people that there are no such properties as qualia.”¹⁶

Dennett's perspective dovetails with the understanding of paul churchland, another well-known “eliminative materialist,” who insists that we need to let go of our antiquated notion that what we experience introspectively actually exists. As such, we “need to eliminate our old language of the mind” in favor of the purified language of neuroscience in which “ ‘A-delta fibers and/or C-fibers’ will replace our notions of pain; ‘iodopsins,’ our color after images; and ‘vestibular maculae,’ our feelings of acceleration and falling.”¹⁷ For eliminative materialists such as churchland, our internal experience of consciousness is irrelevant and it is a waste of time to give it any theoretical attention. What we s...