What is "consciousness?"
“What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else.” Hannah Arendt [1906-1975]
“What is consciousness?” The Latin term from which we have the word “consciousness” is conscientia, meaning “joint or shared knowledge”
“Conscience” is obviously our English cognate for that Latin word and shares the sense of shared understanding, that is, of what we also typically call “common sense”
Our use of “consciousness,” however, shifted long ago from the notion of shared experience to that of “personal awareness”
“Consciousness,” in other words, has come to mean something individual; that is, it is taken to mean something close to self: the quality that distinguishes my experience from “yours” or that of any other person
That’s why questions about consciousness are most often framed in terms of “mind;” the two have become more or less interchangeable in ordinary language
It’s also arguably one of the oldest philosophical questions; (the other is “what is reality?”)
So for a very long time now the question has been taken to imply that there some sort of thing to be identified or discovered within me
This presumption—that consciousness or mind must be a distinct thing—has resulted in a great many mistakes about human being
These mistakes take the form of dualisms: body/mind; nature/spirit; reality/appearance, subject/object, and so on
All these dualisms are mistakes, but at the same time they are “natural” errors: that is, they arise from the fact that being human introduces distinctions into the world
So let’s start answering the question about consciousness in terms of our experience
The first feature of the experience of consciousness is difference
The ancient Hebrew creation myths preserved in the first three chapters of the “Mosaic Code”—the first part of what Christians call “the Bible”—tell a revealing story about the origins of difference
You will recall that the deity, having formed the world in section 1, turns in section 2 to the act of forming a human from dirt: the name Adam is a rendering of the Hebrew hadamah, which means “earth” or “soil”
The creator deity—deciding that the human “needs a companion”—takes a startling step: all the other animals are paraded before the human, both for him to name and from which to choose a companion!
The point to notice here is that the creator is ignorant: from the standpoint of creation there is no difference between the animals and the human
The creator does agree, however, to make a “suitable companion” for the man
Then, the story goes, both the man and the woman are warned not to eat “the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and bad;” in other words, they are warned not to learn to make distinctions
Leaving aside the contradictions that have already appeared in this story, what I want to emphasize is that—in the course of it—the man and the woman become human
That is, they become able to make distinctions; when they talk about the meaning of the prohibiton, they decide to eat the fruit of the tree
It is with this act, we learn, that all differences emerge: not just between “good and bad” but between “naked” and “clothed”
So we learn that this ability to decide distinguishes the human: once one distinction has been made, all become possible
This is the central feature of consciousness: we are able both to take action and to be aware of our actions
The text of Genesis confirms this account: when the man is given a choice amongst the animals of creation, he names them!
This act of distinguishing between things is something the creator does not do: it is the first act of consciousness
I also like to call this ability “reflexive,” in the sense that we are able both to do and to reflect upon what we do
Yet it remains a puzzle how this capacity appeared in the evolution of the brain
All brains in the animal world have left and right lobes; many functions are shared by both lobes, but most animal functions are divided between the two halves of the brain
But we are unable to resolve the question of “where” and how human consciousness—with it’s unique reflexive power—arises in the brain
This puzzle does not have to be clarified, however, in order to perceive our experience of reflexivity
Another term for this reflexive power is “self-consciousness;” only humans are capable of being aware of themselves
It is because of this that we are conscious of life as a process from birth to death
So, to the “dualisms” I mentioned earlier we can now add “past” and “future”
I called these dualisms “mistakes” because they are not features of the world, they are introduced into the world—into our experience—by the capacity of consciousness to draw distinctions
Later in the story that opens the Genesis creation myth, the creator is looking for the man and woman, who are hiding; when the man emerges he tells the creator “I hid because I was naked.” (My young children always delighted in this example of the “self-incriminating reply!”)
The deity replies: “Who told you you were naked?”
So it is that on account of this power to make distinctions the humans are “cursed” to live in the world as we experience it: distinguished by birth and death, work and rest, pleasure and pain, and so on
Not mentioned in this catalog are some of the central powers of consciousness: memory, imagination, and knowledge
(The first two of these create the illusion of past and future; this will be the topic for another essay); knowing is the most creative of the powers of human consciousness
The central point is that “knowing” is possible because of the power of consciousness to introduce distinctions into experience
In other words, we are able to know because we are able to detemine what there “is” to know
This conclusion clashes with the popular sense that we are “observers” of a world that is somehow “out there” and also able to “discover” the laws which govern it
Since ancient times people—most of our greatest thinkers among them—have been convinced of this duality: mind and world
What I am pointing out is that there is no “world” without mind (or consciousness)
Of course, it doesn’t seem that way; we seem to experience the world out there when we open our eyes
But we’re wrong about this appearance, just as we eventually found that the sun only seems to “rise” each day, when in fact the earth is rotating with us on its surface
Of course, there exist an enormous range of processes of which we ourselves are a part; we don’t create these processes—gravitational, chemical, subatomic, and so on—but we do introduce distinctions between them
Thus we are able to determine the relations between these distinctions; we can know the numerical, physical, chemical, and all the other interactions, once again, because human consciousness creates these distinctions
For example, we came to know the earth is a sphere by noticing that ships heading away from shore gradually disappear over the horizon
I took the photo at the top of this essay in one of the many limestone caves in France to which humans retreated to survive the ice age some 12,000 years ago
I was charmed and moved, not only by the assertion made by that ancient artist that “I was here,” but also by the fact that the image evidently records some injuries to the fingers of the person whose hand is outlined on the wall
In other words, the artist created a record of having lived
This might be said to be the ultimate power of consciousness…