this is part of what makes it so elusive. It is a subjective phenomenon.
Someone has it. In a deep and indisputable way, your inner world truly
is not just someone’s inner world but your inner world—a private realm
of experience that only you have direct access to.
The conscious mind is not a public object—or such is the orthodox
view, which may yet be overthrown by the Consciousness Revolution.
In any event, the orthodox view holds that scientific research can be
conducted only on objects exhibiting properties that are, at least in
principle, observable to all of us. Green No. 24 is not. Neither is the distinct
sensory quality of the scent of mixed amber and sandalwood, nor
is your empathic experience of understanding the emotions of another
human being when you see him in tears. Brain states, on the other
hand, are observable. Brain states also clearly have what philosophers call representational content. There are receptive fields for the various
sensory stimuli. We know where emotional content originates, and we
have good candidates for the seat of episodic memory in the brain, and
so on.
Conscious experience has content, too—phenomenal content—and I
touched upon it in the Introduction: Its phenomenal content is its subjective
character—how an experience privately and inwardly feels to
you, what it is like to have it. But this particular content, it seems, is accessible
only to a single person—you, the experiencing subject. And
who is that?
To form a successful theory of consciousness, we must match firstperson
phenomenal content to third-person brain content. We must
somehow reconcile the inner perspective of the experiencing self with
the outside perspective of science. And there will always be many of us
who intuitively think this can never be done. Many people think consciousness
is ontologically irreducible (as philosophers say), because
first-person facts cannot be reduced to third-person facts. It is more
likely, however, that consciousness is epistemically irreducible (as
philosophers say). The idea is simple: One reality, one kind of fact, but
two kinds of knowledge: first-person knowledge and third-person
knowledge. Even though consciousness is a physical process, these two
different forms of knowing can never be conflated. Knowing every last
thing about a person’s brain states will never allow us to know what they
are like for the person herself. But the concept of a first-person perspective
turns out to be vague the moment we take a close look at it. What is
this mysterious first person? What does the word “I” refer to? If not simply
to the speaker, does it refer to anything in the known world at all? Is
the existence of an experiencing self a necessary component of consciousness?
I don’t think it is—for one thing, because there seem to be
“self-less” forms of conscious experience. In certain severe psychiatric
disorders, such as Cotard’s syndrome, patients sometimes stop using
the first-person pronoun and, moreover, claim that they do not really
exist. M. David Enoch and William Trethowan have described such
cases in their book Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes: “Subsequently the subject may proceed to deny her very existence, even dispensing altogether
with the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’. One patient even
called herself ‘Madam Zero’ in order to emphasize her non-existence.
One [patient] said, referring to herself, ‘It’s no use. Wrap it up and throw
“it” in the dustbin’.”Mystics of all cultures and all times have reported deep spiritual experiences
in which no “self” was present, and some of them, too,
stopped using the pronoun “I.” Indeed, many of the simple organisms on
this planet may have a consciousness tunnel with nobody living in it.
Perhaps some of them have only a consciousness “bubble” instead of a
tunnel, because, together with the self, awareness of past or future disappears
as well.
Note that up to now, in defining the problems for a grand unified
theory of consciousness, we have assumed only a minimalist notion:
the appearance of a world. But as you are reading these sentences, not
only is the light on but there is also somebody home. Human consciousness
is characterized by various forms of inwardness, all of which
influence one another: First, it is an internal process in the nervous system;
second, it creates the experience of being in a world; third, the virtual
window of presence gives us temporal internality, a Now. But the
deepest form of inwardness was the creation of an internal self/world
border.
In evolution, this process started physically, with the development of
cell membranes and an immune system to define which cells in one’s
body were to be treated as one’s own and which were intruders. Billions
of years later, nervous systems were able to represent this
self/world distinction on a higher level—for instance, as body boundaries
delineated by an integrated but as yet unconscious body schema.
Conscious experience then elevated this fundamental strategy of partitioning
reality to a previously unknown level of complexity and intelligence.
The phenomenal self was born, and the conscious experience of
being someone gradually emerged. A self-model, an inner image of the
organism as a whole, was built into the world-model, and this is how the
consciously experienced first-person perspective developed. How to comprehend subjectivity is the deepest puzzle in consciousness
research. In order to overcome it, we must understand how the
conscious self was born into the tunnel, how nature managed to evolve a
centered model of reality, creating inner worlds that not only appear but
that appear to someone. We must understand how the consciousness
tunnel turned into an Ego Tunnel.
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