Abstract
This book addresses fundamental issues regarding the nature of the most intractable kind of consciousness called ‘immediate awareness’. It also addresses the issue of whether or not immediate awareness, when it is found within the structures of knowing how, is computable [decidable] on the standard von Neumann computer. The term ‘immediate’ (sometimes the term ‘direct’ is used) is not intended to mean meaningless awareness, as some recent theorists assume.2 Nor does immediate awareness mean “awareness that,” “conscious awareness that” or “consciousness that” such and such is the case, where a subject who is aware must know that they are aware in the sense of stating or otherwise indicating in language that they are aware. Nor does it mean that their awareness is necessarily accurate in some sense. Immediate awareness in the sense I am focusing upon here does not require that the one who is aware must be able to comment or reflect upon it or be right about it. Thus immediate awareness here also does not refer to “self-awareness,” as some have recently defined the term ‘consciousness’ or ‘conscious awareness’. Nonetheless, the sense of immediate awareness of concern here is cognitive; it is the most fundamental and pervasive faculty of human knowing underlying all natural intelligence.
“The pursuance of safe research will impoverish us all.”1
Ian Stewart
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References
Ian Stewart, “What Mathematics is For,” in Nature’s Numbers: The Unreal Reality ofMathematical Imagination, Basic Books, 1995, p.29.
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, New York, Touchstone, 1994, p. 33.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volumes I and II, 1890, London, Macmillan.
Note those philosophers who now want to know what kind of “thing” consciousness is, such as Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, 1996;
and Block, “On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 18, 1995, pp. 227–287.
There are very serious epistemological differences between James and Russell in their respective construals of knowledge by acquaintance. In essence, Russell’s construal (at least in his 1913 theory of knowledge manuscript) permits nonpropositional immediate awareness whereas James’ does not. See references to James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Harvard University Press, 1976 and Russell’s Theory of Knowledge, The 1913 Manuscript, Elizabeth Ramsden Eames, (ed.), Routledge, 1984.
See Block, 1995. Block distinguishes between what he calls phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, the latter representable in “that clauses”. Though I agree that there is such a distinction to be made, I do not believe he has made it. Calling the more intractable kind of consciousness phenomenal already begs certain questions regarding the nature of the objects of that consciousness as well as the means of being conscious of them. The term ‘phenomenal’ refers to objects of the senses, that is things one is conscious of through the senses, as opposed to objects of thought or immediate awareness [or some, such as Penrose, say intuition]. Sorting the two [major] kinds of consciousness the way Block does may show obeisance to a prevalent nominalist cum empiricist tradition, but begging questions does not provide fundamental analysis.
William James, “Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” Mind, 9, January, 1884, pp. 1–26.
The term ‘public’ here is intended to include whatever is operationally definable.
Some recent writers on consciousness limit the term ‘experience’ to sense experience.
Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 1994.
See, for example, Penrose’s descriptions of the problem he is addressing in The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, 1989, Oxford University Press, p. 10; also in relevant sections of his Shadows of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 1994, for example, p. 45. Penrose consistently confuses these kinds of knowing and recognizes only knowledge that problems with implied reductions of knowing how and knowing the unique to knowledge that.
The absence of ontological analysis is noticeable, for example, in the works of Block, “On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 18, pp. 227–287, 1995. Ontological analysis addresses the most fundamental kinds of things, objects, that exist.
As will become clear, manner of a performance is not to be construed as style of performance. Styles may be arbitrary, but as I define it, manner of performance (following extensive research on intelligent performances) is not. Precisely defined in terms of timing and oscillation of movements, manner is indicative of knowing how. Knowing how is knowing where, when, what, in what way, and in what right proportion to do a thing.
Though the position I argue for is essentially realist and contrary to traditional classical Cartesianism, I prefer to omit discussion of “isms” as far as possible in this study and simply attend to the inquiry at hand.
See Louis P. Pojman, What Can We Know, An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, Belmont, Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1995. This work completely ignores knowing how.
Peter Geach, Mental Acts: Their Content and their Objects, New York, Humanities Press, 1957. Geach referenced this aphorism as follows: “No experiment can either justify or straighten out a confusion of thought; if we are in a muddle when we design an experiment, it is only to be expected that [if] we should ask Nature cross questions...she return crooked answers.”
If one does not accept the existence of propositions, then the emphasis is on sentences or statements.
Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript, 1984, p. 51 [emphasis is mine].
For a statement of James’ theory of neutral monism, see William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Longmans, 1912, especially the essay, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that addresses the nature of human knowledge, knowing, and belief. This includes an examination of the nature of evidence and justification for beliefs.
See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and ItsChallenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, 1998.
Also see Bernard J. Baars, A CognitiveTheory of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 1998.
See F. Crick, and C. Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness,” Seminarsin the Neurosciences, 1990, Vol. 2, pp. 263–275 and “The Problem of Consciousness,” in Scientific American, Volume 267, number 110, 1992.
As an example of the effort to map the binding problem to neurological correlates, see: Andreas K. Engel and Wolf Singer, “Temporal binding and the neural correlates of sensory awareness” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 5, no. 1, 2001, pp. 16–25.
Also see: Chris Frith, Richard Perry and Erik Lumer, “The neural correlates of conscious experience: an experimental framework,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 3, no. 3, 1999, pp. 105–114.
This view is also based on an uncritical acceptance of what is called the Gradualist Thesis regarding language, originally stated by Quine [1951] in the “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Gradualism basically states that there is no clear demarcation between formal (constructed) languages and natural languages. For many good reasons, there are powerful arguments against this thesis, some of which I touch upon in the following chapters.
This thesis has been substantially supported by empirical and theoretical research on the nature of intelligence by Howard Gardner and others associated with the Harvard Project Zero Multiple Intelligence Theory. See Gardner references.
See George Maccia, 1989 [my emphasis].
Timing is inextricably a part of any intentional doing which is manifested in temporal sequences, as knowing how clearly is. Representing this computationally presents serious problems. See Jeffrey Elman, 1990.
Frederic C. S. Bartlett, Thinking, New York, Basic Books, 1958.
See Gary Stix, “Boot Camp for Surgeons,” in Scientific American, September 1995, p. 24.
See Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science, 1985; Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, 1993.
See especially M. Estep, 1984.
To fully cover the subject of indexicality would require an entire book of its own. Due to the complexity of the subject, I cannot address the indexical function [within sign relations] as thoroughly and completely in this work as the subject warrants. However, see my 1993a and the Castaneda references to indexicality. Contemporary writers on the subject of consciousness, such as Crick, confuse the concept sign with the concept symbol, thus reinforcing faulty representational theories of the mind. I use the concept sign to refer to the category of all indexicals, more or less following Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958. Thus, signs or indexicals include symbols, ikons (or images), and actions, including performances. This is necessary so as to theoretically capture the broader scope of all knowing, including all signs which disclose our knowing, and that which may be presented as well as represented.
However, some interesting work on gesture recognition in the design of computer software is underway which I will address later in this book.
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 57–58.
William James, “Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” Mind, 9, January, 1884, pp. 1–26. Also note the distinction between selecting and sorting objects. To select does not imply the existence of a class; to sort does imply the existence of a class of objects.
See the American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993, emphasis mine.
For an interesting article touching on this subject, see Alan Hausman and Tom Foster, “Is Everything a Class?” in Philosophical Studies, Vol. 32, 1977, pp. 371–376.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1961.
See David Kaplan, “Demonstratives,” in Themes From Kaplan, Joseph Almog, John Perry, Howard Wettstein, eds, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.
Also John Perry’s “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” in NOUS, 13, 1979, pp. 3–21.
See the Appendix on Proper Names.
See the Introduction to the MIT Edition of What Computers Still Can’t Do, pp. xxxviii-xxxix, emphasis mine.
Again, manner of a performance is not to be construed as style of performance.
Stuart Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,” in Scientific American, Volume 265, No. 2, August, 1991; and
Stuart Kauffman, Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Also see the latest research underway in DNA computing by Leonard Adleman and Richard J. Lipton reported in “A Boom in Plans For DNA Computing” and “DNA Solution for Hard Computational Problems,” Science, Vol. 268, 28 April 1995, pp. 498–499 and pp. 542–545 respectively.
Miguel A. Nicolelis, Luiz A. Baccala, Rick CS. Lin, John K. Chapin, “Sensorimotor Encoding by Synchronous Neural Ensemble Activity at Multiple Levels of the Somatosensory System,” Science, Volume 268, 2 June, 1995, pp. 1353–1358.
See: Kandel, E.R. and J.H. Schwartz (1991). Principles of Neural Science, 3rd edition, New York: Elsevier.
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Estep, M. (2003). The Problem of Immediate Awareness. In: A Theory of Immediate Awareness. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0183-9_1
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