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What Is It Like To BeUnconscious?
Gary Williams
LSUgarystevenwilliams@gmail.com philosophyandpsychology.comIn this paper I want to respond to Ned Block’s claim that it is simply “ridiculous” to suppose thatconsciousness is a cultural construction based on language. In so doing, I will argue that adistinction can be made between what-it’s-like to be a nonhuman animal and the consciousnessof average, adult humans. In accordance with this distinction, I will argue that Block is wrong todismiss social constructivist theories of consciousness on account of it being simply “ludicrous”that conscious experience is anything but a basic biological feature of our animal heritage,characterized by sensory experience, having slowly evolved over millions of years. By defendingsocial constructivism in terms of both Julian Jaynes’s externalist behaviorism and J.J. Gibson’secological psychology, I will claim that a distinction can be made between the basic biologicalexperience of nonhuman animals and the consciousness that constitutes the experience of anaverage human adult. In other words, this paper will attempt to show that consciousness is notnecessary for perception.
2
The Reactive Mind
To begin, I concur with Ned Block (1995), Thomas Nagel (1974), and many other theorists who claim that all animals have a “what-it’s-like” when perceiving the world. That is, Iagree that there is “something it is like” for bats to perceive the world just as there is “somethingit is like” for dolphins, bats, and humans to perceive the world. It is this mysterious sense of “what-it’s-likeness” that has theorists baffled in coming to terms with “phenomenalconsciousness”. Moreover, to equate phenomenal consciousness with this “what-it’s-like” is practically synonymous with saying that phenomenal-consciousness is simply experience itself, particularly in respect to sensory perception. However, the central claim of this paper will be thatthe basic biological experience of perceiving the world does not deserve the title “conscious”.This is not to belittle the dazzlingly rich experience enjoyed by nonhuman animals. Nor is it todeny that nonhuman animals have a unique, bodily “perspective” on the world. To deny
conscious
experience to nonhuman animals when they perceive the world is simply to claim thatthe possession of consciously accessible and subjectively internalized qualitative states is not the
sine qua non
of biological organisms when perceiving the world. As J.J. Gibson put it,Perceiving is an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of hisconsciousness. It is a keeping-in-touch with the world,
an experiencing of things rather than having of experiences.
It involves awareness-of instead of just awareness. It may beawareness of something in the environment or something in the observer or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware. (Gibson,1979, p. 239, emphasis added)It is helpful to think of this claim in terms of the epistemological distinction betweeninternalist and externalist theories of perception, that is, between internal constructivism anddirect or “naïve” realism. On my reading of
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
3
the Bicameral Mind
, Julian Jaynes was a thorough going nonrepresentational realist about perception. Moreover, he argued for a strict behaviorism in regards to the psychologicalinterpretation of average animal cognition (Jaynes, 1986c, p. 4). By explicating internalist andexternalist theories of perception in terms of Gibsonian ecological psychology, I hope todemonstrate the conceptual foundations for Jaynesian behaviorism in regards to howconsciousness could possibly be a “social construction”. Seeing how Jaynes’ understood the perceptual processes of nonhuman animals is critical for making sense of his claims about humanconsciousness being constructed through a social-linguistic scaffolding.Let us begin our inquiry with a discussion of internalist theories of perception. On theinternalist (i.e. constructivist) account, one does not perceive the world directly. Instead, perception is quintessentially an awareness of nerve states as they are agitated at receptor sites bythe physical world external to the body. Under this framework, it is supposed that the retina isdirectly sensed rather than the public world itself and subsequently, the quality of sensation issimply the quality of receptor sites being agitated. This perspective has of course generated anumber of epistemological and metaphysical difficulties through the Western philosophicaltradition. Locke said that the mind is forever trapped behind a veil of Ideas; Kant proclaimedthat we constitutionally lack access to the noumenal reality, etc. As Gibson says, discussing suchan internalist, representation centered theory, “The Causes of the excitation of our nerves…areforever hidden from us. We have only the deliverances of our senses to go by, and we areimprisoned within the limitations of the senses. We have to
deduce
the causes of our sensations,as Helmholtz put it, for we cannot
detect
them” (1966, p. 38).Internalist, sensation based approaches to perception dominate the epistemologicalfoundations of contemporary perceptual research and provide thinkers like Block with a certainset of unexamined assumptions regarding the fundamental constitution of visual perception.
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