Chapter 1: What is the Problem?

What is the world made of?

The problem of awareness is related to a few of the well-known philosophical questions. Why do we exist? What is the world made of? Who of what am I? Do I think I am actually doing that?

Over the last century, people have only become comfortable using the term "consciousness" and it is no longer always synonymous with the mind. We know how the brain works and how things develop, how the body reacts to drugs and alcohol and sadness - and yet we are not a step further to a definition for consciousness.

What it always seems to come down to is a kind of philosophical twofold. Are we our body of our thoughts, Are we subjective of objective? We come down to a sort of dichotomy, and the question of consciousness is spiritual is simply a scientific phenomenon that we cannot yet explain.

You can think about things or so many different ways, and that is then only your subjective experience. For example, think of a dog you are stroking - the fur, the warmth that the animal radiates, etc. And then think of the same dog, but now it is waiting for you at a distance. The same animal, two very different images.

How are consciousness and philosophy related?

For years, philosophy has been arguing about the concept of consciousness, and you can roughly divide their opinion into monism and dualism. Most people therefore agree with dualism, which says that there is a distinction between your body and the "self" (also known as the mind, the consciousness). However, nobody knows for sure where this separation is and what it is. (This entire book would be a lot shorter if we knew that.)

An example of a dualist is René Descartes, the creator of the well-known "I think, so I exist." Descartes had a theory, indeed that the body and soul were made of two different materials, and that the soul was made of something that was not physically tangible. This is called substantive dualism.

The big problem with this kind of dualism is the contact between the two substances. It must be an interactive connection, but there is no point in the body that seems to be present. Descartes claimed that this occurred in the pineal gland, but that was later caused incorrectly. Most voices agree that substantive dualism therefore does not work.

Gilbert Ryle makes a point that the idea of ​​"the mind" has crept into our everyday language as something non-physical, which is not a good thing. Ryle says that behaviour and thoughts are not mysterious things that we cannot explain.

In modern description, the mind is often seen as what the brain does. Consciousness is not something that is, but what we create ourselves. This is how most psychologists currently think about the mind.

In the late 20th century (1970), Karl Popper and John Eccles brought their dualist interaction theory to light. Their theory was that the neurons in the brain were set up to absorb both impulses from the body and the self. However, they could not explain how they did it.

Benjamin Libet (2004) came up with the idea that "consciousness" is a kind of mental energy field that is in contact with the body without being present in the body. But he too could not tell how. David Chalmers came up with "naturalistic dualism" - just dualism with the emphasis on the fact that the psychological bridge between body and soul has yet to be found.

Cartesian materialism is the concept that people say they are monists, but work with dualistic principles.

There are two sides to monism - physical and mental. The physical side, the mentalist, says that body and mind are all made of the same thing. The mental side, the physicalist, says that nothing is real and that we all experience it in our own mental way (sensations). This materialistic side is often experienced as unpleasant in the discussion of consciousness because it basically removes the whole idea of ​​consciousness.

But it is not a hundred percent that materialism says that consciousness can be reduced to something that is completely physical. But it does depend on physical characteristics, and uses it to exist.

Epiphenomenalism is the idea that a mental state is produced by physical events, but has no influence on the physical world. So the world influences the mind, but the mind does not affect the world. Julien Offray de la Mettrie came with this in 1748 when he said that people are not much more than good machines.

The problem with epiphenomenalism is that if the mind has no influence on the world, then we should never be able to talk about our experiences and emotions. In addition, the idea of ​​a mental state is closer to dualism than monism.

William James came up with the idea that there is only one kind of "stuff" in the world, both of which are not physical or mental. This is called "neutral monism." He suggested not to see the world as "stuff" but as data. Then there is panpsychism, the idea that all physical things have a certain degree of consciousness, no matter how little. This is almost the opposite of neutral monism.

Where is the consciousness in psychology?

Psychology emerged as a term in the 18th century, and was slowly seen as a branch of science in the course of the 19th century. It was different from philosophy because it was based on empirical data.

The most famous book of that time is The Principles of Psychology by William James. As a monist, he immediately rejected the idea of ​​a spiritual "mind," because consciousness can disappear due to brain damage and thus reside in the brain. He came up with the idea of ​​the flow of consciousness - the idea that consciousness is moving like a kind of flowing river.

James built his reasoning on a very scientific basis of results. Psychology, thus, is therefore the study of the connection between physical stimuli and sensations that are experienced.

In the same period there was Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany. He did studies on the speed of an impulse. This was also called the speed of thought. He was also very interested in optical illusions and came up with the idea that what we see is not always an accurate representation, but that it is influenced by expectations and experiences.

Helmholtz's work led to the emergence of phenomenology, the idea of ​​considering our subjective experiences as the most important. Edmund Husserl suggested that we use the things we have through experience rather than the real physical things. (I don't really get it either).

Another way to study the subjective experience is introspection; self-observation. Wilhelm Wundt worked with this in 1879, and with his many experiments is also called the father of experimental psychology. He believed that the study of something had to be systematic and strict and therefore trained people specifically to properly report their own experiences.

Wundt thought there were two things in the brain; sensory experiences and emotional experiences. Awareness depended on a combination between the two. He also looked at atoms and particles as a statement of consciousness that William James did not agree with at all.

Because both of these streams had hum issues, it was behaviourism that became popular in Europe and the USA. John Watson was the first to come up with it and makes the point that psychology is an experimental, objective science that requires no introspection. With that, consciousness was therefore not important, because it was about measuring behaviour so accurately. At one point the whole word "consciousness" almost became a sort of taboo and it was half a century of very limited study of psychology.

Even when the support of behaviourism became less in the 60s, the word remained. During the 1970s, on the other hand, the study of the mind and the state of mind by religion, alcohol, drugs, etc. became interesting and the word came back slowly.

The 50s to 90s are seen as the "first generation" of cognitive science. The rise of technology and therefore the concept of AI, for example, has helped get the current second generation going. People like Richard Gregory continued to build on Helmholtz's ideas and came up with the concept that our perception of the world is a combination between what we experience and what the brain fills in itself.

But even now we still have no certain idea of ​​what consciousness is. In the book, consciousness will be used as the denominator for subjective experiences.

What is ‘the gap’?

It seems that "consciousness" is the only mystery that our psyche still has. The cause of this mystery comes from a gap in history - behaviourism.

For William James, for example, it was an impossible idea that consciousness had nothing to do with the experience of our world. But then came behaviourism, which thought that consciousness was something that we didn't have to worry about and there was no progress in researching consciousness. It was not until 1994 that Chalmers published a paper at the very first conference for consciousness, saying that although we could explain simple problems, such as sleep cycles, the hard problems, such as how consciousness is possible, are almost unsolvable through decades lack of research.

Exercises

1.1. For this exercise, ask yourself as often as you succeed; "Am I aware, right now,"? There is no right or wrong about this question, no definitive answer, but you will become more aware of your own thoughts and consciousness.