All this shows that “consciousness” does not refer to any single idea or thing, but that we use it as a suitcase-word for a great many different activities.
§4-2. Unpacking the Suitcase of Consciousness
Aaron Sloman: “It is not worth asking how to define consciousness, how to explain it, how it evolved, what its function is, etc., because there’s no one thing for which all the answers would be the same. Instead, we have many sub-capabilities, for which the answers are different: e.g. different kinds of perception, learning, knowledge, attention control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc.”[53]
To see the variety of what human minds do, consider this fragment of everyday thinking.
Joan is part way across the street on the way to deliver her finished report. While thinking about what to say at the meeting, she hears a sound and turns her head —and sees a quickly oncoming car. Uncertain whether to cross or retreat, but uneasy about arriving late, she decides to sprint across the road. She later remembers her injured knee and reflects upon her impulsive decision. “If my knee had failed, I could have been killed. Then what would my friends have thought of me?”
It might seem natural to ask, “How conscious was Joan of what she did?” But rather than dwell on that ‘consciousness’ word, let’s look at a few of the things that Joan “did.”
Reaction: Joan reacted quickly to that sound.
Identification: She recognized it as being a sound.
Characterization: She classified it as the sound of a car.
Attention: She noticed certain things rather than others.
Imagining: She envisioned two or more possible futures.
Indecision: She wondered whether to cross or retreat.
Decision: She chose one of several alternative actions.
Recollection: She retrieved descriptions of prior events.
Reconsideration: Later she reconsidered this choice.
Selection: She selected a way to choose among options.
Apprehension: She was uneasy about arriving late.
Planning: She constructed a multi-step action-plan.
Embodiment: She tried to describe her body’s condition.
Emotion: She changed major parts of her mental state.
Representation: She interconnected a set of descriptions.
Language: She constructed several verbal expressions.
Narration: She heard them as dialogs in her mind.
Anticipation: She expected certain future condition.
Intention: She changed some of her goals’ priorities.
Reasoning: She made various kinds of inferences.
Reflection: She thought about what she’s recently done.
Self-Reflection: She reflected on her recent thoughts.
Empathy: She imagined other persons’ thoughts.
Moral Reflection: She evaluated what she has done.
Self-Imaging: She made and used models of herself.
Self-Awareness: She characterized her mental condition.
Sense of Identity: She regarded herself as an entity.
That’s only the start of a much longer list of aspects of how we feel and think—and if we want to understand how our minds work, we’ll need explanations for all of them. To do this, we’ll have to take each one apart, to account for the details of how they each work. Then each reader can decide which ones should, or should not be regarded as aspects of ‘consciousness.’
4-2.1. Suitcase words in Psychology
Holist: Yet after you analyze all those parts, you will still be obliged to explain how they all unite to produce the streams of consciousness that emerge from them. So, then you still will need some words to describe that entire phenomenon.
Why did our language come to include such terms as ‘awareness,’ ‘perception,’ ‘consciousness,’ every one of which condenses many different processes?
Psychologist: Such self-words are useful in everyday social life because they help us to communicate—both with our friends and with ourselves. For, because we all share the same kinds of jumbled ideas, we can pack them into vague suitcase-terms that seem easy for us to understand.
Ethicist: We need them also to support our principle of responsibility and discipline. Our legal and ethical principles are largely based on the idea that we ought to punish or reward only actions that are ‘intentional’—that is, are based on having been planned in advance, with predictions about their consequences.
Psychiatrist: Perhaps we use those suitcase terms to keep ourselves from asking too much about how our minds control themselves, and what underlies the decisions we make. Perhaps we use words like “consciousness” to help us suppress all those questions all at once—by suggesting that all of them are just a single big Mystery.
Student: If “consciousness” is just a suitcase word, what makes it seem so clear to us that we actually possess such a thing? If such terms keep shifting their meanings, why doesn’t this become evident whenever we start to think about them?
That could be because no part of a mind can ‘see’ much of what the rest of that mind does. A typical resource inside a brain accomplishes its jobs internally, in ways that other resources cannot perceive. Also, when any resource probes into another, that very act may change the other’s state—and thus scramble the very evidence it would need to recognize what’s happening. These could partly account for Hume’s complaint that our minds lack good ways to inspect themselves.
David Hume: “The motion of our body follows upon the command of our will. Of this we are every moment conscious. But the means, by which this is effected; the energy, by which the will performs so extraordinary an operation; of this we are so far from being immediately conscious, that it must for ever escape our most diligent enquiry.”[54]
Hume assumes that we could never develop more powerful ways to inspect ourselves—but today we have new image-machines that show more of what happens inside our brains. For example, now we can detect activities that start before our limbs begin to move.
Dualist philosopher: Still, those instruments will eventually fail, because you can measure a brain but not an idea. Some creatures are conscious, while others are not—and consciousness is a subjective thing that can’t be explained in physical terms.