Tuesday, 20 June 2017
If you can only know objectivities, or better, if whatever you know is necessarily objective, then how can you know that there is consciousness, as something essentially non-objective? This is hard to express clearly. The content of the intentional acts that make up the stream of experience is objective, it is the very definition of objective. This covers everything that can be felt, perceived or thought, so where is the evidence for subjectivity? What form could it possibly take? If you speak of consciousness and mean only various objective correlations, such as might be meant by a brain scientist, then consciousness is only a special sort of phenomenal object, no different in principle from any other. It may be called emergent, but whatever it is it is out there, part of the furniture of the world. Speaking from the point of view of the experiencer, this reduction seems to betray the reality. When you intend your own consciousness you refer to something known directly, something that feels quite different from an idea or a perception. You know yourself as doing it, or being it in a special way. That special way must be an indispensible component of the experience, but not the object of the experience. As if your knowledge that 'this is consciousness' involves something off to the side of the intentionality. There still must be a kind of operation that goes from the awareness of the object to the awareness of the awareness. This is not a logical operation but has at least the same force. Perhaps the cogito is a way of trying to map it onto logic. It is as if a thing, any thing, is connected to something that is not a thing. But how is this possible? Surely we can investigate the thing and find this umbilicus concealed in a blindspot, grab onto it and follow it to its lair.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.