Re: [xmca] Consciousness

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Another cent (it's in my pocket, I swear!) on Cs.  I've been taking  
another look at the section in Crisis where LSV is getting to the  
pinnacle of his argument against mind/matter dualism in psychology.  
One of my frustrations with Lenin is the way he throws around the word  
"reflection." I've grumbled about this here before, and he does it a  
lot in the passage in MEC that Andy linked us to recently.

<http://marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two4.htm>

This passage is full of phrases such as the claim that matter is  
"copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing  
independently of them"; that we should consider "sensations as a true  
copy of this objective reality," and so on. (True copy? This is a  
judgment that requires adopting what Andy is calling a God's eye  
position, isn't it?)

LSV uses the term "reflection" at times as well (driving me to  
distraction). But towards the end of Crisis he writes a very  
interesting analysis of this metaphor, one that grants it both a  
positive and a negative side. I've copied the passage below (my PDF of  
Crisis doesn't have page numbers, but this section is not hard to find).

LSV's argument, on my reading, is that we can think of Cs as being  
like reflection in a mirror - but only if we think about this in the  
correct way. We should think of Cs as a real (material) process,  
analogous to the rays of light which bounce of the mirror. A real  
object is reflected in a mirror when light rays (also real) bounce off  
its surface. There appears to be an image 'in' the mirror, but this is  
merely an illusion. Science does not study appearances, it studies  
realities, though it can then use these to *explain* appearances.  In  
the mirror-reflection metaphor for Cs, what is analogous to the image  
'in' the mirror is "the subjective" - the (illusory) sense one has  
that consciousness is mine alone, subjective, personal, internal and  
mental. This subjectivity, LSV proposes, is merely an appearance. Cs,  
in contrast, is a real process that encounters real objects. Just as  
the light rays bounce of the mirror to create the illusion of a second  
table 'in the mirror', Cs engages objects and in doing so gives rise  
to the illusion of a subjective experience: that there is a second  
table 'in the mind.' If Cs 'reflects' real objects in the world, it is  
as a real process itself. In doing so, it produces a phantom, a  
'subjective object' that seems to be in some 'inner' space.

Pittsburgh is in virtual lock-down today for the G-20 meetings, and  
Duquesne, located at the edge of downtown, has cancelled classes, sent  
the faculty home and for all I know locked the students in their dorm  
rooms. It seems an over reaction to me, but we shall see. Deprived of  
my classes I'm at home, catching up on reading, including Merlin  
Donald's 'Origins of the Modern Mind.' I just want to steal two  
phrases from this book, because I think they help in the context of  
this discussion. Donald writes of modern humans as having "a hybrid  
mind," that is part person, part social, part mechanical. And he  
writes of the "cognitive architecture" we have today, which "is a  
hybrid structure of great internal and external complexity." Andy has  
said that "What is given to you is consciousness." I think this is  
untrue in two respects. First, Cs is not *all* that each of us is  
given. We are also given a body, honed over eons of evolutions, and we  
are given a culture, honed over thousands of years. But, second, Cs is  
*not* given to each of, at least individually. Cs is hybrid, in  
Donald's phrase; it is, to use Marx's phrase, "the general or common  
imagination" of humans together in a form of life. Each of us has the  
*illusion* that Cs is something subjective and personal, 'inside' us  
in some way (though as soon as we start to think about this it becomes  
completely mysterious), but this is only how it *appears.* Cs is in  
reality a collective material, human, and mechanical, activity.

Martin


========
"Let us compare consciousness, as is often done, with a mirror image.  
Let the
object A be reflected in the mirror as a. Naturally, it would be false  
to say that
a in itself is as real as A. It is real *in another way*. A table and  
its reflection in
the mirror are not equally real, but real in a different way. The  
reflection as
reflection, as an image of the table, as a second table in the mirror  
is not real,
it is a phantom. But the reflection of the table as the refraction of  
light beams
on the mirror surface ? isn?t that a thing which is equally material  
and real as
the table? Everything else would be a miracle. Then we might say:  
there exist
things (a table) and their phantoms (the reflection). But only things  
exist ?
(the table) and the reflection of light upon the surface. The phantoms  
are just
*apparent* relations between the things. That is why no science of  
mirror
phantoms is possible. But this does not mean that we will never be  
able to
explain the reflection, the phantom. When we know the *thing* and the  
*laws of
reflection of light*, we can always explain, predict, elicit, and  
change the
phantom. And this is what persons with mirrors do. They study not mirror
reflections but the movement of light beams, and explain the  
reflection. A
science about mirror phantoms is impossible, but the theory of light  
and the
things which cast and reflect it fully explain these ?phantoms.?

It is the same in psychology: the subjective itself, as a phantom,  
must be
understood as a consequence, as a result, as a godsend of two objective
processes. Like the enigma of the mirror, the enigma of the mind is  
not solved
by studying phantoms, but by studying the two series of objective  
processes
from the cooperation of which the phantoms as apparent reflections of  
one
thing in the other arise. In itself the appearance does not exist."


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