[xmca] Consciousness reframed?

[Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>]

Having had a busy week I was amazed at all the consciousness of  
consciousness trying to get raised here lately. J



I suppose I’ve acquired a habitual suspicion of abstract nouns  
presenting themselves as concrete phenomena. I don’t generally believe  
that names name things. The ways we use words are a lot messier and  
more interesting usually.



The noun consciousness is built on the adjective conscious, requiring  
us to fill in [What is conscious] for it to make sense. A conscious  
person? Then the meaning is usually just opposed to an unconscious  
person, which gives us a pretty limited basis for the meaning of  
consciousness (i.e. not being unconscious). "The Conscious Brain"  
would make a clever book title, but it seems a little weird to say  
that brains are conscious on their own (except in science fiction).  
Some people talk about the conscious mind, which seems to fit in a  
discourse that is as much Freudian as Cartesian, going along with and  
contrasting with unconscious thoughts, unconscious feelings.



The suggestion has already been made here that we ought to be  
referencing a process rather than a thing. Conscious thinking,  
conscious feeling? Or perhaps a bit more in the spirit of CHAT:  
conscious activity, conscious doing. So what makes activity or doing/ 
feeling/thinking conscious? Again we’ve heard the suggestion that it  
is symbolic mediation, semiotic doing. So we’d then have something  
like “conscious activity is acting in ways that make felt-sense to us  
in terms of symbolic/cultural codes of meaning and feeling, in advance  
of, during, and in retrospect after our doing”.



I think that’s a reasonable semiotic take on conscious activity. It  
does not however quite address either the physiological or  
phenomenological-experiential aspects.



On the physiology side, we can drop back to consciousness/ 
unconsciousness – as in "etherized upon a table". Or we can push  
forward toward some emergent feedback loop system in the brain/body  
process-complex (ala Edelman). And maybe hope to eventually link this  
to the phenomenological (by which I mean experiential, “subjective”)  
aspect as a quality-of-feeling that attaches to perceptions, actions,  
inner speech and imaginings, etc. because all this neural-bodily  
activity is accompanied by a sort of inner “echo” of that activity in  
the neuronal re-entrant loops.



But on this logic, I have to then doubt that we are normally  
experientially aware of our own awareness, that we are conscious of  
being conscious (as opposed to simply assessing that we are not  
unconscious). And if so, “consciousness” is not an experiential  
phenomenon. We are simply conscious of the “contents” of our  
“consciousness”, along with the putative special feeling from the echo  
effect.



I think that this, for me at least, relegates “consciousness” to the  
status of a fancy locution that does not really point me toward a  
phenomenon about which I could learn surprising and important things  
that were not already implicit in the discourse usage of the term. I  
suppose that is equivalent to saying I wouldn’t bother trying to make  
an empirical study of it as such. What I would study is how activity  
depends on the ways in which we mediate our doings and feelings  
semiotically and culturally. Or otherwise just how the echo effect  
emerges and why it makes us feel the way it does. It’s quite possible  
that these two research agendas don’t ever converge. Or maybe they do.



JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke





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