Self- Knowledge

Knowledge expressed using “I” is different from knowledge expressed using other modes of reference (names, descriptions, demonstratives). I know that I wrote The Subjective View and I also know that Colin McGinn wrote The Subjective View, but these are different pieces of knowledge despite the identity of reference. This is made vivid in amnesia cases: I might forget that I wrote that book while coming to learn that someone called “Colin McGinn” wrote it—I don’t know I am the author though I know who the author is (that McGinn fellow). I also might know that I did something and not know that Colin McGinn did, because I have forgotten who I am and what my name is. Thus “I am Colin McGinn” is an informative statement. But how exactly do the two pieces of knowledge differ—what makes them different? What is distinctive about first-person knowledge? Evidently I can acquire knowledge of myself expressible using “I”, but what is the specific nature of such knowledge—what makes it stand out from other sorts of knowledge of objects?

One possible response is that it is not unique but merely a special case of an informative identity statement. It is similarly true that “Hesperus is a planet” and “Phosphorus is a planet” express different propositions, but there is nothing special about either proposition. There are simply two modes of presentation associated with the two names, so knowledge of one doesn’t imply knowledge of the other. Likewise, it may be said, “I” in my mouth expresses a different mode of presentation from “Colin McGinn”: that is what the difference consists in. But this response misses an important point, namely that I could also not know a proposition that refers to me by a different name (or description or demonstrative). But that difference is not the same difference as the difference between my name and “I”: the former could just consist in a different description being true of me, while the latter does not. The proposal blithely employs the notion of a mode of presentation without saying what it consists in for my use of “I”, but that is empty unless something is said to explain what this mode of presentation might be. In reply to this objection it may be offered that the difference is that “I” is an indexical while proper names are not: that is how the two propositions differ (now pick your favorite theory of indexicals). But again this conflates cases, since “you” and “he” are also indexical but don’t track what is special about first-person knowledge. I might also think that he wrote The Subjective View while seeing myself in a mirror without realizing it, but this again doesn’t give me the knowledge that I wrote that book. It is something about first-person knowledge in particular that is special not indexical knowledge in general or merely the possibility of more than one name for the same object. We can’t assimilate the case to a wider phenomenon; we need to identify what it is specifically about first-person knowledge that makes it different from other sorts of knowledge of objects. When I know a fact about myself that I express using “I” how does this differ from knowing the same fact about myself without using “I”?

I think that to answer this question we need to dig deep, metaphysically and epistemologically; it is not a merely linguistic phenomenon that we are concerned to understand. The answer I want to propose is not easy to grasp and I may have trouble explaining it. The basic thought is that we may not have the sort of knowledge of ourselves that we think we have—there is something peculiarly problematic about such knowledge. I don’t really know that I wrote The Subjective View, even though I know quite well that Colin McGinn wrote it. This is because there is a gap between my knowledge of myself qua myself and my knowledge of the person known as Colin McGinn. I can coherently say to myself, “I know that CMG did such and such, but I’m not sure that I ever did such and such, because I’m not sure that the person so named is really me”. I think he is, but the question admits of rational doubt. Put differently, I am not certain that I am a particular person in the objective world—that this self is that person. I am in a sense alienated from that individual, as if he is more my avatar than I myself. So I am unclear that his exploits are really mine. Let me try to elucidate this doubt by constructing a fanciful thought experiment.

Suppose that I actually exist in an immobile form in a safe room of some sort (a brain in a vat, to make it concrete). However, I have a body assigned to me that leaves the room and wanders around the world acquiring a history—that is, the experiences generated by this body are reproduced in my mind, so that it is as if I am wandering about. I thus acquire information about the doings of this body. We might be inclined to say that I leave the room with my body (though my brain stays put) and come to have various properties as a consequence. This already sounds strained and a further wrinkle can put it under pressure: suppose that another person commandeers my body and goes out into the world using it as he desires. This individual is called “Colin McGinn” and he does many things, including write books. He is not I. Nevertheless, I might acquire various beliefs about myself as a result of what this individual does, e.g. that I wrote a certain book. These beliefs would be false in the situation described: I never do anything—he does all the doing. It merely seems to me that I do these things.

The skeptic now steps in to urge that this might be true of my actual situation. How do I know that what the person called “CMG” does is really done by me? Maybe I am not embodied at all and the wandering person I think of as myself is not me. Maybe I went through the mental motions of writing a book but none of this caused a book to be written; instead someone else in a certain body did the actual physical writing. I have all sorts of impressions as of that body, as well as knowledge of my subjective states, but when I think I have acted in certain objective ways I really haven’t. After all, it doesn’t follow from the fact that I performed a certain series of mental actions (choosing words, etc.) and that a certain body moved in ways corresponding to this series that I performed those physical actions. I might be ensconced impotently somewhere while all the action is going on elsewhere, mistakenly taking credit for it. I might have no active presence in the world at all, though someone that does matches me in certain ways. I think I have a history of objective happenings, but perhaps I don’t, having only a mental history and an uneventful history of physical immobility. For instance, I never went to school in Blackpool, even though it seems to me that I did—it was someone else who went there in my stead. Accordingly, my beliefs about myself are generally false: my self-knowledge is not what I thought. This is because of the gap between how I appear to myself from the inside and what I objectively do or am subject to. I could express this gap by saying, “I might not be Colin McGinn”. The person with that name might well exist and have the history I take myself to have, but I am not identical to that person. I can therefore sensibly say to myself that I might not be Colin McGinn, i.e. the person who has such and such a history. I know various facts about him and I have no qualms about attributing those facts to him, but there is a question as to whether he is I, i.e. the individual I encounter from a first-person perspective. The objective self that is called “CMG” might not be the subjective self I refer to with “I”. That objective self, so conceived, certainly did various things, but he might not be me, so it is doubtful that I did those things. My putative identity with CMG is thus questionable because of the gap that exists between the subjective self and the objective self, i.e. between the self I encounter within and the public self that exists objectively. The very thought that I have an objective identity can seem like a rash conjecture, even when I don’t doubt that there are objective persons. How can I be something in the world? The world exists with persons in it, but the thing I refer to with “I” might not be one of these persons.

Let me try to put the point more intuitively. When I think of myself (de re) as Colin McGinn I have no trouble with the idea that this individual has a certain objective history—that very individual. I am thinking of an entity that has an objective existence, is observable by others, with a body, etc. But when I think of myself as myself using “I” I feel a gap open up between this entity and the objective facts I associate with it, which I might express by saying, “It is problematic that this entity ever did any of those things”. From the first-person perspective it is moot whether the self even has such attributes; they seem external to it, not part of its intrinsic character, not part of what is given with the self. Thus we feel that the self stands apart from the attributes commonly attributed to it when conceived from the third-person perspective. This is the difference between “I” and “CMG”: the latter presents no gap between the object and the facts that hold of it, while the former does present just such a gap. That is why it can seem surprising that I am an objective being at all: for how can I be that? I seem to myself from the first-person perspective to be of the wrong category to be an objective person, so I am uneasy about claims to self-knowledge of the usual kind–for example, that I wrote a certain book. I feel myself to be curiously remote from the facts of my supposed objective history, and would not be confounded by the discovery that I am not the real subject of these facts, as in the skeptical possibility described earlier. The fundamental form of this kind of thought is that Iam not my body, so that anything it does is not an attribute of me—though I have no qualms about attributing these things to the person I call by my name. This is no doubt what Descartes (and many others) was driving at—the self is not to be identified with the body, so that the history of one is not the history of the other. We could put this by saying that the inner self is not the objective person; of if he is, that is a problematic proposition.

Metaphysically, we could say (riskily) that the self is a bare particular with respect to objective facts: it is not qualified by such facts or presented as instantiating the properties in question. But when we think of a person from a third-person perspective he or she is not similarly conceived as a bare particular: here the facts are integral and salient. It would accordingly be bizarre to offer a theory of the semantics of “I” that defines it by reference to objective circumstances, as that “I” in my mouth means “the author of The Subjective View”, though that theory is by no means absurd as a theory of the name “Colin McGinn”. Put in these (risky) terms, self-knowledge is knowledge of a bare particular (relative to objective facts) that has certain extrinsic attributes by virtue of a relation to something else, while knowledge of the third-person kind is knowledge of an object endowed with various intrinsic properties. Of course, we must add that the self is not a bare particular tout court, since it has an array of mental properties that can be introspected—but we have been speaking of knowledge of physical properties of the person. With respect to mental properties, there is a strong contrast with the kind of self-knowledge discussed so far, since in their case we can’t envisage the possibility of someone else being the subject of these properties. I can’t say, “Someone else may be the person suffering these pains” as I can say, “Someone else might be the author of The Subjective View”. In the self-ascription of mental states I am not venturing beyond the subjective self, as I am when attributing physical attributes to myself. In a sense, then, the former case is like the case of the objective self in that both don’t involve any attempt to cross a metaphysical divide; it is only self-knowledge of objective facts that involves this kind of leap—the kind of knowledge expressed by “I am the author of The Subjective View”. That is the peculiar case, mixing as it does the subjective with the objective, thus inviting the protest, “But how could I have such attributes?” What I most intimately am is divorced from such worldly matters, or so it seems to me from the inside. That may be a false view to take, but it infects our attitudes towards self-knowledge nonetheless: it is what makes “I am CMG” such a potent and troubling thought—the very idea that this might be that. Surely there comes a time in everyone’s life when they recognize that they are a person existing in an objective world, as well as the subjective self with which they have become so familiar; and this is a potentially vertiginous thought—a kind of expansion and contraction at the same time (“I am more than this locus of subjectivity, but also only one object among many”). I am suggesting that such fraught thoughts are built into self-knowledge and give it the peculiar character that it has. There is nothing particularly strange about knowing objective facts about a named individual, or about someone knowing in the first-person that he or she has certain mental states, but it is strange to know that you yourself have certain objective attributes—because that is to combine the inner and the outer in a problematic way (as the skeptic points out). At its most basic, the remarkable (and terrifying) thought is that I am someone.[1]

[1] Readers familiar with Thomas Nagel’s work on these topics will detect some points of contact between it and the present reflections.

A Counterfactual Theory of Morality

It is frequently maintained that moral sentences are logically misleading: they look like straightforward fact-stating descriptive statements but actually they are not. Their underlying logical form differs from their surface grammatical form. Thus the emotive theory treats them as expressions of emotion (exclamations); the prescriptive theory takes them to be recommendations (imperatives); the anti-categorical-imperative theory interprets them as hypotheticals about desire; the existentialist philosophy condemns them as dispensable symptoms of bad faith not eternal truths. The thought is that the surface form of moral sentences (e.g. “Stealing is wrong”) invites errors of reification and that a paraphrase away from that form will reveal their logical nature to be other than it seems (compare Russell’s theory of descriptions, always the paradigm). We thus rid ourselves of entities and facts that offend our ontological sensibilities. In roughly this spirit I will suggest a new theory of the logical form of moral sentences, though I doubt that it has the liberating ontological significance boasted by other theories; I am concerned more with semantic accuracy than metaphysical purity.[1]

The theory can be simply stated: A moral proposition is a statement about what should be done in certain circumstances. To say that stealing is wrong, for example, is to say that if an occasion for stealing arises you should not take it. To say that generosity is right (or good) is to say that if an occasion for generosity arises you should so act. The idea is that if an opportunity to do a certain something arises you should act in a certain way and not in other ways. Life presents us with occasions of possible action (to steal or not to steal, to be generous or not to be) and morality directs us to act in one way rather than another. Thus the theory is a counterfactual theory in roughly the sense in which we have counterfactual theories of causation: to say that a causes b is to say that if an event like a were to occur an event like b would occur.[2] Causal statements look like simple categorical statements, but logically they have a counterfactual form—they are conditionals of a certain sort. There is no more to them than what such conditionals assert—nothing over and above the meaning of the counterfactual itself. Similarly, we say nothing more in saying that stealing is wrong than that you should not steal in situations in which stealing is an option. When a mother is instructing her child in the wrongness of stealing she is saying that stealing should not be done when the opportunity to steal arises. We might put it by saying that certain actions should not be performed when one might be tempted to perform the actions in question. If you feel like stealing and you think you can get away with it, don’t do it! Or better, you shouldn’t do it—it would be wrong. Likewise, if an opportunity to be kind presents itself, you should take that opportunity and act kindly. The logical form of a moral utterance is thus conditional: it says what should be done if certain possible conditions obtain. If no such conditions could ever arise, the statement would be pointless (ought implying can); the point of morality is to regulate possible action.

We can note three things about this analysis. First, it is irreducibly normative: it says what should be done in certain circumstances, not what is done or could be done or would be done. So it is not intended as a theory that attempts to leverage the normative from the non-normative, still less a theory that rejects the normative on metaphysical grounds. The normative is present there in full force. Second, the theory directly relates morality to action: morality is all about regulating actions—not about emotions or desires or Platonic forms or aggregates of happiness. It is also about actions as they might occur in the real world—situations an agent might actually confront. It is practical in that sense. It says that you should do this and you shouldn’t do that if such and such a predictable situation should arise. Third, it discourages overly fanciful metaphysical ideas—the Form of the Good, indefinable non-natural moral qualities, some heavy-duty forms of moral realism. It doesn’t, however, endorse forms of moral anti-realism or reductionism, since it explicitly builds in a normative condition in the shape of “should”; it merely advises against taking moral sentences as logically analogous to such sentences as “Gravity is proportional to mass” or “London is populous”, which are not logically conditional. To say that stealing is wrong is not to categorically ascribe a property to an object, as those sentences do, but to make a statement about what should be done in certain circumstances. Moral propositions are thus like dispositional propositions (e.g. “salt is soluble in water”): superficially they seem like simple categorical statements, but deep down they are conditional in form. They function to abbreviate a more complex-looking counterfactual conditional. That didactic mother might pedantically remark, “Stealing is wrong, i.e. you shouldn’t steal if an occasion arises where you might be tempted to”. She is not attempting to dispense with the moral concept of wrongness—indeed, she invokes it when employing the word “should”—but merely spelling out the formal content of the original sentence. She might even try to avoid all possible confusion by saying explicitly, “You morally shouldn’t do it”. She isn’t attempting to get outside the moral circle, just to articulate the thrust of a moral affirmation—it’s about what should and shouldn’t be done in certain possible circumstances.

Does this theory avoid moral “queerness”? There are all sorts of metaphysical assumptions about that question that I would dispute, but we can quickly respond as follows: no in one way, but yes in another. No, in that we are still invoking an irreducibly normative notion in the shape of “should”; but yes, in that we are not postulating something that transcends constraints on action—as arguably Plato’s Form the Good does (as it might be interpreted anyway). We are not invoking an entity that is fit to be gazed at and adulated, like some sort of radiant god, but rather enunciating principles governing human action. There are metaphysical extravagances that might be discouraged by the down-to-earth proposal to paraphrase moral statements in the manner suggested, but theorists looking for naturalistic reduction or elimination will be disappointed. The proposal is metaphysically modest, being merely an attempt to get the semantics straight. The proper form of objection to the theory would be that it fails to capture the entailments of moral sentences, or generates unacceptable entailments, but no such objection has hitherto been offered; and the theory seems on solid ground in that respect. Of course, we can go on to ask what justifies such a conditional should-statement—that is, what makes such a statement true—and here we may expect the usual array of theories to offer themselves, e.g. divine command theory, moral relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, social contract theory, etc. But that is to go beyond what the theory set out to accomplish, namely an account of logical form. If the child asks her mother why she shouldn’t do such-and-such, the mother might reply by sketching her favored moral theory; or she might loftily respond by observing that she is merely informing her child of what moral statements mean. If her daughter is precocious enough, she might further comment, “Moral propositions are logically analogous to causal propositions according to the counterfactual theory”. Here we can imagine the clever child replying, “If that’s all you are saying I quite agree, though there is still much work in moral theory to be done once questions of logical form are out of the way”.

An intuitive way to put the theory is as follows: morality is fundamentally about making the correct moral decisions as the occasion arises. Decisions are made in concrete circumstances. Abstract moral propositions don’t always make this clear (“Humility is a virtue”, “Cleanliness is next to godliness”), but it is close to the surface of moral discourse. We may say grandly that stealing is wrong and generosity is right, but what we mean is that you shouldn’t decide to steal something when it is in front of your nose and you fancy having it, and you should decide to act generously to someone who needs help even if you have other things to do. Moral propositions are essentially about what decisions to make in what circumstances—hence conditionals about what should and shouldn’t be done when certain situations arise. We might call this theory the “normative hypothetical” theory: “if it is the case that p, you should/shouldn’t do X”—a conditional with a descriptive antecedent and a normative consequent.[3]

C

[1] I say “new” but it is entirely possible that the theory has been enunciated elsewhere; it is certainly commonsensical. Still, it is far from orthodox.

[2] I won’t fuss with exact formulation, types and tokens, etc. I am merely making a comparison. (I am also not endorsing counterfactual theories of causation.)

[3] The same kind of account is attractive for statements of prudence, e.g. “Eating in moderation is good”. What this says is that when you are presented with food you should not stuff yourself—if food is placed in front of you, you should consume it in moderation. The prudent person is one who does what he (prudentially) should when negotiating the conditions if life.

Sentience and Morality

It is often said these days that morality applies when and only when sentience is present, but the exact connection between the two is not often spelled out. The thought is that the states of insentient objects impose no obligations on us while the states of sentient beings do. Obviously it is not intended that the merely physical states of sentient beings impose such obligations; the idea is that it is in virtue of the mental states of sentient beings that moral obligations apply. That is, it is states of consciousness that form the necessary and sufficient conditions for morality to apply. But what is it about consciousness that confers value on it? Not merely its subjectivity or its intentionality or its rationality or its innerness, since many conscious states have these features but have nothing particularly to do with morality—for instance, seeing yellow or thinking about the moon. There is nothing good or bad about having such mental states considered in themselves: they impose no moral obligations on moral beings (we are not obliged to increase the incidence of seeing yellow). Rather, there is a subclass of mental states that are morally relevant—the class that includes desire, happiness and unhappiness, agreeableness and its opposite, good experiences and bad. Pain and suffering are paramount in this class: from physical injury to bad smells to romantic pangs to boredom, lassitude, and despair. All the things that we don’t like, that turn us off, that bring us down, that ruin our day: thwarted desires, nasty sensations, unpleasant forebodings. These are the mental states that create obligation and trigger moral action, along with their positive counterparts. Thus “Pain is bad” is the prime example of a moral proposition, because it leads directly to ought-statements such as “You ought to do something about that person’s pain”. It is this type of state of sentient beings that is deemed morally significant.

But this doesn’t settle the question of the connection between sentience and morality, because we have yet to explain what sentience as such has to do with morality. Why does the property of consciousness have such a central role in moral thinking? What about unconscious pain and unconscious desire? Suppose for a moment that these are possible (the supposition is not absurd): would such states also ground moral obligation? The answer is unclear: one feels that they would count to some degree but not as much as fully conscious pain and desire. It is worse to feel a conscious pain than to have one that is outside of consciousness, but surely one ought to do something about someone’s pain even if he or she is not conscious of it. Similarly, it is good to satisfy a person’s conscious desires, but is it equally good to satisfy someone’s unconscious desires? Utilitarianism exhorts us to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but does that extend to unconscious happiness? The fact of being conscious makes a moral difference, though not the same difference as that between (say) being square and being in pain—the former having no moral significance at all. What if a tribe was equally attentive to the unconscious minds of its members as to their conscious minds—wouldn’t that make them more morally sensitive than us? Is the emphasis on conscious mental states a moral prejudice? Or is it just that we don’t tend to believe in the unconscious mind but would change our moral tune if we did?

The question of other minds is instructive: here there can be genuine doubt about the scope of morality. Suppose that half the people you are acquainted with are conscious and half or not—but you don’t know which is which. The distribution of sentience is opaque to you. Then you will be placed in a moral quandary, since you can’t apply the sentience-morality connection with any confidence. You agree that obligation requires sentience, but you don’t know who has it. It would be different if morality had nothing to do with sentience and everything to do with outer behavior, since then your obligations would be equal for all the individuals you encounter. But as things are, the scope of moral obligation is indeterminate so far as you are concerned, so you don’t know how to be moral in this world. Should you treat everyone as if they are sentient just to be on the safe side (but think what a waste of resources for the false positives), or should you put half your effort into each individual (but that may result in neglecting a deserving case)? The sentience criterion runs into the problem of other minds and in unfavorable cases can render it unworkable as a basis for morality. You always know what is due to you morally, since you know your own consciousness directly, but you can be genuinely uncertain what you owe to others. And this theoretical problem has a real-life counterpart when it comes to other species and people with abnormalities (such as paralysis or coma). If you got really serious about the problem of other minds, you might wonder whether you had any moral obligations to others at all—and likewise with the problem of not recognizing sentience when it is present (worms, trees?). The sentience test makes morality epistemologically problematic.

Is it just a primitive fact that sentience matters? What if we came across aliens that invert our normal sense of moral obligation, treating insentient objects as deserving moral respect while disregarding sentient beings? They go around making sure that every object is polished and made straight, holding this to be their prime moral obligation, while treating suffering and unfulfilled desire as morally insignificant. Could we persuade them of the error of their ways? Would we be reduced to saying, “Can’t you see that pain is bad and roundness is value-neutral?” When they ask us why we can only reply, “Because pain is a conscious state”. They might wonder whybeing a conscious state makes all the difference: what is it about consciousness that makes it the sine qua non of morality?[1] Is it the mere fact that to be conscious is for there to be something it is like for the organism? But why does what it’s like have this special relationship to morality? Why is this kind of subjectivity a condition for moral obligation to get a grip? And if it is a condition, why do moral theories not generally recognize it to be so?

For not all substantive moral theories put sentience at the heart of morality. Utilitarianism does because it expressly speaks of maximizing a certain type of mental state, assumed to be conscious; but deontological theories have no such direct connection to consciousness. The duty to tell the truth, keep your promises, not to steal, not to commit adultery, etc., say nothing about states of consciousness: they could apply in a robot world. There might be lying, stealing, promise-breaking adulterous robots—that is, beings that do all these immoral things. Does morality apply to them? One might say that such duties can only apply against a suitable psychological background, but that is not part of the official deontological story and threatens to reduce it to a utilitarian theory. The connection between morality and sentience is certainly looser according to deontological ethics, and less subject to some of the uncertainties of the sentience criterion. It may be true that in the actual world morality and sentience are coterminous, more or less, but it is a question whether the connection goes any deeper—whether the existence of moral obligation can be explained by the nature of sentience. That is, it is a question why being conscious should be the touchstone of morality, as a matter of conceptual necessity. There is certainly a feeling—an “intuition”—that this is so, but articulating it is less easy than one might have expected. Maybe one part of morality—the part concerned with pain and suffering—necessarily involves consciousness, but it may not be essential to other parts, such as those emphasized by deontological theories. Would an eliminative view of consciousness put an end to morality? Would a takeover of the conscious mind by the unconscious mind make the idea of moral obligation nugatory? What if a condition analogous to blindsight were to invade the entire human mind—would that mean that morality no longer applies? Kant took personhood to define the scope and limits of morality, thus excluding animals and some humans; the substitution of sentience for personhood was intended to enlarge the range of moral obligation. But perhaps we need a further enlargement to include beings whose consciousness is in question. Sentience may be too parochial (as well as too inclusive in some respects). Having interests seems to be the essence of morality, but that notion doesn’t seem necessarily tied to sentience, though having conscious desires may be the central case of having interests. Ecological ethics sometimes speaks of the interests of whole species or the biosphere or the planet, but these entities are not claimed to be conscious sentient beings. Sentience as such doesn’t seem to constitute the dividing line, given the moral neutrality of much sentience (e.g. seeing yellow), and unconscious mental states seem to have some moral weight, and not all moral rules have to do with promoting conscious happiness and avoiding conscious misery, and other minds can be elusive: so we do well to take the sentience criterion as just a rough rule of thumb rather than a definitive account of the scope of morality. Perhaps, indeed, it was always a bad idea to seek hard and fast limits to the scope of morality.[2]

[1] Should we say that pain can only hurt if it is conscious, and hurting is what makes pain morally significant? But then it is not consciousness as such that is morally significant but its power to make things hurt: an entity is morally considerable if and only if it can be made to hurt. This is (a) a rather narrow conception of morality and (b) not self-evident as a conceptual truth because of the possibility of unconscious pain. Here we get into debates about the metaphysics of pain, which render the sentience criterion contestable.

[2] Morality has been in a process of expansion over many centuries; it would be folly to suppose that it has reached its outer limit now. We tend to fashion theories to fit its actual scope at any given time. Now that we have acquired the power to destroy planets (our own at least) and might develop yet more destructive powers, we might have to consider our obligations to the universe as a whole; and this might prompt us to expand our notion of obligation beyond the realm of sentient beings. What if we encounter complex alien life forms to which our notion of sentience fails to apply—might we then contemplate extending the concept of moral obligation to include these insentient life forms? After all, it was only recently that the sentience criterion came to be accepted as a legitimate extension, mainly as a result of a greater awareness of animal ethics.

Being Conscious

What is consciousness? What is its basic and essential character? I shall suggest the following: consciousness is the feeling of being. This terse formula will need some elaboration but it is useful as a summary statement. I mean to be speaking of consciousness in the broadest sense—the kind of consciousness (sentience) found in birds, reptiles, fish, even insects, as well as humans. Mainly this is sensory consciousness, though other kinds branch out from the basic kind (presumably it was the earliest kind of consciousness to evolve). There are two sides to the characterization I propose, corresponding to feeling and being. By the latter I simply mean existence: to be conscious is to feel the existence of something. Here two historical figures come into play: Brentano and Descartes. Brentano maintained that to be conscious is to be conscious of something, generally something other than oneself, say objects in the environment. Descartes maintained that being conscious implies one’s own existence (the Cogito)—consciousness carries within it the knowledge of the existence of a self. Putting these two thinkers together, we can say that being conscious carries a double existential implication: it implies the existence of a subject of consciousness and the existence of something other than the subject. It is existentially committal in two respects. Possibly these intimations are misleading (illusions etc.), but they are real intimations nonetheless. Consciousness posits a duality of existences. The suggestion is that these are universal features of consciousness, as Brentano and Descartes supposed; they are necessary and definitive. I think that is basically right, but I won’t here go into the pros and cons. The important point is that conscious states are being-directed while non-conscious states are not (being square doesn’t imply the existence of anything). We can see this in the grammar: to be consciously seeing (say) is for a subject to see an object—there is no subject-less seeing of non-objects.[1]

What about the feeling part? I intend by this word to capture the primitiveness of consciousness in its most basic form—it is a primordial type of feeling. It is not a judgment or a mental act or a belief or an emotion; it isn’t “conceptual”. To be conscious is to feel a certain way—to feel consciously. Thus consciousness is rightly classified as a sensation: whenever an organism is in a conscious state it has a characteristic sensation, the sensation of consciousness. There are sensations of red and sensations of pain, but there is also the sensation of consciousness itself. You can feel this sensation in yourself during your waking hours; it attends your every conscious move. A being might not this have this sensation, in which case it would not be conscious. If you attend now to your visual experience, you will detect various visual sensations, but in addition to these you will find the sensation of consciousness itself. This is why you are aware of your consciousness—because you have sensation of consciousness that you know about. So the feeling of being is a sensation directed toward being—you sense being, you have a sensation of it. It is not that you believe in being whenever you are conscious or that you make a judgment about it; rather, you have a primitive sensation of being. But this sensation cannot occur in the absence of consciousness, as arguably other sensations can, since it is what consciousness is—it is precisely the sensation of consciousness (the consciousness-sensation). If you have a conscious sensation of pain, say, you have both a sensation of pain and a sensation of consciousness. The latter sensation accompanies all conscious mental states uniformly despite their phenomenological variety. When you recover consciousness upon waking up you start to have a sensation that will be present throughout your waking hours—not a higher-order judgment that you keep making or a certain type of omnipresent emotion or a mental act repeatedly performed. You have the consciousness-sensation, a specific feature of mental life.[2]

The view I am describing has points of contact with Sartre’s view of consciousness.[3] He emphasizes the fact that consciousness essentially posits being: the for-itself aims itself at the in-itself. It is not an enclosed self-subsistent being. He doesn’t describe it as having a sensation-like character, but this claim is consistent with his analysis. What he does emphasize is what he calls the “nothingness” of consciousness—the idea that consciousness has no positive being over and above its posited objects. I won’t try to explicate this idea here, merely noting that it can be added to the account I am developing. In Sartre’s terms, consciousness harbors a negation: it is not the objects it posits. It transcends those objects, though not because it is another object, but rather because its being is to be pure other-directedness. It posits existence without being an existent thing like the things it posits—it has a kind of invisible vanishing existence: nothingness, in a word. So, following Sartre, we can say that consciousness is the feeling of being that distances itself from being: it posits being as not itself. It is the feeling of being while feeling itself not to be a being (an in-itself). Thus three notions come together in consciousness: feeling (sensation), being (existence), and negation (nothingness). These are fundamental features of our conceptual scheme, as well as of objective reality. We can therefore say, filling out our simple formula, that consciousness is the feeling of double existence that presents itself as removed from existence (transcending it) and as not itself an existent thing (except as a kind of nothingness).

There is another way to put the view I am proposing: we can speak of manifest being and non-manifest being (pure being). Inanimate objects have non-manifest or pure being: their being is not manifest to any conscious subject, save per accidens. They simply are without any necessary recognition of this fact. But in the case of conscious subjects being becomes manifest, as when we recognize our own existence in acts of consciousness. Consciousness makes our being (and other being) manifest, so it is the agent of being-manifestation. Instead of saying that consciousness is the feeling of being we can say that it is being become manifest, thus shifting the emphasis to the level of being. Consciousness is being become aware of itself. At one time being was manifest to no one, but then consciousness came about and being became manifest. Being caused being to become aware of being. Thus the feeling of being became part of being, with its characteristic structure (sensation plus being plus negation). Instead of saying that consciousness consists in a subject feeling an object we can equivalently say that consciousness consists in an object making itself manifest to a subject—the difference is one of emphasis.

An idealist would insist that there is no being without the feeling of being, possibly a feeling in God’s mind. So there is no pure being: all being derives from the feeling of being–all being is manifest being. This is another way of saying that everything is made of consciousness, so idealism can be formulated using this definition of consciousness. It is the doctrine that all being is felt being. Being consists in sensations of being, i.e. consciousness. An idea in the mind of God is a sensation of being, since God is a conscious being, though no doubt more capacious than human sensations of being. When God has the sensation that a table exists a table exists—that’s idealism under the present theory of consciousness.

How does this account relate to the idea that consciousness consists of states there is something it is like to have? This phrase is usually coupled with the idea of subjectivity, which in turn is analyzed in terms of epistemic access: a state is said to be subjective if and only if it can only be grasped by experiencing it oneself. Thus what it is like to be a bat is subjective in the sense that only beings with experiences like bats can know what kind of state is in question.[4] Clearly this is an epistemological point concerning knowledge of conscious states (or possibly unconscious ones if they are similarly restricted in their conditions of understanding, e.g. subliminal bat perceptions). As such it belongs to a different level from the kind of constitutive conditions I have been discussing: those are internal to conscious states, part of their structure, whereas subjectivity in the sense defined concerns relational facts about knowledge of conscious states. It says they are only knowable in a certain way, i.e. from a particular “point of view”, not from any point of view. There is nothing wrong with characterizing conscious states in this epistemological way, but it should be distinguished from the search for the constitutive nature of such states. There is no incompatibility between the two; they are aiming at different things. The feeling of being that defines a particular kind of conscious state, say a bat’s echolocation experiences, is something that can only be grasped by sharing that feeling, so that subjectivity (in the sense defined) can be added to existence, feeling, and negation that characterize the inner structure of a state of consciousness. Being can be felt (and simultaneously transcended) in different ways, and these ways correspond to differences in epistemic accessibility. There are different things it’s like for organisms and these consist in different ways that being can be felt.

But that doesn’t imply that consciousness itself is a variable commodity in the sense that the property of being conscious itself varies from organism to organism. If what I said earlier is correct, that property is uniform across types of conscious state—within an organism and across organisms. It is the same sensation in all cases—the sensation of consciousness as such. In this sense we do grasp the consciousness of bats, since their consciousness consists in the same thing as ours, viz. that feeling or sensation that makes a state a conscious state. The bat’s echolocation experience is not like anything we possess, but its being conscious is just like what we possess, since that property exists in our experience too—the property precisely of being conscious. If consciousness is a type of sensation, then bats and humans share a sensation (over and above other shared sensations), namely the sensation of being conscious. What we can’t grasp is the nature of the sensory experiences that bats enjoy, but we can grasp what consciousness is for bats, because it is the same for us. All sentient beings are united by a single mental property, i.e. the sensation of being conscious. The bat feels existence by exercising its echolocation sense, and that feeling is subjective (accessible only from one “point of view”); but in addition to that it has a sense of its own consciousness—a certain type of sensation that being conscious consists in. If consciousness consisted in possessing a higher-order thought, we would get the same result, since we know what higher-order thoughts are from our own case; but the same result follows from the sensational theory of consciousness. So there is a sense in which we don’t grasp the consciousness of bats but also a sense in which we do.

What would be a good label for the view I am describing? The label “phenomenological existentialism” suggests itself: it conveys the idea of feeling and the idea of existence, as well as their joining together. But those words carry a lot of baggage and are cumbersome—is there anything catchier and more specific? How about “felt being-ism”? True, it is grammatically awkward, and true it can claim no familiar antecedent; but at least it captures the view briefly and clearly. It’s either that or we appropriate some French or German phrase that resists translation into English, a task I leave to those more linguistically adept than I am.

Coli

[1] Of course there can be hallucinations, but the experience is still object-directed—it has an “intentional object”. It is as of an object.

[2] There might be other such constant sensations such as a sense of your own unity or of the presence of space and time. My suggestion is that a sensation of being conscious pervades all waking life: you constantly feel your own consciousness in the mode of sensation.

[3] See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943).

[4] See Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” (1972)