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CHAPTER VII

THE CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS There is general agreement among neuro-scientists that consciousness arises on the basis of sentience, which is equally the view of philosophers like Hegel and Bradley and Collingwood. Sentience, indeed, constitutes the psychical field, the locus of mental phenomena. Likewise, the empirical evidence copiously supports Spinoza’s contention that the mind is the idea of the body and (as Damasio has maintained) that the body is the framework within which the mind operates. Bodily feeling is thus the basic level of consciousness, as Collingwood contends. But he also points out that feeling is, in many ways, ambiguous: first, there is the question, at best difficult to answer, whether feeling is always conscious or may be unconscious; there is also the fact that we sometimes speak of feeling with a cognate accusative (to feel a pain, for example) and at others of feeling something like a smooth surface, or seeing a colour, designating an object. My purpose will not be served by enumerating at length and discussing, as Collingwood does, the many ways in which feeling can be ambiguous, but it is desirable to establish some degree of clarity on significant points. To what extent is feeling conscious? Thinkers like Husserl, speak of “hyletic” consciousness as a sort of “matter” from which the consciousness of objects is constituted, and of course for Husserl consciousness is basic. It is much in this sense that I am proposing to use the term “primitive sentience” while admitting that sentience covers every kind of sensory experience. Nevertheless there can be doubt whether every level of sentience is conscious. Collingwood confesses that he does not know, and Freud would certainly have maintained that some such experience (e.g., libido is unconscious); we frequently become aware that at some time past we had heard a clock chime although we are only now conscious of the fact, and there are many habitual actions that we undertake without being conscious in detail of how we perform them, yet we must at the time feel that we are making the necessary movements (for instance, in playing a game of skill). Like Collingwood, I have to admit that I do not know whether primitive sentience is always conscious, but I am inclined to believe that it is not, and I think Hegel is correct in asserting that consciousness proper entails making a distinction between subject and object, which is not present in primitive

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sentience. What Collinwood does assert is that feeling is an apanage of consciousness, its proper object.

There can be little dispute about the further assertion that attention, by singling out some feature of feeling or primitive sentience, creates a datum for perception, and that we do not perceive unless we are conscious. I therefore propose to regard this as the initial phase of consciousness. The effect of such singling out is to produce a figure and ground contrast by bringing the datum into prominence against a background of less definite content, without which there is no definite object of which to be conscious. That attention is an essential feature of consciousness is, therefore, fairly obvious and it is clear that attention is the activity that organizes sentience - the psychical field - by distinguishing elements in it as objects for perception. For this reason it has been called (in particular, by Collingwood) selective. The epithet, however, should not be misunderstood in this context to mean that in distinguishing the object from its sentient background attention is necessarily the agent of deliberate choice. Choice of necessity would involve attention, but not vice versa. That attention organizes the sentient field has been argued and demonstrated in the most illuminating detail by Merleau-Ponty. Although we were unable to find in his theory any direct indication of how what I have called the crucial question could be answered, his detailed account of how the perception of objects and the external world emerges from pre-perceptive sentience is most instructive and convincing. Although he rejects (as excessively intellectualist) the view that perception is judgement, what he objects to is rather the notion that our common perception involves explicit ratiocination - which, of course, it does not - than that it implicitly involves judgement. But Merleau-Ponty’s penetrating interpretation and analysis of the psychological facts clearly and persuasively display how the development and exercise of perception is implicitly and in fact the detailed and intricate ordering of the content of the sentient (psychical) field. In his own words:

“We now begin to see a deeper meaning in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal all stray data.” (The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 313).

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This “logic” is the logic of organization, of distinguishing, identifying and relating which is the product of attention and when it is made explicit it becomes judgement, as we shall demonstrate anon. What directs attention? This is not, in all cases, an easy question to answer. It has been noted that feeling of some sort is always involved, because feeling is the primary object of consciousness. In many instances we can trace back the excitation of attention to innate emotions and impulses such as fear, curiosity, anger, or sex (instincts evolved to protect the individual and reproduce the species). But in developed consciousness there are innumerable occasions when attention is attracted to objects which have little or no obvious, or at best a very tenuous, relation to these innate instinctive reactions. When my attention is drawn to a spectacular sunset, or to the beauty of some delicate and graceful flower, it is by no means easy to trace back the attraction to any primitive instinct. What Edelman and others have called the value system, developed as a result of experience, the enjoyment of occasional pleasures and pains, no doubt plays a significant part in the direction of attention. But something more must be at work. Clearly no attention need be directed to the stimulus of a reflex movement to bring it into operation, but any deliberate action requires some degree of attention to certain of its contributory factors; for instance, the driver of a car may act largely automatically, yet she or he must at least pay attention to the circumstances that make it necessary to turn the steering-wheel; and it is not always easy to decide what the directing agent might be. Still more difficult is it to discern what drives attention when I deliberately direct it to some activity in which I feel disinclined to engage (e.g. tedious work), forcing it away from some pleasure which I would prefer. One would normally say that “I” turn my attention, or force myself to attend to the matter in hand. To understand what we mean by this claim, we still need to know how to identify the “I”. Neuro-physiologists (despite all the important work that they have done on attention) have not, so far as I am aware, discovered any special neural activity in the brain corresponding to this direction of attention, if indeed they have identified any that corresponds to the exercise of attention itself. PET studies have revealed that attention increases the activity of some neural groups and reduces that of others - which is what we should expect. It has also been established that the firing of certain neurons (in the IT system) facilitates visual discrimination, which would presumably favour the attraction of attention to specific objects, or could be stimulated by the direction of attention towards them. The reticular system of the brain stem, the hypothalamus and other midbrain structures have been found to play an important part in the control of emotion by regulating endocrine secretions.

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Such functioning can enhance or reduce input from the sense organs, and so may influence the direction of attention. These facts, however, give scant indication of the actual impulsive agency directing attention. Yet, if attention is the primary condition of consciousness because it initiates perception by discriminating an object in contrast with a context and constructs a figure against a ground, it would be important to discover what prompts it to do this if we are fully to understand the nature of consciousness. In a very interesting (but little noticed) book, entitled The Subject of Consciousness,1 Cedric O. Evans, a former pupil of mine, has made a perspicacious analysis of attention as a feature of consciousness, arguing convincingly that there is no experience without some form or degree of attention, which polarizes every state of consciousness, however diffuse or rambling, into a foreground and a background. He also distinguishes three types of attention, which he calls, severally, unordered, interrogative, and executive. That all consciousness necessarily involves attention, we have already insisted, for consciousness emerges only with perception, which is the picking out of an object from the sentient background by attention. This immediately polarizes the psychical field into foreground and background, whether or not the object is sharply or only vaguely distinguished. Further, while ever we are awake something is occupying our attention, even when we are making no special effort to concentrate, and this is what Evans has called “unordered” attention. We certainly do constantly exercise attention of this kind, but the adjective is an unfortunate choice because every conscious state is one of some degree of order, first because no object is perceived that is not at least distinguished from a background, and secondly because (as I shall presently argue) attention is always patterned in a series of degrees. Evans might have been better advised to call the more prevalent form of attention “involuntary” to distinguish it from that which we deliberately direct upon a selected object. Evans’ description of what he calls “interrogatory” attention is correct and unobjectionable. It is the attention that we exercise whenever we are searching for anything, be it a person, an inanimate possession, or the solution to a puzzle. The search and its objective become a dominant idea ranging all potential objects in order according to their relevance to the aim of the quest. We are impelled to the third variety of attention, “executive” attention, when we need to concentrate upon some action, physical or mental, requiring previous experience, careful manipulation, and special skill or technique.

The Conditions of Consciousness 115 This classification is useful and well founded, and Evans is entirely right to maintain that interrogative attention is governed by a dominant idea which organizes the content of consciousness in accordance with its relevancy to the progressing search, inhibiting the intervention of unrelated objects. His

too far. Certainly attention divides the psychical field into what is “in focus” and what is not. The latter, Evans calls “unprojected consciousness”. But this dichotomy is not a stark polarization. There are degrees of attention at all times, even if on some, rather rare, occasions what is in focus is sharper and more arresting than on others. The background is never simply diffuse, for the structure of attention (if you like, of consciousness) is a series of gradations that may be symbolized as a nest of concentric circles with the heeded matter in the centre, or as a step pyramid with the object in focus at the top. When I am driving my car I focus my attention on the road ahead (if I am to drive safely), but this need not prevent me from admiring the scenery, or noticing objects by the way (e.g. a pheasant on the roadside fence). These objects, however, are not at the centre of my attention. Much less are the tactual sensations of the accelerator and brake pedals I am operating with my feet, although I must to some degree give heed to them. At the same time, although I must feel them, I am scarcely aware (if at all) of the kinaesthetic sensations in my ankles and knees as I do this. Of none of these things am I totally unconscious, but the degrees of attention I devote to them are very different. As I am now concentrating my attention on what I am writing, I am still aware, somewhat more vaguely, of the position of the furniture around me in the room. Less markedly, I am aware of the light coming in through the window, and the glow of the desk lamp at my shoulder. Yet more dimly, I am aware of the pressure against my body of the chair on which I am sitting: and so on, until other objects affecting my sense organs sink into near or complete oblivion. We often experience some object (say, a sound) to which we later say that we failed to pay attention while we were concentrating on some other matter, although we were not wholly unaware of its occurrence. There may, indeed, be occasions when our minds relax and the keenness of attention is attenuated, and others when we drift into reverie, but even then there is some structure in our thinking, although it may be less clearly articulated than when we are giving close heed to the activity in which we are engaged. Not only does consciousness prevail at every level, but no part of the psychical field is devoid of some degree of attention. Only unconscious feeling, if there is such, is beyond its scope.

insistence on the polarization of consciousness, however, goes somewhat

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This range of levels of attention is important and should not be overlooked (as it is by Evans, with serious consequences for his later identification of the experiential self). It is not only constant and typical of the waking state, but is the essential condition of consciousness and is what has, in large measure, led me to the view, presently to be advanced, that consciousness is the next higher degree of organization than is operative at the physiological and sentient levels. Attention is not, however, simply a static structure imposed upon a state of consciousness; it is a practical activity. We pay attention to particular objects; we take heed of what interests us; and this taking notice is an act, at times more definitely deliberate than at others. As we shift our attention from one object to another, so the psychical field is reorganized around what takes central prominence, and this happens in every state of alert consciousness, not only in special circumstances when we are searching for something, or concentrating on performing a skilled or difficult practical task, but while ever we are conscious. In short, the act of attention is the essential activity that properly defines consciousness. The essential question is: What precisely is the agency that performs this movement? Evans contends that, as it is a practical activity, it is directed by kinaesthetic sensation, both when interrogative attention is governed by a dominant idea (because the idea is always dependent upon sentience and perception, which involve bodily movement in the adjustment of the relevant sense-organs), and when executive attention is guided (as it always is) by kinaesthesis. Certainly the sense organs all function concomitantly with some muscular process, either voluntary or unconscious (like the focussing of the lens of the eye). Nevertheless, from the facts that some kinaesthetic sensation may always be in the background of consciousness and in some cases may even regulate the ongoing activity, it does not follow that the attentive direction of conscious activity is due to this kinaesthetic sensation, but rather that the kinaesthesis is the result, not the cause, of the play of attention. For example, when I lift a cup of coffee to my mouth the movement of my hand is controlled by subconscious kinaesthetic sensations in my arm, but this is not what directs my attention to the cup or prompts the decision to lift it. Whatever that is must precede the kinaesthetic sensation. It is more plausibly the dominant idea of assuaging my thirst, which will have directed my attention to boiling the water and making the coffee. It could, of course, be argued that the idea has been generated by somatic sensations (thirst), which in this example is indeed the case, but those somatic

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sensations are not the same as the idea. Nor is the somatic sensation always at the focus of attention; something is needed to draw attention to it. And suppose I decide that it is more important to write a letter to my bank manager before the morning postal collection than to drink coffee (despite my thirst), what is it that impels the decision and diverts my attention from coffee making? You may say that it is my concern about certain financial matters, and concern is an emotion; but although emotion may influence decision it is not itself decision. That requires conation, which psychologists have told us is always associated with emotion, although they have not otherwise explained what drives it. Here, again, the psychologist may retort that drive and conation are one and the same. Yet to say that drive always accompanies emotion is not to explain its occurrence nor how it is engendered. Emotion per se is passive rather than active; it may well prompt activity by exciting desire, and how it does so is what needs to be explained. In the more extreme case, when we drive ourselves, contrary to desire, to neglect some pleasurable indulgence and to attend to a matter that we find distasteful, we think of the diversion of attention as an act of will. What is the will and how does it act? This is perhaps the most mysterious performance of the mind, on which neuro-physiology has, as yet, to throw more light, although neuroscientists do not hesitate to invoke it (see the reference above to Damasio). Certain regions of the brain, no doubt, become active when it occurs, but what impels them into operation? The position I shall seek to advocate is that primitive sentience is the form assumed by an organized whole of metabolic and physiological processes at a specially high degree of integration. This primitive sentience constituting the psychical field is in itself an indiscriminate whole of diverse feeling, and the supervenience upon it of consciousness occurs only when attention singles out elements within it and (as it were) makes them conspicuous against a contrasted horizon. The critical question that we now face is: Whence comes this activity of singling out, of identifying and distinguishing? We are tempted to answer: From the self, the subject of consciousness. But this cannot be right, first because the self is itself the product of the discriminating activity of attention distinguishing self from other and subject from object, and secondly because attention can be operative in types of consciousness devoid of the distinction between self and other and free of any awareness of a subject, as it presumably is in very young infants and in many species of animal other than homo sapiens.

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I have admitted that attention is, at any rate in many (possibly most) cases, directed by instinctive urges developed in the course of evolution and preserved by natural selection. But the source of these urges themselves is still unexplained. If we assume, as is possible, that all life is in some degree sentient (as, for instance, when a plant grows towards the light), sensibility as such, which is largely passive, cannot be the source of the activity of selection. If the motion is the result of a mere tropism it may be attributed to simple quasi-mechanical (or reflex) action; but in the vast majority of instances the consequent movements are immeasurably more complex than could be accounted for in this way. What the sensibility stimulates is action aimed at self-maintenance (e.g. Paramoecium attaching itself to a bubble to access a more plentiful oxygen supply), and that cannot simply be physico-chemical reaction, even if it depends upon it, because physico-chemical reaction per se is not autonomously self-maintaining. Just as sentience is specific only to self-maintaining and self-reproducing organisms, so is autonomous activity in quest of self-maintenance. It is in this auturgy of living things that we must seek the origin of instinctive urges - and so also, perhaps, the impulsion of attention. Since attention raises some sentient feature in the felt state of the organism to the level of conscious perception, of which that feature becomes the object, the waking condition of any animal is always to some degree attentive. This is a necessary condition for recognition and discrimination of objects in the environment and for learning from the consequences of contact with them. The response of the animate creature to destructive or benificent encounters will affect its capacity to survive. Being alert, therefore, will have distinct survival value as the condition of appropriate action. Evolution will, accordingly, have favoured those whose attention is keen and active. The self-activity of attention is thus conceivably the expression at the level of consciousness of the auturgic activity that promotes self-maintenance. If this is so, then the evolution of consciousness can be credibly explained (remembering always that the neural development that subserves it cannot be the result merely of natural selection, which is not itself the source of favourable mutations). Stuart Kauffman has identified what he calls a collective autocatalytic set of macromolecules2 (e.g. nucleic and/or amino acids) as the precondition of life. But the living cell (be it prokaryotic or eukaryotic) involves more than this. It is, he says, a complex of matter, energy, and information plus something more. A collective autocatalytic set of molecules, even though it can be self-reproductive, does not act in its own behalf - is not autonomously self-maintaining. And that, as Kauffman contends,3 is the essential

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characteristic of life. He calls this capacity “agency”. Such self-preserving activity cannot just occur accidentally, because, if it did, it would be merely transient. It has to be encoded somehow in the genetic material. Moreover, what acts on its own behalf acts purposively which purely physico-chemical processes never do. Kauffman defines the living organism as “an autonomous agent” which “is a system able to reproduce itself and carry out one or more thermodynamic cycles.”4 This definition, which he goes to some lengths to illustrate and defend, disguises the fact that the performance of one or more thermodynamic cycles is in the cause of self-maintenance. Nevertheless, the defining character of life is this agency, the capacity to act on one’s own behalf. What I wish to suggest is that attention is this agency operating on the psychical level. If this is correct the innate ability to direct attention to arresting sensations is neither more nor less than being alive. It is the innate urge to self-preservation. It is what Spinoza called the conatus in suo esse perseverandi operating at the level of consciousness. Once this is admitted, it follows naturally that the successive creation by attention of sensible figures against a diverse felt background progressively grows into a system of objects in relation, which comes to constitute the awareness of a more or less orderly surrounding world, within which the organism has to maintain itself. Apart from this activity, relations could not be cognized and, however or wherever they exist could never be explicitly realized. On the hypothesis I am putting forward, it would be legitimate to presume that even a single celled animal, being already a highly complex, integrated organic system, might be in some degree sentient. If so, a presumed feeling of privation and discomfort in Paramoecium might be assuaged by chance contact with a bubble and the protozoan, being alive, might be capable of “learning” by association of this feeling of relief with bubbles. An inclination towards bubbles might be an incipient exercise of attention. Similarly, a bubble floating upwards could lead to the distinction between the directions up and down; in other more complex creatures a loud noise becomes associated with a large threatening object - and so on. A further question, of course, is how these learned associations are genetically imprinted in the genome, which cannot, in the majority of cases be simply a matter of chance mutation.

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This scenario is, however, mere speculation, and even if it may be tempting to entertain, it cannot be accepted without serious qualification, because if we in any sense were to attribute to so lowly an organism as Paramoecium any degree of attention we should be regarding it as already conscious, not merely sentient. The self-preserving drive must somehow direct the protozoan to the bubble. How it does so, it is difficult to conceive, for we can hardly allege learning by trial and error, of which we have no evidence. And we cannot resort to natural selection for explanation , because although it would presumably eliminate organisms unable to access the missing oxygen, it could not initiate the required mutation in the genetic structure that empowers it to seek bubbles when necessary; and without that the protozoan would not survive. Further, self-preservation implies a distinction between the self to be preserved and what is not self, as Dennett has pointed out (CE, p. 174). This distinction at first is, no doubt, only implicit in the creature’s behaviour and becomes explicit only at a high level of development at which other selves are recognized, whether in competition with one’s own, or in family affection and co-operation. Prior to this, the feeling of one’s own body and its modification by contact and commerce with others is the occasion of a primitive self-feeling which is (presumably) the origin and basis of that consciousness of self at the level of intelligence which is the condition of intellectual development. Damasio has told us that this feeling of the proto-self as it is modified by an external object is the prior condition of all consciousness. If so, it should be experienced by all animals to which we can plausibly attribute awareness; but although animals almost certainly experience bodily feeling, we cannot credibly attribute the feeling of a self as such to any animal lower in the evolutionary scale than (say) the primates. What self-feeling entails, then, needs more investigation. But this must be deferred until later. The tentative conclusions that emerge from what I have so far considered are: 1. Attention is the operation at the level of consciousness of the auturgy of the organism, the autonomous pursuit of self-preservation at a higher pitch of organized unity and comprehensiveness than is achieved simply by metabolism and physiological regulation. 2. Sentience is raised to the level of consciousness by the discriminating effect of attention upon its content, prior to which it is an indiscriminate conglomerate of feeling. 3. Self-feeling is embedded in the bodily sentience that forms the background to the objects given prominence by attention, although we

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cannot yet say confidently how it becomes a genuine feeling of self. Damasio suggests that self-feeling emerges as we become aware of feelings as “mine” - but surely there is a hint here of hysteron proteron. These conclusions seem reasonably warranted, but can at best be provisional at this stage, because, as has been conceded, they leave a number of questions unanswered, some virtually mystifying. What, for instance, is the source of the autonomous urge to self-maintenance that is the distinguishing mark of life? How does it (if it does) emerge as the direction of attention? How does the sense of self arise ab initio? What, in terms of neuro-physiology, is will? Is there such a thing as unconscious feeling, or are levels of inattention sufficient to account for our failure to notice the more obscure? I can hardly undertake even to try to answer all these difficult questions. In the next chapter I shall make some attempt to identify the subject of consciousness and to clarify the notion of self. What brain activity is involved in an act of will I could not attempt to discover without further intense neuro-physiological research, on which, not being a scientist, I am not competent to embark. In the light of what I shall propose in the next chapter, however, I might suggest some tentative answer to the demand for the source of the autonomous urge to self-maintenance. Is it not, perhaps, a singular instance, at the appropriate level of complexity, of a new emergent form of functioning supervening upon a specially high degree of intricate chemical holism? That is, after all, the distinctive form of life. What is undeniable, at the point we have so far reached, is that attention, whatever directs it, initiates and instigates implicit judgement in the recognition of an object, for cognition involves the identification of a specific entity and its distinction from others - the analytic-synthetic discursus involved in the apprehension of a Gestalt - a figure-and-ground complex. It is the discrimination of “this-not-that”, the implicit primary judgement. Accordingly, attention is essentially the activity of inter-relating, of establishing the organization of a whole. This is what gives plausibility to the submission shortly to be made that sentience and consciousness are successive phases continuous with that process of organization that has all along been operative throughout what Hegel characterized as the dialectical succession from physical to chemical and organic activity.

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The clues we have derived from neuro-physiology are all the more significant insofar as they confirm the philosophical theories I have cited above: that consciousness emanates from bodily feeling and that perception is the organization of the psychical (sentient) field by the selective activity of attention. Hobbes and Locke, as well as more recent philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, painted themselves into a corner by confining the content of perception to the brain where the causal process which was supposed to convey it was excluded. For Hobbes it was no more than matter and motion appearing to us as “fancy”; Locke alleged that we could only know our own ideas; and Russell declared that what we perceived was our own grey matter. If that were so they could have no means of knowing whence our percepts originated, what were their causes were, or whether they corresponded to anything other than themselves. The claims of these philosophers to elucidate these matters, then, contradicted their own theories. Are the neuro-physiologists in any better case? They tell us that the source of our consciousness is the body, and that the feeling of the body is perceived when we attend to special features of it (in Damasio’s exposition, when the bodily condition is altered by the effect upon it of an external object). But how can we (or he) come to know this if what we perceive is only that in our own feeling to which we attend? We feel it as the sensation of our bodily parts, but how can we be assured that we are not deceived? This is Descartes’s question, and he found no better answer than was provided by his conviction of God’s benevolent refusal to deceive him. For us, the answer will depend on how we conceive the content of sentience and its relation to the body, the condition of which and to its changes it purports to reveal to us. This, again, will depend on how we conceive the nature of sentience itself. To answer the relevant questions will not be easy and may well be largely speculative. The best we can hope for is that we may be able to reach a coherent theory that does not, by implication, contradict itself and the possibility of ever reaching it or discovering its truth.

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NOTES 1 Cf. C.O. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness (London, G.Allen and

Unwin, 1970), Chs.3 and 4.

2 Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 45.

3 Op. cit., Ch. 3.

4 Ibid., p. 52f.