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WE KNOW THE MEANING OF “CONSCIOUSNESS” SO LONG AS NO ONE ASKS US TO DEFINE IT

   The term “consciousness” is generally used to refer to an individual’s awareness of his or her own thoughts, including sensations, feelings, and memories.We usually take this awareness for granted, except when we are having difficulties – such as trying to do something when we are very tired.

   But if you focus your thoughts on your consciousness, you soon become aware that your conscious experiences are constantly changing. While reading this book, for example, you may be reminded of past experiences or present discomforts that interrupt your concentration; plans for the future may spontaneously spring to mind.

   Thinking about your conscious experiences makes you realize just how much your thoughts are changing, and yet they seem to come together, merging and carrying on smoothly as a whole.American psychologist William James compared these everyday experiences of consciousness to a stream that continuously flows, despite the odd interruption and change of direction.

   He declared: “A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness…”. James’s famous description of the “stream… of consciousness” is one that almost everyone can identify with, because we all experience it.

   Yet, at the same time, James points out that it is very hard to actually define: “When I say every thought is part of a personal consciousness, ‘personal consciousness’ is one of the terms in question… to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks”. This “most difficult of philosophic tasks” has a long history.

   The ancient Greeks discussed the mind, but did not use the term “consciousness” or any equivalent.However, there was debate as to whether something separate from the body exists at all.
In the 4th century BCE, Plato made a distinction between the soul and the body, but Aristotle argued that even if there is a distinction, the two cannot be separated.

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"Consciousness… does not appear to itself chopped up in bits… It is nothing jointed; it flows."
                     ——William James

Early definitions

   René Descartes, in the mid-17th century, was one of the first philosophers to attempt to describe consciousness, proposing that it resides in an immaterial(无形的) domain he called “the realm of thought”, in contrast to the physical domain of material things, which he called “the realm of extension”.

   However, the first person accredited with the modern concept of consciousness as an ongoing passage of individual perceptions is the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. James was drawn to Locke’s idea of passing perceptions and also to the work of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

   Kant was impressed by the way our experiences come together, noting that if we hear a noise and feel pain at the same time, we typically experience these as one event. He called this the “unity of consciousness”, a concept that influenced many later philosophers, including William James.

   James felt the most important point about consciousness is that it is not a “thing” but a process – it is what the brain does to “steer a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself”. It allows us to reflect upon the past, present, and future, to plan and adapt to circumstances and so fulfil what he believed was the prime purpose of consciousness – to stay alive.

   But James found it hard to imagine the structure of a unified consciousness. He likened(把...比作) it to a group of 12 men: “Take a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each give one word.Then stand the men in a row or jam, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence”.

   If consciousness is a stream of distinct thoughts, James struggled to see how these combine.As he said, “The idea of a plus the idea of b is not identical with the idea of (a + b)”.Two thoughts added together cannot be made into one idea.They are more likely to form an entirely new idea.

   For example, if thought a is “it’s nine o’clock”, and thought b is “the train leaves at 9:02”, thought c – “I’m going to miss my train!” – might follow.

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   The 12-word sentence problem was used by James to illustrate his difficulty in grasping how a unified consciousness stems from separate thoughts.If each man is aware of just one word, how can there be a consciousness of the whole sentence?

Combining thoughts

   James concluded that the simplest way to understand how thoughts within the stream of consciousness might combine to make sense is to suppose “that things that are known together are known in single pulses of that stream”. Some thoughts, or sensations, he believed, are unavoidably connected, like Kant’s example of hearing a noise and feeling pain at precisely the same time,because any thoughts that enter our awareness during the same moment of time combine to form a pulse, or current, within the stream.

   We may have many of these currents flowing through our consciousness, some fast and some slow. James stated that there are even resting points, where we pause to form pictures in our minds, which can be held and contemplated at length.

   He called the resting places “substantive(实质的) parts”, and the moving currents the “transitive parts”, claiming that our thinking is constantly being dislodged(使移位)from one substantive part towards another, propelled by the transitive parts, or current.We are, therefore, effectively “bumped” from one conclusion to another by the constant stream of thoughts, whose purpose is to pull us ever forwards in this way.

   There is no final conclusion; consciousness is not a thing but a process, which is constantly evolving.James also drew attention to the personal nature of consciousness, stating that thoughts do not exist independently of a thinker – they are your thoughts or mine.Each one is “owned” by someone, and never “comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own”.

   And it is these thoughts “connected as we feel them to be connected” that form the self. As thoughts cannot be divided from the self, James said that investigating this self should be the starting point of psychology.Experimental psychologists did not agree, because “the self” cannot be offered up for experimentation, but James thought it was enough to work with our understanding of a self that does certain things and feels in certain ways.

   He called this the “empirical self”, which manifests itself through its behaviour, and suggested that it consists of several parts – the material self, spiritual self, and social self – each of which can be studied through introspection(自省). "No-one ever had a simple sensation by itself: consciousness… is of a teeming(大量的) multiplicity(多样性) of objects and relations."

William James

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   Dots of pure colour make up this work by the French, Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. Yet our brain combines these separate elements so that what we see is a human figure.

Theory of emotion

   In the early stages of his research into consciousness, James realized that the emotions play an important role in our daily lives, and went on to develop, with his colleague Carl Lange, a theory about how they relate to our actions and behaviour. What was to become known as the James–Lange Theory of Emotion states that emotions arise from your conscious mind’s perception of your physiological condition.

   To illustrate this theory, James used the example of seeing a bear, then running away.It is not the case that you see the bear, feel afraid, and then run away because of the fear.What is really happening is that you see the bear and run away, and the conscious feeling of fear is caused by the action of running.

   This contradicts what most people might think, but James’s view was that the mind’s perception of the physical effects of running – rapid breathing, increased heartbeat, and perspiring heavily – is translated into the emotion of fear.Another example, according to James’s theory, would be that you feel happy because you are conscious that you are smiling; it is not that you feel happy first, and then smile.

Pragmatism

   Related to James’s theories about consciousness is his approach to the way we believe things to be true or not. He stated that “truths emerge from facts… but… the ‘facts’ themselves meanwhile are not true; they simply are.Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them”.

   James defined “true beliefs” as those that the believer finds useful. This emphasis on the usefulness of beliefs lies at the heart of the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism(实用主义), which was central to James’s thinking. In the course of our lives, James claimed that we are continually testing “truths” against each other, and our conscious beliefs keep changing, as “old truths” are modified, and sometimes replaced by “new truths”.

   This theory is particularly relevant to the way that all scientific research, including psychology, progresses.James cited the discovery of the radioactive element radium by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1902 as an example. In the course of their investigations, the Curies found that radium appeared to give off unlimited amounts of energy, which “seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature”.

   However, after conscious consideration of this revelation, they concluded that “although it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature”.In this instance, the Curies’ scientific knowledge had been questioned and modified, but its core truths remained intact.

"There is but one indefectibly(无瑕疵地) certain truth… the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists."
                     ——William James

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   Pierre and Marie Curie’s research, like most scientific work, modified, rather than totally contradicted, earlier theories. New “truths”, James claimed, constantly modify our basic beliefs in a similar way.

Further studies

   The period following James’s death saw the rise of the behaviourist movement, and a decline of interest in consciousness. Consequently, little theorizing on the subject happened from around the start of the 1920s up until the 1950s. One important exception was the German-based Gestalt movement, which emphasized that the brain operates in a holistic(整体的) way, taking account of whole conscious experiences, rather than separate events– just as when we look at a picture, we see not just separate dots, lines, and shapes, but a meaningful whole.

   This concept is behind the now famous Gestalt phrase: “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. Since the 1980s, however, psychologists and neuroscientists(神经系统科学家) have developed a new field of research called “consciousness studies”, focusing on two main areas of interest: the content of consciousness, as reported by people who are considered to be normal and healthy; and the consciousness of people whose state of awareness has been impaired in some way.

   The latter group includes cases, such as when the subject is in a “persistent vegetative(植物人的) state” (PVS) – in which patients in a coma(昏迷) are awake and breathing independently, but have apparently lost all higher brain functions. The goal with both paths of research is to try to find ways of assessing consciousness as objectively as possible, and to understand its underlying mechanisms – both physical and psychological.

   Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that there are mechanisms of consciousness. By the closing years of the 20th century, the British molecular biologist and biophysicist Francis Crick was claiming that consciousness is related to a specific part of the brain– the prefrontal(额叶前部的) cortex(皮层) area, which is involved in thought processes such as planning, problem-solving, and the control of behaviour.

   Research carried out by the Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Linas links consciousness to the activities of the thalamus(丘脑) in conjunction with the cerebral(大脑的)cortex. The thalamus, a structure embedded deep in the centre of the brain, is responsible for regulating vibrations(振动) inside the brain at certain frequencies; if these regular rhythms are disrupted – by an infection or genetic causes – then an individual may experience neurological disorders, such as epilepsy(癫痫) and Parkinson’s disease, as well as psychological conditions, such as depression.

   But when it comes to definitions of consciousness, modern attempts still remain vague and difficult to apply. For example, the American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls consciousness “the feeling of what happens”, and defines it as “an organism’s awareness of its own self and its surroundings”. As William James suggested, more than 100 years earlier, consciousness is hard to define.

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   MRI scans of the brain have helped to identify structures such as the thalamus, seen in the centre of this scan, that appear to have links to consciousness.

Lasting legacy

   An edited version of James’s 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, is still in print, and his ideas have been a major influence on many psychologists, as well as other scientists and thinkers.

   The application of his pragmatic philosophy to facts – concentrating not on what is “true” but on what it is “useful to believe”– has helped psychology move on from the question of whether the mind and body are separate or not to a more useful study of mental processes, such as attention, memory, reasoning, imagination, and intention.

   James claimed his approach helped to move philosophers and psychologists “away from abstraction, fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins, towards facts, action, and power”. His insistence on focusing on the wholeness of events, including the effects of different environments on our actions– in contrast to the introspective, structuralist approach of breaking down our experiences into small details – has also shaped our understanding of behaviour.

   Before James started teaching the subject at Harvard in 1875, there were no independent psychology courses available in any American university. But within 20 years, around 24 universities and colleges in the USA had recognized psychology as a distinct academic discipline, and were offering degrees in the subject.

   Three specialist psychology journals were also founded in that time, and a professional organization – the American Psychological Association – was formed. James introduced experimental psychology to America, despite claiming to “hate experimental work”.

   He did so because he had come to realize that it was the best way to prove or disprove(反驳) a theory.But he continued to value the use of introspection as a tool of discovery, especially of mental processes.The shift in the perception of psychology and its concerns from being considered, “a nasty little subject” (in James’s words) into a vastly beneficial discipline owes much to his work.

   In 1977, in a speech celebrating the 75th anniversary of the formation of the American Psychological Association, David Krech,then Professor Emeritus in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, referred to James as the “father of psychology”.

"All these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views.Properly they are but one protracted(延长的) consciousness, one unbroken stream."
                     ——William James

MORE TO KNOW…

APPROACH

Analysis of consciousness

BEFORE

• 1641 René Descartes defines consciousness of self in terms of the ability to think.
• 1690 English philosopher and physician John Locke defines consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind”.
• 1781 German philosopher Immanuel Kant states that simultaneous events are experienced as a “unity of consciousness”.

AFTER

• 1923 Max Wertheimer in Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms shows how the mind actively interprets images.
• 1925 John B. Watson dismisses consciousness as “neither a definite nor a usable concept”.

WILLIAM JAMES

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   William James was born in 1842 to a wealthy and influential New York family, and travelled widely as a child, attending schools in both Europe and the USA.James showed early artistic ability and initially pursued a career as a painter, but his growing interest in science eventually led to him to enrol at Harvard University in 1861.

   By 1864, he had moved to Harvard Medical School, although his studies were interrupted by bouts of physical illness and depression.He finally qualified as a physician in 1869, but never practised medicine.In 1873, James returned to Harvard, where he became a professor of both philosophy and psychology.

   He set up the first experimental psychology courses in the USA, playing a key role in establishing psychology as a truly scientific discipline.He retired in 1907, and died peacefully at his home in New Hampshire in 1910.

Key works

• 1890 The Principles of Psychology
• 1892 Psychology
• 1897 The Will to Believe