My name is Jim Watson, and I have set up these web pages to offer yet another forum for discussing
what philosophers of mind today call ‘the hard problem’ – namely, whether or not the subjective
experience of ‘consciousness’ can somehow be generated by the neural processes that go on in the
brain and the rest of the central nervous system. I, for one, don’t believe that it can.
Most of today’s philosophers of mind – in the West, at any rate – are monists, with physicalism
(materialism, naturalism, emergentism, according to preference) and idealism (revitalised in some
ways by the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum theory) being the most popular
positions. Physicalists maintain that everything that exists in the real world, including mental
experience, is physical, and idealists maintain, by and large, that the real world exists only in the mind.
Both of these positions have been defended vigorously throughout the years, but very little progress
with our understanding of the ontological nature of the real world (as distinct from our understanding
of its physical nature) has actually been made since the Greeks started the debate more than 2500
years ago.
I believe that the seeds of the difficulty were sown at the very beginning in the mould-breaking ideas of
those early thinkers. It was the Atomists who suggested that the world consisted of tiny particles kept
in motion by an external power, a vision that led eventually (via Aristotle and the ‘fathers’ of the early
Semitic Churches) to our Western science-based paradigm of reality (which, unlike the Vedic belief
systems of Eastern cultures, takes the view that the world – indeed, the whole Universe – is something
essentially physical that we can stand away from and observe).
This picture of reality, unfortunately, is past its sell-by date. It deals only with our perceptions of
physical reality, ignoring the fact that – because we are an integral part of the system we are
observing – those perceptions are heavily influenced by our subjective beliefs and attitudes. It seems
to me, therefore, that the Western paradigm is urgently in need of revision, and also that the missing
subjective input may be the key to a better understanding of the experience of consciousness. In
recent years some theorists (notably Geoffrey Chew, David Bohm and Sir Roger Penrose) have
pondered the possibilities of developing the role of consciousness as an element of reality, but no-one
has yet suggested a convincing role for it in a coherent ‘world view’.
The missing subjective data (interpretations, judgements and so forth) are obtained by introspection
rather than by observation of the external world, and in consequence are often dismissed as
‘metaphysical’ irrelevancies. This, however, is a fundamental error (perhaps the fundamental error in
this context?) because authentic metaphysical arguments require the same rigorous thinking as
scientific ones – the really important difference being in the source and content of the initial premises.
Metaphysics, sadly, has acquired an evil reputation over the centuries, because the word – originally
coined to identify those works of Aristotle that were catalogued ‘after physics’ – is often used loosely to
cover all kinds of irrational things, from religion to fortune-telling, and from spiritualism to magic. Its
real business today, however, is mainly with ontology, epistemology and ethics, which are eminently
respectable activities that deal with our judgements about the nature of the world around us, the
validity of our knowledge about it, and the moral questions that arise as we live in it. It seems to me,
indeed, that if we want to build a picture of reality that will meet our modern needs we shall have to
brave the anger of the scientific establishment by redefining philosophy (usually described, after all,
as “the pursuit of knowledge”) to include both science and metaphysics – to return, in a way, to the
idea of what used to be called ‘natural philosophy’.
Such a holistic view of the nature of the world, and of our own place in it, produces a change in our
perception of some of the seemingly insoluble puzzles that face us today. There is a parallel, for
example, between the energy/matter dichotomy of physics (especially in quantum theory) and the
mind/body dichotomy of ‘philosophy’, which suggests that another purely ‘physical’ theory of the kind
Einstein was seeking in his later years - or a modern 'Theory of Everything', for that matter - will not be
sufficiently wide-ranging to solve our problems. What we need instead is a whole new paradigm of
reality that will accommodate theories about mental as well as physical phenomena, and will
incorporate a plausible role for consciousness.
Paradigm shifts rarely involve the collection of new data – it is mainly the assumptions about existing
data that change. To look for a new paradigm here, therefore, calls for an ontological analysis of our
present assumptions about reality, an approach that will also illustrate how metaphysical techniques
can illuminate empirical ‘scientific’ data. I want now to offer such an analysis.
Ontologists are philosophers who attempt to categorise elements of the world as they perceive it, and
they are traditionally allowed to choose the categories that best suit their purposes. The system I shall
use here divides entities into real and fictional, concrete and abstract, and material and non-material.
Real entities, unlike fictional ones, exist in their own right, either as physical or as mental phenomena.
Real concrete entities can be perceived by the normal senses; real abstract entities exist only in
individual minds. Some concrete entities, like rocks and human bodies, are material; others, like
magnetic energy and music, are non-material, but their concrete nature is confirmed by the impact of
their effects upon us as perceived via our senses. All abstract entities, of course, are non-material.
(The importance of recognising the existence of concrete non-material entities, incidentally, will
become apparent when we are discussing the nature of consciousness later in this article).
A New Reality
We can now begin to develop our new paradigm by allocating ‘scientific’ data to the above categories.
Every one of us – and, for that matter, probably every living creature – has a different perception of
the external world (of which his own body is a part). The perception always remains an abstract
mental representation of what is observed, filtered by the senses: neither the concrete world itself nor
any objective ‘truth’ about it can ever be known to the observer. No two perceptions, moreover, are
identical – even for individuals of the same species.
In the ontological framework I have set out above this means that each of us is aware of not one but
two ‘worlds’, the concrete one that makes a direct impact on us via our senses, and the abstract one
we create in our minds on the basis of our sensory observations. I believe that recognising the
difference between them is the key to a better understanding of both the nature of reality and the
subjective experience of consciousness.
In order to proceed further with this argument I need a name for the unfamiliar theoretical framework I
am using. The simplest thing is probably to speak of a new ‘Two Worlds’ paradigm – not to be
confused, of course, with Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics! I shall
shortly be using the framework of a Two Worlds paradigm to examine our existing assumptions about
the experience of consciousness, but, as that is only one aspect of our experience of reality in
general, I think we must first see what new assumptions we may have to make about the ‘objective’
data on which we base our interpretation of the wider picture.
The most intractable problem in this whole area is the alleged incompatibility of relativity and quantum
theory. The ‘counterintuitive’ picture of submicroscopic reality that is presented to us by quantum
mechanics appears to defy rational explanation, yet we feel that it must somehow describe the world at
those levels because it predicts practical events with such fantastic accuracy that physicists and
engineers now use it without question in their calculations. The result is that key features of the
theory, such as the wavefunctions of the systems concerned, seem to be widely accepted as concrete
elements (rather than simply representations) of reality.
Thinking within the Two Worlds paradigm suggests that to make this assumption is a fatal mistake, but
we make it, nevertheless, largely because the dimensions of the submicroscopic world described by
quantum theory are so small that we cannot (yet) obtain substantial empirical evidence about its
nature. We are therefore forced to rely almost entirely on a mathematical representation of it – which,
of course, exists only in the abstract world of our minds – and we accordingly risk ‘mistaking the map
for the territory’.
Mathematics, indeed, can be a very dangerous instrument if its essentially tautological nature is not
borne in mind. It was Sir Arthur Eddington who said: “In physics everything depends on the insight
with which things are handled before they reach the mathematical stage”, and I believe that it is partly
the elegance of the quantum mathematics that has misled us in our interpretation of the nature of the
submicroscopic world. It is no coincidence that the Heisenberg and Schrödinger equations are both
based on mathematics developed by William Hamilton a century earlier to describe the motion of
waves and particles at the same time, his equations being designed to describe the total energy of
any closed system containing two interdependent variables. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the
quantum equations derived from them should express the reciprocity of the values of any such pair of
variables – the feature that is central to Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’. This reciprocity,
moreover, is not incompatible with relativity theory.
A second area of confusion arises within the concrete world itself when we consider the wave/particle
‘puzzle’ that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. It is my belief that this ambivalence is simply an
unfamilar but otherwise normal feature of the behaviour exhibited under 'stress' by these
submicroscopic entities (I suggest, incidentally, that from now on we call them energons to avoid the
clumsy ‘wave/particle’ circumlocution) and that the results of the celebrated Bell-Aspect experiments
have been distorted by the effects of the measuring processes. It was Einstein himself, after all, who
demonstrated the interconvertibility of mass and energy, and the idea that energons should exhibit
instability at or near the mass/energy threshold is again not inconsistent with relativity theory,
especially when one considers the evidence from high-energy physics experiments, in which particles
can be observed to ‘flip’ in and out of material existence at the drop of a hat.
Einstein actually described matter particles as “condensations of energy”, which further emphasises
the ontological distinction between the concrete material nature of the particles and the concrete non-
material nature of energy, as well as the ambivalence that appears to exist at the interface between
the two states. This view of the nature of energons, moreover, seems to be quite consistent with what
modern string theory suggests about the underlying reasons for their structural differences.
My conclusion, therefore, (and it is likely to be wildly unpopular!), is that Einstein’s “world of real
objects” instinct was probably right after all, and that there is no good reason to assume that the real
world is any less relativistic at submicroscopic levels than at what are often called ‘classical’ levels,
where we observe it with our normal senses.
Focus on Consciousness
Having reached this conclusion about the nature of reality in general, we are at last in a position to
revert to our primary purpose, which is to investigate the nature of the important element that is
currently missing – the subjective experience of consciousness. This leads us at once to another
famous and puzzling dichotomy – namely, the one that produces the ‘mind/body’ problem. I’m afraid
that in this case my ontological analysis is even less likely to be well received, because it rejects all the
popular monist approaches in favour of a dualistic philosophy.
The central plank of my philosophy is that living creatures are ontologically different from everything
else in our world. The difference, moreover, lies in the very phenomenon we are considering at the
moment – the possession of ‘consciousness’ (though we shall be considering what this means in a
moment). This difference has been pointed out in various ways. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has
said, memorably, that there is “something that it is like” to be a bat, but “nothing that it is like” to be an
inanimate object, and the same must surely hold for every sentient creature. Then there is the
haunting story about a worried student who approached his professor after listening to a lecture on
the nature of reality. “Please tell me”, he begged. “Do I really exist?” The professor looked at him
thoughtfully. “Who wants to know?”, he enquired.
I don’t think I can improve on those two insights. Both the entity who “wants to know” in the case of the
student and the one who feels “what it is like” in the case of the bat obviously have a real existence,
and I need to call them both by a name that indicates this. The name I prefer is the self – the ‘living
self’ of my web site – which avoids the undesirable associations of other options like ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’.
So, as I said above, I am now defending a highly unpopular dualist position, but one in which the
duality is not between the body and the mind, but between the (concrete material) body and the
(concrete non-material) self.
Anyone holding dualistic beliefs today, of course, has to show that the identity he envisages for
himself – or for other living creatures – does not appear to include Gilbert Ryle’s celebrated “ghost in
the machine.” I believe that my particular brand of dualism avoids most of the difficulties that haunt
the Cartesian variety – or any other model based on an act of faith, for that matter – because it does
not posit a mind, soul or spirit as a component or feature of the human being. Instead, it rests on the
proposition – which I hope is entirely rational – that all living organisms can be seen to be (not 'have',
you will observe) non-material but concrete selves, and that each of these selves has an awareness
and an autonomy that enable it to interact with its surroundings in ways typical of its species. Come to
think of it, my ‘dualism’ is really more of a trialism – not a Cartesian mind/body dichotomy, in other
words, but a trichotomy of self, body and mind.
This concept of the self, in fact, actually circumvents the intractable mind/body problem, which is
essentially the puzzle of how the non-material mind can possibly influence (and be influenced by) the
material body. The problem, as I see it, exists only because of the assumptions we have made about
the mind. Descartes described it as an immaterial “thinking substance”, and he and many others
since have taken a similar view. (Even Freud, who stressed the importance of what he called “the
unconscious”, believed that the conscious ego retained control of the wayward elements that he
postulated as existing at the deepest levels of the human 'personality').
My model looks at the mind in a completely different way. I believe that the self is operating
ceaselessly – mainly at subconscious levels – using the brain and the rest of the central nervous
system as its ‘apparatus’ for processing the sensory information involved in the body’s two-way
interactions with the rest of the concrete world. That model then allows us to use the word ‘mind’ with
the two principal meanings we employ in everyday conversation – namely, the self’s capacity for
awareness (“She has an excellent mind”), and the content or state of that awareness (“His mind was
devoid of ideas!”. “My mind is made up”.) Whatever it is that enables my body to interact with the
world around me, therefore, it certainly isn’t my mind. The real actor in the drama, constantly
‘managing’ both my mind and my body, can only be my concrete non-material self.
This view of the relationship between self, body and mind is supported by modern brain-scanning
evidence, which confirms that the vast majority of our mental activities take place in our subconscious
minds (it is the never-ceasing neural processes, controlled without our knowledge in our limbic
systems and brain-stems, that keep us alive). Thinking, which is central to the Cartesian dichotomy,
becomes merely one of the self’s many activities – and a subsidiary one at that – instead of their
instigator. All in all, I believe that adopting a dualistic philosophy - acknowledging the presence of a
concrete but non-material self - is the only way to avoid creating the mind/body problem.
The idea of a non-material element being a part of our makeup has been around since the earliest
times – no doubt because of an instinct for self-identification by prehistoric man in the frightening
world around him, and later in more sophisticated forms like the Vedic Atman, the ‘soul’ of the
Semitic religions, and the ‘mind’ of Descartes. But in my belief system, my self is not a mystical part of
me: it is me – the totality of the being that has been familiar to me all my life.
My self, too, clearly continues to exist whether I am thinking about myself or not. It is my self that
drives my car while my mind is on something completely different, feels my needs and emotions before
I am consciously aware of them, and contrives to maintain my body in homeostasis entirely without my
conscious intervention. My self must be ontologically non-material, moreover, because it cannot be
isolated as a physical entity, but it must also be concrete because it has effects that are detectable by
the senses. Why, then, does the idea of its existence meet with such scorn?
The most obvious reason is that our experience of its workings, as I have said, is largely
subconscious. What we think of as our ‘consciousness’ is strictly speaking an awareness of self and
surroundings that develops from sensory signals received initially at subconscious levels. Our periods
of conscious awareness are relatively few and far between, and modern neurophysiological work has
demonstrated that what we think of as a conscious perception is actually the result of a subconscious
one ‘breaking through’ to the level of conscious thought – normally in about half a second. I prefer,
incidentally, to call such processes 'subconscious', reserving the word 'unconscious' to describe states
like sleep or coma in which the conscious mind is virtually out of action.
A more fundamental reason, perhaps, for the widespread antagonism to the idea of the self has also
been mentioned earlier – namely, that the current Western view of reality is incomplete, which makes it
extremely difficult for the idea of a non-material self to attain respectability. The uneasy feeling that
the self may exist, however, sometimes challenges the rational beliefs of the materialist philosopher,
and he is then forced to retreat from the ‘scientifically unthinkable’ into one of four main positions: (a)
the self is a fiction that doesn’t exist; (b) the self exists but its nature is beyond human comprehension;
(c) the self exists because we are created in the image of God; (d) the self is a name for the subjective
experience of consciousness that somehow emerges from the complexity of our physiological
structure. I don’t believe that any of these positions makes sense: Occam’s razor suggests that it is
far more likely that every self exists simply because it is created by its parent(s).
Yet another reason why it is difficult to argue for the reality of the self is that we can find nothing with
which to compare it, which is what we usually do when we are trying to convey our picture of something
to someone who has not experienced it. “The world is shaped like an orange”, we say. Or “I feel as if I’
m floating on air!” But the self is unique in that there is nothing that it remotely resembles – except, of
course, another self – and we are therefore forced to argue for its existence in some other way. This,
fortunately, is not so difficult: we know the living self exists because we perceive its concrete effects in
the real world – as when a human being sings a song or a salmon leaps up a waterfall.
We are clear, then, that the self is not another name for consciousness – it is the entity that
possesses ‘consciousness’, and we have all conspired to make the ‘hard problem’ even harder by
failing to distinguish the various ways in which we use the word. We can discuss them here, however,
the most important meaning being what I shall call Consciousness A – the total awareness, however
simple, that can be regarded as typical of any given species in normal circumstances. The human
version of Consciousness A therefore embraces all the information contained in our conscious and
subconscious minds, as well as the opinions, attitudes and so forth that arise from it, and the
conscious and subconscious processes that deal with it – including those that culminate in thought,
speech and physical activity.
The second meaning of ‘consciousness’ that is relevant here refers to the workings of the conscious
(as opposed to the subconscious) mind. I shall call this Consciousness B, the limited state of human
awareness concerned mainly with communication (the use of language), reasoning (the use of logic)
and computation (the use of mathematics) – in other words, with what have come to be called
‘computational’ activities. Consciousness B – which appears to meet Artificial Intelligence
requirements – does not include subconscious processes, and is therefore only a part of
Consciousness A.
A third way in which we use the same word (Consciousness C) is to distinguish the waking state of
people or animals from sleep, coma and the like. And this is not a trivial meaning: neurophysiological
findings confirm that the distinction is intimately related to the working of the deep-seated mechanisms
that keep our bodies alive.
It seems fairly clear, then, that any rational discussion of the ‘consciousness’ of a self – human or
otherwise – must be concerned primarily with what I have called Consciousness A, which gives due
importance to the primacy of the subconscious. This suggests, among other things, that the dream of
building a fully conscious machine will never be realised.
Thinking for a moment about my own self, its essential identity remains unchanged throughout my
lifetime, neither wearing out like my body nor readjusting constantly to current circumstances like my
mind. It learns continuously from experience, however, because it possesses a general awareness of
its internal condition and of circumstances in the outside world. Such learning, of course, will cease
when my body dies – the ‘disembodied’ self will no longer be able to receive sensory messages –
though there seems to be no a priori reason why it may not be able to survive after that, at least for a
while, in possession of the knowledge it has already acquired.
The Other Internet
If we compare the human animal with other living organisms we see at once that most of them seem to
sense external stimuli in much the same way as we do (often more effectively!), and some – at least
some animals – even seem to experience feelings that verge on emotions. Most of our fundamental
life processes, too, such as our reproductive and metabolic mechanisms, although highly specific in
character to our own species, have parallels throughout the living world, even in organisms where
those processes are controlled by the simplest of nervous systems. Looking at the myriads of life
forms around us, all following their own cycles of birth and death, it is almost impossible not to believe
that they are all animated by the same ‘life force’ as we are, and that each individual organism,
however remote from ourselves in physiological terms, exhibits at least some measure of the
awareness and autonomy that we recognise as the hallmark of a separate ‘self’.
Unless we are idealist philosophers, or physicists who accept the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics – which suggests that the existence of the real world depends on the presence of
an observer – we probably accept the premise that you and I (and my dog, for that matter!), are
actually looking out of different pairs of eyes at the same realities. We observe one another
interacting with our surroundings, recognising people and things, understanding and learning in our
separate ways – in fact, learning from much the same experiences, though the content of what we
learn, and our responses to it, may be very different. It is difficult not to conclude that we are all,
broadly speaking, participants in the same drama.
The goals of every species, moreover, seem to be so similar that it is tempting to think that the
individual self may be in touch with something 'outside itself'. In other words, it may conceivably have
‘extrasensory’ means of communicating with other selves. It seems significant that the nervous
systems of organisms of the same species are so similar that doctors and physiologists can learn
practically all there is to know about them by dissecting only a few individuals, and it is very hard to
believe that these almost identical neural structures are not capable of communicating with one
another at subliminal levels – perhaps even across species boundaries.
No-one, as far as I know, has yet been able to produce any ‘scientific’ evidence to support this
suggestion, but it is always possible, of course, that ‘scientific’ evidence may be the wrong thing to
look for. As I said earlier, Western science is very uncomfortable with any kind of subjective data, and
the researchers may be missing evidence of ‘extrasensory perception’ that might be forthcoming if
they were to study the transmission of feelings rather than images of pictures or numbers. Feelings,
after all, are generated in the subconscious, and often fail to register at the conscious level.
The idea of subliminal communication can lead us to an even deeper question: can our relationships
with other living creatures be even closer than that of actors communicating on the same stage? We
have established that ‘I am my self’, but might that self be not a wholly separate entity at all, but rather
an individual manifestation of some kind of global presence that permeates the whole of the living
world? My conscious perceptions of what is going on do nothing to suggest to me that I may be
sharing my identity in that way, but the challenging idea that I may have been mistaken in this, and
that I may actually be a fragment of a ‘global self’, opens up new possibilities and suggests plausible
answers for some of the questions that have occupied philosophers for many generations.
The concept of a ‘global awareness’, of course, is not new. It has appeared in many guises, from the
‘great spirit’ of the animistic belief systems and the Brahman of the Vedic religions to more modern
variants such as Hegel’s 'Geist', Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, De Chardin’s ‘noosphere’, Bergson’s
‘élan vital’ and Lovelock’s ‘Gaia.’ The ‘global self’ I am talking about now, however, is none of those
things – not a deity, not a vestigial collective memory, and not a goal-directed spirit (unless the goal,
perhaps, is learning). It is a non-material global entity that may connect not only with the human
individual, but also with every other member of the living world, rather as non-material global forces
like gravitation or magnetism interact with individual concrete objects.
If such a global self exists it seems logical to assume that it is influencing (and probably being
influenced by) the autonomous self-serving actions of its trillions of individual ‘satellites’ – which
implies, incidentally, that, unlike the Deity of the Semitic religions, it cannot be either omnipotent or
omniscient. We have little or no conscious awareness, of course, that a global self may be affecting
our lives in this way, but it may well be that the idea persists so stubbornly in virtually every culture on
Earth because there have always been people (and other animals) who can sense that they are part
of something external to – and also much greater than – themselves.
It seems likely, to take the idea one step further, that an individual member of such a global community
might be aware of its own ‘centrality’ in a dynamic self-organising Universe of the type suggested by
Ernst Mach, echoing the unique perspective of the individual observer in Einstein’s relativity theory.
This suggests that (like the Jains) we should see other living organisms as extensions of ourselves,
which would have very interesting secular implications for moral behaviour. In a world in which the
individual self has freedom of action constrained only by ‘natural’ forces and the actions of other living
organisms, one might even venture to suggest a new ‘Extended Self Imperative’ as an alternative to
the ‘Categorical Imperative’ of Immanuel Kant. It might be worded: “Moral actions are actions that one
believes to be in one’s own best interests, provided those are extended to include what one sees as
the best interests of other living things.”
There we are, then. I realise, of course, that much of what I am saying will not be widely applauded,
but I would be delighted to hear from anyone who finds it worth discussing
(c) James Naylor Watson 2005
e-mail: jimwatson@thelivingself.com
The above article treats 'consciousness' as the total awareness of self and surroundings that is the defining
characteristic of all living organisms, and suggests that to begin to understand its relation to reality we need to
remember the difference between the concrete world of our direct sensory experience and the abstract world we create
in our minds. The implications of that distinction are examined in my book The Secret Self, which also explores such
disparate matters as the contrast between Eastern and Western attitudes to knowledge, the wave/particle ambiguity
that underlies the puzzles of quantum mechanics, the neurophysiology of the brain and the rest of the central nervous
system, the celebrated mind/body conundrum, the degree to which self-awareness may exist in other living
organisms, the extent to which we can hope to develop intelligent machines, and - surely most important of all - the
implications of all those things for moral behaviour
Click here to view pdf version of The Secret Self
The Living Self - Consciousness and Reality
Jim Watson
Jim Watson
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