Being Aware
Reflections on Consciousness, Identity, and the Hard Problem
For as long as I remember, I didn’t know that I was concerned with my identity. I was concerned with myself and others, but an identity to me was just a passing fashion. In looking back, I see an image of myself which I exuded a general confidence, yet I am not sure if I’m recalling there how others saw how I saw myself, or if it is indeed me that I am seeing. The feeling I get when I look back is that on the inside it was complete confusion —but I never wrestled with my own thoughts or feelings about identity that I knew of. Its probably more accurate that I was the wrestling; I don’t recall myself ever having an awareness that I was wrestling or struggling; only in hindsight am I embarrassed of how I felt inside.
Looking back, though I would not have recognized nor been able to admit it, I probably was so deeply concerned with what others thought about me that I spent much of my unconscious time and energy trying to figure out how I was supposed to be. I never asked myself why I am (or was) the person I am nor if there was a possibility of changing it. The notion of changing who I am was akin to having a goal of extinguishing the sun. I never asked myself what purpose my thoughts and feelings served simply (probably) because I was my thoughts and feelings, so my questioning was more about how it was possible that I am being this way, whatever way that was. My questioning was not about how I appear in the world, what appearance I am enacting (since I was that appearance) but how it is possible that I am indeed am this way (apparently) having to interact with appearances. But I wasn’t thinking this way (in philosophically correct terms) I was just being that way; again, only subsequently do I have a context.
I ponder if many other people are quite the opposite. I speculate that most people are more involved in the comparison that they see in the reflection, the reflection that is the social world. They reckon themselves as reflecting correctly or incorrectly, self-consciously, against the reflection. It is an odd thing this experience; it is a different thing to be the reflection to be thus concerned with how that which, basically, the reflecting is able to arise as such.
Some people give up the question, so oriented they are in the problem of what is given by the social world, and point to the brain…
Consciousness and the Subject
It is no coincidence then that I came to be curious in the subject of human consciousness. But more so, I was interested in the phenomena itself that makes subjects that we call consciousness. I was not interested in the subject of consciousness as much as I was interested in consciousness itself.
It is interesting to me that a person could me interested in the workings of the mind and not question the fact that the mind is indeed working to be questioned, that is, as though I can look out into the world and find ‘minds’ that I can be curious about. It is preposterously interesting and exceedingly ridiculous that I reflect upon to ponder my own mind as though they are separated enough that I could be able to have such a curiosity.
It seems incredible that anyone who’s interested in consciousness would be so swayed by a social definition and begin from there. Rules. It is weird to me that people would be so conscious about the rules that they spend their time comparing themselves to them as a way of being. Perhaps that is what I wrestled with, but I don’t really know; perhaps to wrestle is the being itself. How could I become aware of that?
It is also very interesting to me that he would associate consciousness, subjectivity, and awareness as though they are referring to the same thing. What would it mean to be aware that I am having consciousness? Even the word is, practically speaking, nearly duplicitous, as though it is hiding some kind of inherent dishonesty. Could I be conscious that I am aware?
When we go down this rabbit hole, it does start to appear sensible that someone would equate all this to a subject and start from there, which is to say, start with what other people are saying about the subject and compare myself to what they have to say about it. It is as though so stymied in their essential, basic, and developmental existence, such a person might have no other approach but back into words and subjects given to them by other people.
What happens if I can indeed be aware in a way that has nothing to do with the subject of consciousness? Is a subject of consciousness something I can be aware of? What kind of existence could that be?
The Hard Problem of Awareness
Thomas Nagel, an N.Y.U. philosopher, wrote a piece back in the ’70s called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” More or less, some have interpreted him to be suggesting that if we can imagine it is like anything to be a bat, then a bat is conscious, because that means it has some sort of subjective experience, but that we can’t really know what that is.
If we listen to what philosophers have said so far, then the subjective experience is the being that is aware of the subject of consciousness. If we listen, and compare, and agree, then for sure consciousness makes the mind-body problem intractable. But if this intractability is simply the case, like Ludwig Wittgenstein stated back in the 1920’s, then we could just as well as what it is like to be a cup and say just as much, but I am not sure if we would get anywhere toward consciousness, since the subject of consciousness, or a subject of a consciousness, is not the same as the subject of bat or a cup, or a cup or a bat (so ridiculous it gets), that is, unless we are hanging in definitions as the source of consciousness. Nagel ponders how he could not know what it is like to be his toaster or a bat (the animal) with echolocation ability. I’m not so sure I believe him. It seems to me he knows exactly what it is like, else he would have no basis to make his observation, which seems an odd contradiction for his argument. Still, as we ponder, we might still be left our in the lurch of being aware, as though I can only be subjectively aware, I guess. Consciousness seems only an intractable subject when everything is a subject and we discern what we are talking about through the definitions given us.
I am still wondering what being aware is though — or when I was ever aware at that!
As I sit here, still pondering, I am not sure why I could not have a sense of what it is like to be a toaster, but getting some sense of what it is like to be a bat seems a little easier. But then when I imagine some more, I do have a sense of being a toaster and a bat, though they are very different experiences. It’s like a kind of arrogance and presumptuousness to say I can’t or don’t. which incidentally, is exactly what Cartesian-Kantian phenomenalism amplifies, now to the point that we have people who are very smart saying things that, honestly, are quite epistemologically truncated.
The philosopher David Chalmers coined the notion of a “hard problem of consciousness”. Many people get into this discussion and find the intracible instance where once we ponder the distinction between mind and body we must encounter his hard problem. Well, the irony about this is that we indeed do not have to think about any of it. I am not even sure why it is a problem except that it occupies the interests of some people who, I suppose, spent a lot of time following rules and crafting their identities. Good for them. But are they speaking of me too? Do I have a hard problem of consciousness that I must contend with? Perhaps.
The question is very enlightening, for sure. That there is a problem that must be dealt with about separation between mind and body says something about the person asking it. I don’t really ask it because, I think as I posed earlier, it is less a problem that the basis from which I am able to do anything at all; it seeme the problem is that some people are having a problem with it. It seems that the person assumes that “we must” think about Chalmer’s Hard Problem. This seems very difficult, not really ‘hard’. I think of hard as intractable, like riding a skateboard under a branch that my heads fails to miss; the problem is that it hurt, and the difficulty is more that I should learn squat down a little deeper. That seems like a hard problem, the hardness of the branch hitting my head and my ass hitting the cement!
I imagine that it takes on a quality of being hard because they must think about the problem between matter and mind, that their thoughts seems like they are reaching the actual being of things. I wonder that Chalmers never engaged with Quentin Meillassoux’s bringing to notice the correlation going on there. But then I remember we are dealing with subjects of consciousness and their asserted identities, and then I understand why he didn’t. It seems for a subject of consciousness there can be no awareness that the problem is baked into the way we are thinking about things. Modern subjects can only ponder subjects, not so much the things themselves.
As the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard might have said: “interesting” but not really substantial.