When it comes to the philosophy of consciousness, philosophers sometimes like to trace the problem back through history to find where they went wrong. That is to say, if there is indeed a problem, the solution may not be to go forward but to go back, seeking a critical point where we made a wrong assumption or followed a train of thought not wholly logically.
If we are to go back in history, how far back must we go before we stumble on the source of the problem? At what point should we accept everything that came before and reject everything that came thereafter, substituting an alternate theory in its place?
The going consensus seems to be that we ought to stop at the dualism of Descartes. But Descartes didn’t invent dualism. Dualism was a mistake plaguing philosophers since the time of the Greeks. Descartes simply rendered his version of dualism as one of substances - mind and matter were two different substances - more importantly, the only two substances. The word ‘substance’ was undergoing significant changes in Descartes’ time - it came to bear similar connotations to “stuff” rather than the archaic Aristotelian connotation of that which underlies and makes possible “things” - and Descartes was making use of this new meaning to refine the concept of dualism in the hopes of making headway on the problem of consciousness. But not only do we need to undo this refinement of dualism, we need to do away with dualism all together - at least, that is my general agenda (it is not the agenda of this essay, however - the aim of which is, as the title makes clear, to trace the problem of consciousness to its source).
Dualism finds its roots in a time before philosophy itself. We need to go back to prehistoric times to understand where the problem began. Back then man recognized no difference between perception and reality, between thought and truth. Man did have a rudimentary idea of “mind” but it wasn’t the elaborate and flourished idea philosophers grapple with today. It was more or less synonymous with what we call the “imagination”. Man always had an imagination - and knew it. This is what eventually came to be known as “mind” today.
But the concept of the imagination was rather simple. Man did not have an extended concept of “perception” - that the world he saw might be illusory only, or that his eyes might deceive him. He had no concept of belief - he only knew truth. It may have been his truth, as we would rightly recognize it today, but for him it was the truth. In other words, all that man knew of mind, other than his imagination, was the variety of its projected forms. By ‘projection’, I mean the taking of our perceptions, or experience in general, as things in the outer world. This can be applied to ideas and emotions as well - ideas are projected as truth or fact, emotions as values or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (attributed to people, situations, self, life, etc.). There was no perception per se, but real things in the real world.
The concept of an unprojected form of experience is something that has been handed down to us by dualism. Experiences never really become unprojected, but we still find use in the concept. We use the concept in order to talk about mind and experience as opposed to real things in a real world, but we often fail to recognize these as things united with the real world rather than separate entities or a distinct phase they enter in and out of. The notion that we could ever be in the midst of contemplating a belief or perceiving some scenery while at the same time taking it as merely mental is absurd if not paradoxical. To regard it as mental may happen afterwards - that is, upon reflection - but in the midst is fully incoherent with the notion of, at the same time, taking it as something ‘mental’. Primitive man had no such concept as ‘mental’. The world was never ‘unprojected’ for him. The only thing ‘mental’ for him was the imagination.
But in regards to the imagination, what does it mean to say that man recognized it as ‘mind’? Was it something unprojected? No, it was projected as all other things, but it was the thing it was projected as that was different. Just as rocks and trees are real things, and 2+2=4 is a truth, and pain is bad and pleasure good, the imagination was really mental. Mind was a real thing. It didn’t take the same form as physical things, or absolute truths, or good and bad, but none of these things ever took the form of any other of these things. They were each comprised of their own unique ‘domains’ of reality.
But what made the imagination especially unique was that it was the domain of the ‘unreal’ - that is to say, everything we imagined, we duly recognized as not really there in the ‘real’ world. This is not to say it failed to project, but simply that, although the things therein were envisioned similarly to things in the world of sensation, they were not really there in the world of sensation. In other words, ‘unreal’ only means “not in the domain of sensory things” (in fact, it means not in any domain other than its own, but because the imagination is primarily a visualization faculty, it is to be contrast foremostly with the visual world).
This was an evolutionary necessity. It was necessary that we regard the imagination as unreal, as under our control, as ours. This was because of its primary function. Its function was to simulate the world of sensation such that we could form models of it and use those models to make predictions and gain better control of it. It was an inner laboratory, so to speak, in which we conducted thought experiments, testing the real world in a safe and controlled setting. But this required that we deem its contents unreal, for otherwise we’d be struck with alarm every time we imagined a predator or other kinds of dangers. We had to recognize that this wasn’t actually happening in the ‘real’ world, and that it was always under our control.
But of course, man can’t get far before encountering the schism. Man must eventually come to experience occasions when he is deceived by his senses, or what he thought was true but turned out to be wrong. To be wrong is not enough per se to create the mind/body problem, or the problem of reality and perception. One must first reflect on the erroneous belief and contemplate what made reality seem as though the belief or perception were true. One must take the apparent reality and question what it was if not the actual reality. Man can go so far as to posit a difference between reality and appearance, but to lump appearance together with mind, or the imagination, one must first draw the link between the two. This link is formed when one considers the false appearance to be unreal - that is, bearing the same ontological status as the products of imagination. When man recognizes this similarity, it makes sense to suppose that he only imagined reality to be as it appeared. So to say that certain beliefs or perception are really mental was, originally, to say that they were imagined.
But now the conception of the imagination takes an interesting turn. It is no longer the domain of the manifestly unreal, but can sometimes spill over into other domains, or at least to appear to be doing such. In other words, the imagination can sometimes seem to be real things or matters of fact. Man can no longer trust his imagination. He can no longer rely of the imagination overtly presenting itself as unreal. He begins to question what he sees and believes. He sees food; he wonders if he’s only imagining it. He believes certain things to be the case; he wonders if these are nothing more than his thoughts.
This shift in the conception of imagination was brought to its ultimate conclusion by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Descartes recognized that the deception of the imagination could be brought to bear on all aspects of reality we felt ourselves in touch with. Anything we perceived, believed, felt, or were in any way consciously in touch with could be doubted, could be a product of the imagination. Kant sealed this line of argument by showing that everything necessarily was just perception - what he called ‘phenomena’. His argument was that if we have no way of knowing whether any of our perceptions, beliefs, etc. were real or not, then they are all necessarily only appearance, and so all we have are the way things appear - that is, perception. He didn’t want to cast out reality so he had to invent ‘noumena’. This is what the dualism of mind and reality leaves us with - a world of perception that we are intimately involved in, and a world of things as they really are that we have no epistemic or experiential relation to.
Of course, this isn’t dualism as we are familiar with it. The dualism we are familiar with concerns the schism between mind and brain (or matter more generally). This, rather, is a schism between perception and reality. But the difference between the two is in scope, not in kind. Traditionally, it has been taken for granted that if matter belongs anywhere, it belongs to the latter half of the dualism considered here - that is, to ‘reality’ - and perception belongs to ‘mind’. The brain is one very particular instance of matter. It is of interest because it seems so intimately mixed up with consciousness more so than any other material object. So the dualism of perception and reality is narrowed down to the dualism of mind and brain. Upon quick reflection on Berkelerian idealism, one realizes that the obliteration of the schism between perception and reality also obliterates the mind/body problem. If there is no realm of matter, then there is no realm in which we find the brain. All is perception, all is ideas; the brain, and all matter, are ultimately mental. Cartesian and Kantian metaphysics can’t claim as much for themselves since they hold onto the reality/perception divide. Of course, this is not to say idealism doesn’t suffer problems of other kinds, but none of these problems are the mind/body one - the reason being, of course, that it obliterates the parent problem from which it stems: the perception/reality problem.
But whether the problem at hand is the mind/body one or the perception/reality one, it is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Various forms of monism have been adopted to counter this problem. We won’t get into these here, nor the reason I’m opposed to them (though for anyone who has read MM-Theory, my reasons can easily be surmised). I would simply like to end on the following note. We have traced dualism to its source. Dualism begins when man learns to allocate his experiences of reality to the imagination, subjecting their authenticity to doubt. He then questions whether what he sees, believes, or feels in any other way is real or just in his head.
This was the birthplace of the problem of consciousness. If we want a monism, we have to back track to this point. We have to avoid the mistake of taking our experiences of reality and allocating them to the imagination. But what can we do instead? After all, we still misperceive, misbelieve, misjudge, misunderstand, etc. What are we to make of these if not illusions borne of the mind? The solution that MM-Theory offers is that we take the dynamics of mind - the believing and then disbelieving, the perceiving and then misperceiving, the judging and then misjudging, etc. - and plasters them directly onto reality - that is, the dynamics of mind are the dynamics of reality. How this works out is outlined in the paper Reality and Perception. In that paper, we find a new understanding of the nature of reality. Reality really is dynamic in this way. It’s not that when one finds that his beliefs were mistaken that they were ‘merely’ mental - it’s that reality itself has changed. He finds himself in a new reality, with a new timeline. Looking back on this timeline, he finds he once believed things erroneously, but there was another configuration of reality with a different timeline. In the past of that reality, his beliefs were true, and it was that reality from which he migrated to the new one (all this made clear in the aforementioned paper). MM-Theory also makes clear that this new understanding of ‘reality’ - for indeed it is the concept of reality that changes, not its contents - allows for a form of relativism according to which reality is not even objective (let alone not absolute). So, for example, whereas one subject may perceive the sky to be blue, another may perceive it as red, and there is no ultimate truth to the matter - the reality of it is that the sky is blue relative to one individual, but red to the other.
The question we asked at the beginning of this essay - at what point should we accept everything that came before and reject everything that came thereafter, substituting an alternate theory in its place? - can be answered: the point, most likely in prehistoric times, at which man began to doubt his experiences, allocating them to the domain of the imagination. And what alternate theory can be substituted after this point? The reader can entertain my proposal at http://www.mm-theory.com.