the unity of consciousness

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I’ve stumbled upon an interesting thought.

If we think of an object–let’s say a helium atom–we can think of it as one object or we can think of it as 6 object: 2 electrons, 2 protons, and 2 neutrons. If we think of it as one object, the electrons, protons, and neutrons become it’s parts. But the decision to think of it as one object or 6 seems rather arbitrary.

Can we do this with consciousness?

If we have 3 people in a room having a conversation, each one has a consciousness. But does it make sense to say they comprise really one consciousness with 3 parts? In some sense, I think it does, but in another sense, it doesn’t. It can make sense if we think of consciousness in the 3rd person. That is, if we say that Jim over there is conscious, and we say this without think of Jim’s consciousness from his own point of view, then we can think of his consciousness in the 3rd person (after all, Jim is a 3rd person to us). How do we do this? How do we think of consciousness in the 3rd person? Well, this is a common habit we have in philosophy (a bad habit, mind you, but a common one). We think of consciousness as a vaporous or ethereal “stuff,” maybe an energy field, a ghost, maybe an aura–definitely a kind of “thing” that comes with the brain. Thinking of things in the 3rd person like this allows for the arbitrary manner by which we can divide it upon into parts or build it upon into a whole from parts. In that case, we can think of the 3 people in a conversation as one consciousness with 3 parts–three centers of energy or concentrations of ethereal substance, or something like that.

But consciousness never really exists as a 3rd person. Consciousness is always 1st person. We don’t ever see any ghosts or vapor or energy fields when we open a living human being’s cranium. Consciousness is a point of view–someone’s point of view. This is really the only legitimate way of conceptualizing consciousness. As such, it becomes difficult to imagine 3 people as really one consciousness with 3 parts. If Jim, in his conversation with his friends Pat and Dora, are thought of a one consciousness with 3 parts, how are we to imagine this one consciousness in the 1st person? What is the single point of view that this one consciousness has? Who is the (first) person that is this consciousness? To me, it doesn’t seem there is anything over and above the 3 individual consciousnesses. There isn’t a fourth being. To me, it seems you can’t really “meld” together points of view, at least not in a way that maintains their parts (like how electrons, protons, and neutrons are still there even though we meld them together to make a helium atom).

This, no doubt, has more to do with the way we conceptualize consciousness and the difference between this and the way we conceptualize 3rd person entities. But I don’t think that conceptualizing consciousness as a 1st person is the wrong conception. I think it’s right. I think this might be why ancient thinkers up to Descartes insisted that 3rd person entities (matter) were infinitely divisible while first person entities (consciousness) were always unitary and indivisible.

I’m not drawing any conclusions from this. I just thought it was an interesting tid-bit that falls out of the way we think of 1st persons and 3rd persons.

Thoughts?

2

Not just ancient thinkers, - but back in the early 20th century - this guy descended from the Swiss Alps and expounded upon the theory of the Collective Unconscious from a psychological perspective.

His name was Carl Gustav Jung and he used to hang out with Freud for awhile. You may have heard of him.

This is why one of the first things I did after studying basic philosophy, - was to study comparative religions and cultural mythologies. The common underlying concepts are astounding.

Lots of people would claim to you that it’s pointless, - but the reality is that it’s taken my trolling and manipulative abilities to new heights.

If these concepts have no power and are flawed, - then why are the vast majority of human beings so easily susceptible to them? It’s like somebody saying money, pleasure or honor have no power when clearly there exist vast multitudes of people who are willing to do almost anything to obtain those things.

So basically, - if you learn to bypass all the differences in experiences of individual consciousnesses, - you can find an underlying common tangent within all of them and then attack that mercilessly to utterly dominate any opposition without having to engage in drastic and/or self-destructive actions.

3

Your “individual conscious” is already a “group conscious”.

4

Yes, but it’s still melded into a single point of view.

5

I believe we can. People can screw with nature but nature is invincible. And humans are made of nature too. Nature is a thing which can be seen as a unified force.

6

But how can you imagine the single consciousness that is the sum of the separate consciousnesses of several individuals? What is the new point of view that pops out of this?

7

Insects, like ants. And a hive of them. Chaos, also.

8

Very interesting OP Gib, here are my thoughts.

The subject of consciousness is no more complex than the way the terms “conscious” and “consciousness” are commonly used; they’re basically just commonly used as a synonyms for the terms “aware” and “awareness”.

The only reason that the subject seems so mystical to many people is because they insist on using the terms “conscious” and “consciousness” more than is necessary. I believe the reason for that is because of a need to find an identity/who-they-are/a-purpose/etc.

Let me explain some scenarios using both the common way to speak in those contexts and the uncommon way where the term “consciousness” is forced into it. When I use the term “consciousness” below I’m not speaking of something mystical, I’m using the term entirely synonymously with the term “awareness”. When I use the term “entity”, I’m only doing so to fulfill the grammatical requirements due to the fact that I’m forcing the term “consciousness” where it’s not needed.

Scenario 1

There are three people in a room who have a discussion on a matter related to the future activities of all three people; P1, P2 and P3, and not of anyone else. They come to an agreement on those activities. A fourth person comes into the room; P4. P1 says, “we have decided on activity X”.

Obviously, an even more common way of stating what just happened would be to say that P1 was voicing the agreement made by between him and P2 and P3.

But, if we must use the term “consciousness” in the restatement, then it would be accurate to say that there’s a conscious entity called P1/P2/P3 which made a decision and it’s output was the part called P1. And there was a conscious entity called P4 who listened to the thoughts of P1/P2/P3.

Scenario 2

This scenario is slightly different than the first.

There are originally three people in a room who have a discussion on a matter related to the future activities involving all three people; P1, P2 and P3, and a fourth person; P4. They then come to an agreement on those activities. P4 comes into the room. P1 says, “we have decided on [decision x]”.

Obviously, an even more common way of stating what just happened would be to say that P1 was voicing the agreement made by between him and P2 and P3.

But, if we must use the term “consciousness” in the restatement, then it would be accurate to say that there’s a conscious entity called P1/P2/P3/P4 and it’s output was P1. The entity P1/P2/P3/P4 made a plan then after a major movement of one of it’s parts (the part called P4 entering the room) it declared it’s plan to itself again.

The questions here could be:

Did or did not the entity P1/P2/P3/P4 then rethink it’s decision after that signifgant movement (common language: did P4 argue with the others)?

Did or did not the part of the entity P1/P2/P3/P4 called P4 become a separate entity after the entity, P1/P2/P3/P4, that it was originally part of declare it’s plan to itself?

Scenario 3

When referring to P3 and in P3’s presence, P1 says to P2, “he thinks X”.

Obviously, an even more common way of stating what just happened would be to say that P1 was giving his opinion on the thoughts of P3.

But, if we must use the term “consciousness” in the restatement, then it would be accurate to say that there’s a conscious entity called P3 which’s output was the entity P1. And there were two conscious entities called P1 and P2 who listened to the thoughts of P3. (Obviously, P1 has two roles.)

The question here could be:

Did or did not the entity then retract its thoughts using another output; itself (common language: did P3 tell P1 that he was wrong)?

If the entity P3 did retract its thoughts using itself as the output, then it’s best to say that P2 is likely to have found the entity of P3 to be indecisive (in common language: he noticed the divergence in the words between the two other people).

9

Let’s say we had 2 ants (to start simply). Each one is conscious. Each one has a point of view. If we can talk about each of their consciousnesses collectively as a single consciousness, are we then saying there are 3 points of view?

10

Yes.

I agree with the first part, but not the second part. For me, the reason has always been that we imagine inanimate objects as not conscious, as not feeling anything, and when inanimate matter goes through a length process of evolution, becoming more complex and capable of surviving and reproducing, it somehow acquires conscious awareness and the ability to feel things. The mystery, for me, is how this happens–how is it that going from simple inanimate matter to more complex inanimate matter (where “inanimate” simply means “not alive” as opposed to “not animated”) results in consciousness.

But the first part of what you said rings true for me. We tend to use the word “consciousness” to denote a “thing”–it is a noun after all, and that leads to the objectification of the concept (i.e. the making of it into an object). Thus, we get the rendition of consciousness in 3rd person terms–the vaporous, ethereal, energy-field thingy that floats around the brain like a ghost.

While I agree that this is a mistaken move and creates a lot of the confusion around the questions of consciousness, I maintain in this thread that the opposite move–treating is always as 1st person–brings the current puzzle into the foreground. Treating is as 1st person, in other words, makes it difficult to imagine, if not impossible, how we can whimsically switch between talking about several consciousnesses (several points of view) and a single consciousness (single point of view) which would supposedly be the sum of the several.

The scenarios you give are excellent examples of the confusions that can arise when treating consciousness as an object (i.e. as a 3rd person entity that can arbitrarily be talk about as cumulatively when we have several of them in the same setting).

11

That what we presume must be separate is not necessarily. That unities can form or exist in different locations.

12

The best I can imagine for 3 consciousnesses forming a unity is a collection of 3 consciousnesses, not one consciousness that is the sum of the 3.

You see, it’s different with the helium atom. When I say that I can imagine the system of electrons, protons, and neutrons culminating in a single helium atom, I’m saying that the whole is more than the sum of the parts–otherwise, the electrons, protons, and neutrons would just be a collection of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and nothing more. But to say that they become a helium atom when brought together is to say that something new comes out of this combination.

What is the new thing that comes out of 3 coexisting consciousnesses?

13

Gib

I think consciousness is ‘mind’ working at the subjective and singular [1rst person] perspective, but it [‘mind’] is also working at all other levels. Its just that we are not privy to such conversations.

Really - when we strip everything back, all we ‘are’ is a perspective view [of mind] linked communicatively to a physical receptacle [body/brain].

Its hard to say how, but I think our thoughts are the result of all that multi-perspective thinking. You wont get the sum of 3 consciousnesses acting as one in the same way as the singular does, its more like a shared subconscious ~ remembering that it doesn’t have a body and brain shared. What happens is that everything communicates and the result is the world [post QM] ~ as opposed to the universe/reality being deterministic and ultimately determined by nothing [science reasoning].

14

I don’t think you can say two people (or two ants) have a point of view without some pretty serious equivocation. The ‘point of view’ that is essential to consciousness is the self-experience, Nagel’s “what it’s like to be X”. There’s no such thing as 'what it’s like to be those two people" in that sense. So for example, we can talk about what it’s like to be a Jewish or feline or rectangular but we don’t mean all felines literally have the same experiences. We mean that within the experiences of each feline, there are certain common themes that come up by virtue of their being feline.
I think you hit the nail on the head by attributing group consciousness to a third-person examination. Saying ‘those people there represent a consciousness’ makes sense only because of how we interact with groups. If those two people are the same to us- they both disagree with us, or are both trying to help us, or both taking a certain position or having a certain relation, it makes sense to think of them as a consciousness because we are dealing with them as a collective. But surely that’s just a sort of mental shorthand (how am I going to deal with the Petersons?) and not a description of any reality, yes?

15

So like unconscious experiences? Or like qualia that don’t have a consciousness to belong to?

Are you saying that you can take all the content of a few instances of consciousness–all the qualia or all the experiences–and treat them as a singular system but without the point of view that makes consciousness the thing it is?

Yes, you echo my thoughts exactly. I especially like your example of “What it’s like to be those two people.” That drives the point home very clearly.

16

If you attach via the internet a number of computers you get more than the sum of the parts. YOu may be able to Crunch numbers or look for new stars - a real use I Believe - with more than 3 times each of the working outputs of the Three computers. But if each consciousness has strengths the others have, the sum may also include what these strengths can do synergetically.

17

Right, but does this network of computers constitute a fourth consciousness?

18

I don’t Think computers are conscious, but it is a unit. It was an analogy, but not an exact one. It is a new unit, I Think.

19

I’m told I’m a lot of fun to agree with. People should do it more often.

So what about multiplicity of consciousness going the other way? Like, you now vs. 10 years ago. Or you when you’re in a blind rage vs. you in some other state. When you were talking about what consciousness is, you didn’t say anything about memory, which is one of the only things that ties us to our distant selves.

20

Yes, but my point is that you don’t get a first person as this new unit. You can get all sorts of third persons as new units, but I don’t see why a first person should arise from bringing together more basic first persons.

I think this is a slightly different problem. It’s the classic ship of Theseus problem (which we can get into if you want). It’s the question of whether a thing which is always changing can be said to carry the same identity over time. I think there’s many ways to maintain a reasonable concept of “self” without insisting it be a constant, unchanging, singular entity at the center of our mental world, so this question isn’t that vexing to me.

The problem of this thread however is different. In fact, your quote above makes me realize it’s the problem of consciousness all over again–that is, the problem of how consciousness arises out of seemingly unconscious matter–except that in this case I’m asking how consciousness arises out of other pre-existing consciousnesses. So whereas I’m asking how a fourth consciousness arises from considering three consciousness collectively, the original problem of consciousness would be asking how a first consciousness arises out of zero pre-existing consciousnesses.