Richard Dien Winfield - The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness

The following chapters draw upon writings of mine that were previously published.

Chapter 2 expands upon and incorporates arguments that I first presented in a paper, Hegel, Mind, and Mechanism: Why Machines Have No Psyche, Consciousness, or Intelligence, delivered at the 29th Annual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain on September 2, 2008, and published in the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 5960 (2009): 118.

Chapter 9 expands upon and incorporates arguments earlier presented in an essay, Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity, published in The Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 4 (June 2006): 75779.

I wish to thank the editors of the journals listed above for their permissions.

Nothing seems more accessible than mind, whose essential subjectivity always reveals mind to itself. Whether feeling its own feeling, consciously confronting objects through its representations, or thinking its own thoughts, mind has its distinctive character in virtue of how it apprehends itself. This pervasive reflexivity, however, has become inconceivable to a prevailing thinking accustomed to conceiving the world to be governed by laws of matter rendering objectivity a mechanism with no place for subjectivity. Consequently, the philosophy of mind finds itself plagued by daunting dilemmas paralyzing reasons quest to comprehend mental reality. These dilemmas arise from three prevalent approaches whose limits must be understood and surmounted to allow for any viable philosophy of mental life.

First, since Descartes, thinkers have largely preoccupied themselves with a mind/body dualism opposing mental to physical reality. Conceiving material things as mechanisms devoid of self-activity and determined wholly from without, these theorists have had to seek mind beyond sensible existence. Their ensuing dualism construes mind as a ghost in a machine, opposing two ontologically incommensurate substances. On the one hand, there is mindimmaterial, indivisible, and self-active. On the other hand, there is the bodymaterial, divisible, and mechanistically determined. Given the resulting incongruence, any relation between mind and body or mind and world becomes unfathomable. How can mind affect the body or the body affect the mind if both are fundamentally alien in composition, form, and process? And if mind and body cannot be intelligibly connected, how can mind apprehend the world or make the world its home and leave any trace upon it? And if mind cannot transform the world or be impinged by it in turn, how can mind escape the soliloquy of meditation to discourse with any other thinking selves?

For those who cannot relinquish the assumption that nature is a causally determined mechanism, these problems have fostered mechanical, neurological, and computational reductions of mind that privilege a physical reality devoid of subjectivity, leaving no place for the very mental features to be explained. Although such material reduction purports to leave dualism behind, it retains the divide by embracing the one side of physical mechanism and excluding everything distinctly mental as at best illusory epiphenomena. Yet how can the excluded epiphenomena of mind be explained away? Just acknowledging them requires ascribing to matter, brain, or computation a power to generate illusion for which physics, neurology, and calculation can offer no explanation. Unlike any other effect, the mental phenomena somehow arise from material process without requiring any extra effort to produce them. Nor do the epiphenomena cause any further movements in the chain of mechanical necessity, as does every other bona fide effect. Moreover, how can there be any theoretical knowledge about the exclusive reality of material process if the spontaneous reflexivity of intelligence is denied any existence of its own?

Second, even when the futility of the corollary positions of dualism and physicalist reductions has been recognized and mind has been acknowledged to be inherently embodied, modern thinkers have undercut this recognition by tending to construe mind in terms of consciousness. Certainly the ancient conception of mind as psyche can be faulted for neglecting conscious reflection, leaving unexplained how the different functions of the soul are united in one subject, as well as how the different contents of the various senses, imagination, and reason can be ascribed to the same objectivity. Consciousness may incorporate all mental content within the encompassing vantage point of the ego, which confronts a correlatively unified objectivity. Yet the modern privileging of consciousness has its own fateful liabilities. The focus upon conscious awareness has ignored dimensions of mind that do not involve consciousness while downplaying othersmost notably discursive rationalitythat involve consciousness but simultaneously transcend its constitutive subject-object opposition. This is exhibited by how most thinkers who subsume mind under consciousness treat the subject-object polarity of conscious awareness as always involving conceptualization and discursive rationality. Supposedly unless conceptual unities are thought to pervade perceptions necessarily, appearance cannot have any non-subjective unity enabling an objectivity to confront awareness. Yet if all forms of consciousness involve thought and, therefore, linguistic expression, language would somehow have to be invented and later be acquired by individuals who beforehand cannot be aware of objects, themselves, or any other interlocutors. Such neglect of the other dimensions of embodied mind therefore leaves in abeyance not only consciousnesss own mental preconditions, but the very possibility of thinking consciousnesss own character.

These difficulties are symptomatic of how the departure from mind/body dualisms remains incomplete so long as consciousness is held to be paradigmatic of mental life. Far from bridging the mind/body divide, consciousness is the very form of mind in which awareness stands over against an objectivity from which its own reflection is always excluded. Even when consciousness reflects on its own awareness, the awareness it apprehends is still different from the apprehension it has of it. Only a further reflection can grasp the latter as its object, but with the same result that what consciousness is conscious of still remains different from the conscious act apprehending it. Dualism can never be fully overcome when subject and object remain distinct, as is constitutive of the defining opposition of consciousness.