Consciousness and Subjectivity

Abstract

To keep in mind one case of the kind of problems raised by the status of de se beliefs, here is Castañeda's 1966 Editor of Soul case: "Smith has never seen his image (…) in photographs, mirrors, ponds, etc. Suppose that at time t Smith does not know that he has been appointed the editor of Soul and that at t he comes to know that the man whose photograph lies on a certain table is the new Editor of Soul, without Smith realizing that he himself is the man in the photograph." (Castañeda 1966: 130). essential for a (virtual) unification of the mind, as is the role of higher-order mental states for the global kind of access at the personal level we call 'consciousness'. Being a self thus has to do with appearing to oneself, or representing oneself, in a certain way. The way Dennett sees it, a self is made up of sub-personal parts, by exploring accesses among them ("I propose to construct a full-fledged 'I' from sub-personal parts, by exploiting the notion of access"-he says in Brainstorms, Dennett 1978). He agrees with Rosenthal in thinking of state-consciousness as consisting in reportings on one's own mental states by expressing higher-order mental states. Also, he proposes that only this is consciousness proper, in contrast with for instance behavior-guiding awareness; thus, consciousness proper is characteristic of linguistic creatures only. In such creatures if a self is in place and higherorder mental states are expressed, we may say that the illusion of the Cartesian Theater is perfectly real-in this sense there is a cartesian theater, i.e. there is self-presentation or self-appearing, even if there is no 'center' (in the brain). The fact that other animals are not like that is what makes them, in Dennett's words, unlike us: as he puts it, 'they are not beset by the illusion of the Cartesian Theater' (Miguens 2002). 10 B. Baars' conception of consciousness as global workspace is the idea that what is globally accessible in a cognitive system is 'publicly available', i.e. available for the system, in contrast to information processing in the subsystems, which although available for controlling behavior, is not 'centrally' available (Baars 1988). 11 A. R. Damasio himself wants to put forward a conception of self or consciousness according to which self or consciousness is 'having the body-body proper-in mind'. The mark of the fact that we are embodied conscious beings, and not cartesian souls, is the fact that our consciousness is such that we always have the self in mind -this is what 'subjectifies' consciouness, makes it mine. Understanding how this embodiment makes for mine-ness is, in Damasio's view, clearly important for thinking about self and emotion. Cf. Damásio 1992, Damásio 1999, Damásio 2010. 12 Chalmers 1996. The 'hard problem' is the problem of phenomenal consciousness (one could ask: 'why doesn't it all go on in the dark?'); 'easy problems' concern cognitive functions; control of behavior, discriminatory abilities, reporting mental states, etc. Idealism as Henrich does may help us see all that. As ...