Quote:
Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness. We feel that it is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until we understand the problem much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both. (Crick and Koch 1990, p. 264)
Insight often comes as a surprise. From a purely heuristic perspective, narrowing down the scope of one’s search too early certainly is dangerous, for instance, by making attempts at excessive, but not yet data-driven formal modeling. A certain degree of open-mindedness is necessary.
On the other hand, it is simply not true that everyone has a rough idea of what the term “consciousness” refers to. In my own experience, for example, the most frequent misunderstanding lies in confusing phenomenal experience as such with what philosophers call “reflexive self-consciousness”, the actualized capacity to cognitively refer to yourself, using some sort of concept-like or quasi-linguistic kind of mental structure. According to this definition hardly anything on this planet, including many humans during most of their day, is ever conscious at all.
Second, in many languages on this planet we do not even find an adequate counterpart for the English term “consciousness” (Wilkes 1988b). Why did all these linguistic communities obviously not see the need for developing a unitary concept of their own? Is it possible that the phenomenon did not exist for these communities?
Which ones??
And third, it should simply be embarrassing for any scientist to not be able to clearly state what it is that she is trying to explain (Bieri 1995).
What is the explanandum?
What are the actual entities between which an explanatory relationship is to be established? Especially when pressed by the humanities, hard scientists should at least be able to state clearly what it is they want to know, what the target of their research is, and what, from their perspective, would count as a successful explanation.
The other extreme is something that is frequently found in philosophy, particularly in the best of philosophy of mind.
I call it “analytical scholasticism”. It consists in an equally dangerous tendency toward arrogant armchair theorizing, at the same time ignoring first-person phenomenological as well as third-person empirical constraints in the formation of one’s basic conceptual tools.
In extreme cases, the target domain is treated as if it consisted only of analysanda, and not of explananda and analysanda.
What is an analysandum?
An analysandum is a certain way of speaking about a phenomenon, a way that creates logical and intuitive problems. If consciousness and subjectivity were only analysanda, then we could solve all the philosophical puzzles related to consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective by changing the way we talk.
We would have to do to modal logic and formal semantics, and not cognitive neuroscience.
Philosophy would be a fundamentalist discipline that could decide on the truth and falsity of empirical statements by logical argument alone.
I just cannot believe that this should be so. Certainly by far the best contributions to philosophy of mind in the last century have come from analytical philosophers, philosophers in the tradition of Frege and Wittgenstein. Because many such philosophers are superb at analyzing the deeper structure of language, they often fall into the trap of analyzing the conscious mind as if it were itself a linguistic entity, based not on dynamical self-organization in the human brain, but on a disembodied system of rule-based information processing.
At least they frequently assume that there is a “content level” in the human mind that can be investigated without knowing anything about “vehicle properties”, about properties of the actual physical carriers of conscious content.
Quote:
Particularly from a phenomenological perspective, internality is a highly salient, global feature of the contents of conscious self-awareness. These contents are continuously accompanied by the phenomenal quality of internality in a “prereflexive” manner, that is, permanently and independently of all cognitive operations. Phenomenal self-consciousness generates “inwardness.”
I only have this "Which ones?" question as to which languages without the term "consciousness" he is exactly referring to.