Originally Posted by Wolf Singer
However, there are other aspects of conscious-
ness, such as self-awareness and the experience
of individuality, that seem to require explan-
ations which transcend purely neurobiological
reductionism. It is my perception that the onto-
logical status of these phenomena differs from
that of the qualia of phenomenal awareness, and
that it is these aspects of consciousness which
give rise to the hard problems in the philosophy
of mind and provide the incentive for adopting
dualistic positions. The most challenging phe-
nomenon in this context is that we perceive
ourselves as agents who are endowed with the
freedom to decide, implying that the self is
capable of controlling, by will, processes in the
brain. We experience these aspects of conscious-
ness as immaterial mental entities that are
capable of influencing the neuronal processes
required for execution of actions, and hence we
perceive them as different from the material
processes in the brain.
I propose that these latter connotations of
consciousness are perceived as different because
they require for their development interactions
among brains that are succinctly differentiated
as to have phenomenal awareness and to signal
to one another that they are endowed with this
capacity. Such brains are able to enter dialogues
of the kind I know that you know how I feel
or I know that you know what my intentions
are, and so on. My proposal is that the experi-
ence of the self with all its subjective mental
attributes emerges from such dialogues among
human beings, above all from the early inter-
actions between caregivers and babies. The
experience of individuality and responsibility,
and as a consequence the intuition that one is
endowed with intentionality and free will, would
then have to be considered as a product of
social interactions. The subjective attributes of
consciousness would have the ontological status
of social realities, of cultural constructs, and
would therefore, transcend pure neurobiological
description systems that focus on individual
brains.
The mechanisms that enable us to experience
ourselves as endowed with mental capacities do,
of course, reside in individual brains, but the
contents of this experience are derived from
social interactions. But why then should the ex-
perience of the self be so obviously different from
other experiences that we also derive from social
interactions? One explanation could be that the
dialogue that leads to the experience of the self is
initiated during an early developmental stage,
before episodic memory matures and begins to
keep track of what the brain experiences. If so,
there would be no conscious record of the pro-
cesses that led to the experience of the self and
the associated subjective connotations of con-
sciousness. Because of this amnesia these early
experiences would lack causation; they would
appear to be timeless and detached from any real
world context. In consequence, the subjective
connotations of consciousness, although acquired
by learning, would be perceived as having tran-
scendental qualities that resist reductionistic
explanations.