Most discussions of consciousness begin with a familiar question.
What is consciousness?
Neuroscientists ask it.
Philosophers ask it.
Artificial intelligence researchers ask it.
Increasingly, the public asks it too.
The question feels perfectly natural.
So natural, in fact, that we rarely stop to examine it.
But perhaps we should.
Not because the question is wrong.
Because we have already made an important assumption before asking it.
The assumption is hidden in the grammar.
Consider two simple sentences.
She is conscious.
She has consciousness.
At first glance, they appear to say almost the same thing.
But they do something rather different.
The first describes a state.
The second introduces something that can apparently be possessed.
Without noticing, we have moved from an adjective describing experience to a noun describing what appears to be an entity.
The transition is effortless.
It is also philosophically significant.
Language performs this kind of transformation all the time.
We begin with people interacting.
Soon we speak of relationships.
We begin with things changing.
Soon we speak of change.
We begin with people deciding.
Soon we speak of decision-making.
Processes become concepts.
Activities become objects of thought.
This ability is one of language's greatest strengths.
Without it, much of science would be impossible.
How could we investigate evolution without speaking of evolution?
How could we study communication without speaking of communication?
How could we compare different kinds of memory without first treating memory as something we can discuss?
Language allows us to compress rich patterns of experience into concepts that can be analysed, compared and developed.
Scientific thought depends upon this extraordinary achievement.
But every compression has consequences.
When experience is packaged into a concept, some aspects become easier to examine.
Others quietly fade into the background.
Movement becomes stability.
Activity becomes entity.
Relation becomes object.
The concept becomes so useful that we gradually forget it was ever a way of organising experience.
It begins to feel like the experience itself.
This matters because consciousness may be one of the concepts most affected by this process.
When we ask,
What is consciousness?
the grammar quietly encourages us to imagine consciousness as something that exists independently, waiting to be discovered, measured or possessed.
Soon other questions follow naturally.
Can animals have consciousness?
Can machines have consciousness?
How much consciousness does an infant possess?
Can consciousness be transferred?
Can consciousness survive death?
Notice that none of these questions is unreasonable.
Yet every one of them assumes that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be had.
Before neuroscience begins.
Before philosophy begins.
Before artificial intelligence enters the discussion.
The grammar has already suggested an ontology.
None of this means the grammar is mistaken.
On the contrary, it has served us remarkably well.
Science advances by creating stable concepts.
Concepts allow us to classify, compare, measure and explain.
Without them, knowledge could scarcely accumulate.
The point is not to abandon such concepts.
It is simply to remember that they are ways of construing experience rather than transparent windows onto reality.
Perhaps philosophy has a distinctive role here.
Science often compresses experience into concepts so that investigation becomes possible.
Philosophy can occasionally unpack those concepts, not to reject them, but to recover the richness of the experience from which they arose.
Sometimes, by unpacking a familiar concept, we discover that the questions we have been asking are not the only questions available to us.
Sometimes we discover that the grammar has been guiding our imagination all along.
This series is an invitation to perform that unpacking.
Not because consciousness is "only" a word.
Nor because language determines reality.
Rather, because every investigation begins with the ways in which experience has first been organised into language.
Before we ask whether consciousness exists in brains, animals or machines, it may be worth asking a quieter question.
How did consciousness become the kind of thing we imagine could be possessed at all?
That question does not answer the mystery of consciousness.
But it may help us understand why the mystery has taken the particular shape that it has.
And sometimes, understanding the shape of a question is the first step towards asking a better one.
No comments:
Post a Comment