(After reading David J. Chalmers, “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience”, Scientific American, December 1995, pp. 80-86.)

Chalmers’ main point is that you cannot get at what consciousness is by studying neurophysiology or cognitive psychology. This may help unravel in more detail how the brain organizes information, but does nothing to solve “the hard problem” of how to get from brain phenomena to actual conscious experience.

There is an inner and outer reality: the inner is consciousness and the outer is the material world. Descartes considered them wholly different (res cogitans and res extensa), but this dualism will no longer do. We must look for bridges and strive for “the theory of everything”, as we do in physics of the four fundamental forces. (Though we have not yet achieved it there either.)

E.J. Schumacher postulated four forms of knowledge: of the external world (through science), of our own internal world (through introspection), of another person’s internal world (attainable through love), and of what another person’s knowledge of our own inner world is. (A kind of love squared or iterated. )

In exploring the inner world of our own consciousness, we cannot use the usual methods of science (experiment and observation), because no one but ourselves has access to our own consciousness and therefore no one can check or replicate our results or conclusions, or verify or falsify any laws or theories that we think we have discovered. However, we may be able to use other methods, such as making surveys of other people to compare their observations of their own consciousness with each other and with our own observations. The assumption involved is that every human’s consciousness is more or less the same, which mayor may not be true, but seems reasonable enough. Thus we relax the requirement of objectivity to the less demanding one inter-subjectivity.

Chalmers explores certain brain-mind links, which might bridge from the physical to the psychic world, such as the link to motor centres (leading to speech or action), where awareness may arise. (He distinguishes between awareness and consciousness.) Another bridge leads to the assignment of “meaning”, as in our ability to recognize faces. There is an image (mere information), and then: “aha! THAT’S what it MEANS!” (I.e. “I have seen it before” – the role of memory.)

I am especially interested in the generation of “meaning” from “mere information” (a string of bits or pixels or phonemes). I perceive a scheme in Chalmers’ article, somewhat like this: from sensation (mere information) to perception (interpretation and elaboration by higher brain centres) to awareness (action response) to consciousness (“text published” in Dennett’s sense) to experience to memory (the latter two establish the basis of meaning) to meaning itself (recognition next time the experience is repeated).

Another important concept in Chalmers’ article is one concerning the dual aspect of an “information state”: if the physical structure in terms of bits or pixels or phonemes corresponds to the experiential structure (what actions the awareness was linked to), then the “information content” is the same. It is like a translation of the “meaning” pattern from one medium to another, like transcribing from MSWord to Word Perfect. It is the pattern or structure that matters, not the medium. Marshal McLuhan was wrong in saying that “the medium is the message”. It is the structure that is the message. This also gives us some assurance that our image of external reality corresponds to our awareness of it – in its information structure, not in material reality.

I now feel ready to add “psycho-physics” (an exploration of the inner world of consciousness) to the “windmill model” of the evolution of knowledge. (See the essay “Unfinished Road to Truth”, in Section V.) It is the newest and still largely unexplored branch, from which much can be expected. Its raw material can be the branch of philosophy called “phenomenology”, Le. raw experience, just as the raw material of physics is motion, light, sound, heat, and electromagnetism. Not only the consciousness of wakeful states, but dreams and other altered states, could enter into phenomenology. I can hardly wait for the results of such exploration.

Exploring the phenomenology of the mind could be done, e.g. by conducting a Claremont dialogue: in a small group in a circle, each person expresses his or her own idea on some given subject, independently, not responding to what they heard from others. A person can pass if not ready to speak.

In evaluating this, the scientific observer would focus on how the different minds work (are there similarities and differences?), not on the conclusions arrived at (if any).

One could also use free associations, “hot cognitions” (Osgood’s semantic differential adjectives), or dreams. This comes close to psychoanalysis of healthy (not mentally disturbed) subjects. It should not be surprising that, in probing consciousness, we must also pay attention to the subconscious and the unconscious. After all, these are adjoining rooms, or even darkened parts of the same room, in our earlier metaphor. The unconscious is potentially conscious if the light beacon of attention should sweep that way.

However, Schumacher says that knowing another person’s mind can only be done through love, which I interpret as recognizing the other as “Thou”, not “It” (Buber). Unfortunately this is the opposite of scientific objectivity. Giving up repeatable objective observation may not be enough; even inter-subjectivity will have to go. Is the answer something close to mystical communion? After all, mystical experience is also experience, parallel to observation and experimentation, and may be more appropriate for exploring the inner realm of our mind and the minds of others. But is mysticism possible interpersonally? It is usually done alone and in isolation. Except in Quaker meeting…?