7 - Consciousness: an appendix

Summary

This chapter serves as a transition between the previous two chapters and the ones to follow in Part Three. Before moving on, it is worth drawing a few consequences of the theory of consciousness presented in the last chapter, while also pointing the way to the chapters to come.

I begin with an historical note. Seventeenth-century Rationalists quite commonly claimed that persons are always conscious (see, for instance, Descartes 1642/1986, 74). To their Empiricist contemporaries and successors, and to most of us, this claim seems insupportable. It is difficult to believe that when under general anaesthetic, or when in a deep, dreamless sleep, or when struck a concussive blow to the head, one is conscious. But I would like to suggest that the Rationalists were on to something that many of their successors missed. Most of the Rationalists just didn't always express it well or always understand it altogether themselves. A good case can be made that they, unlike their successors, understood – even if only dimly – that consciousness is not a single, noncomposite state. Most especially, the Rationalists verged on understanding that phenomenal states and first-order, proposition-like intentional states dissociate from apperception. In fact, it is textually evident that Leibniz (1714/1989, 214) had an explicit grasp of these dissociations of first-order states from apperception.

While it may be bizarre to think that we are always conscious in the sense of apperception (C2), it is considerably less bizarre – not bizarre at all – to think that we are conscious in one of the other senses, C1 and CS, at any time.