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GUEST EDITORIAL for the first issue: THE BLIND (WISE) MEN
AND THE ELEPHANT OF CONSCIOUSNESS |
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This new journal is important because it addresses the unique problems of a "breakthrough" area in scientific psychology. The potential reader of a new journal is bound to ask, "Another journal? About what? Are these my people?" I do wish the title were "Consciousness and Cognition and ...". The ellipsis would make clear that the journal is truly intended to be multidisciplinary, and that one of the major problems with the field is that there is no consensus on what we are talking about. The announcement declares us to be "a forum for a natural science approach to the issues of consciousness, voluntary control, and self", three concepts about which we have as much consensus as the people of the late Soviet Union have for democracy, market economy, and social responsibility. This is a problem, but it is also an opportunity, and the major reason we need a specialized forum. The Editors-in-Chief solicited editorials from a sampling of the Editorial Board to give the reader at least an implicit idea of what the journal was about, and the possible breadth of approaches. When I first read over my editorial notes and what my three fellow-editorialists had written, I was concerned that the reader would think we were pulling their leg with a parody of the parable of the Blind (Wise) Men and the Elephant. On second thought it seemed a good analogy, and telling the truth about where we are now surely is critical to getting where we want to go. We agree (most of us) that there is an elephant (consciousness) and that it is big (important). But we have very different approaches to explaining it. Let me make explicit what I think an explanation is. An explanation of a phenomenon is an account of the variance of that phenomenon (eg. whether it occurs or not, or how big it gets, or how pretty it is). We seek an explanation for a purpose, usually control or prediction. We find an explanation satisfying when it has accounted for enough of the variance for our purposes. If our purposes differ, what we accept as an explanation will differ. Our approaches to consciousness differ because we have very different conceptual categories with which to frame an explanation, and because we have different goals. Consider how we four guest editorialists represent significantly different approaches: Professor Libet is a most courageous physiologist. Thirty years ago, when consciousness was a dirty word in psychology, let alone in physiology, he truly pioneered the neurophysiology of awareness (Libet, 1973). He seeks an account of awareness in terms of activities of cortical neurons. This is exemplified by his work with direct recordings of electrical activity of cortical sensory neurons when surgical patients under local anesthesia responded to simple near-threshold tactile stimuli with introspective reports of "I feel it", or "No, I don't feel it". Professor Baddeley is a cognitive psychologist. He wants to account for consiousness in terms of cognitive elements like working memory. This concept and the methods of studying working memory have been very fruitful, and he urges that admitting in public that it has something to do with consciousness will lead us to more complete and even more useful models, with better clinical applications. He describes himself as "timidly setting sail" in the perilous waters of consciousness studies, but he also describes himself as a "reformed sinner" and we know how passionate they can be. Professor Horowitz is a psychodynamic psychiatrist; this is the discipline where the study of consciousness (and unconsciousness) lived during the dark Behaviorist age. His concern with clinical problems of awareness such as repression and intrusive imagery has led him to seek beyond psychoanalytic metapsychology for a new account of normal as well as abnormal awareness. His account will be formulated in terms of cognitive elements, information flow and control, like Professor Baddeley's, but with some elements extending beyond the individual to include relationships with others, and cultural elements. Labeling myself is of course more difficult. My background is in medicine, and then neurophysiology and then neuropsychology. I studied attention as arousal (by stimulating the reticular formation; Galin and Lacey, 1972), and attention as perceptual selectivity (by recording from cortical and subcortical systems controlling sensory input; Galin, 1965). I studied hemispheric specialization (Galin and Ornstein, 1972), and the implications of hemispheric integration and disconnection for psychiaty (Galin, 1974). I was a neuro-electro-cognitive-psychophysiologist. But for some years I had a growing sense that neither the data I was collecting, nor that of nearby disciplines, would give me a satisfying explanation. More refined electrophysiology? More sophisticated cognitive psychology? Neurochemistry? Strolling in the Collective Unconscious and petting the Archetypes? No. At last I realized that the problem was not with the data but with my questions. My intuition was that my real question could not be formulated within the frame of reference of any of these disciplines. This is a "work in progress", so I cannot give you a simple account, but my central question is , "What gives people their characteristic wholeness?" The areas of my life which seem to be the greatest sources of value are science, love, aesthetics, and religion, and "wholeness" seems to be a core construct in each of them. In brief, and in colloquial terms, science seeks the unifying theory; love involves a shift in some sort of boundary between people, forming a new unit; aestheic value involves dynamic unity, harmony, or integration, ("it all works together"); and the most universal religious experience, independent of doctrine, involves unity and oneness. My interest in a person's experience of wholeness led naturally to the question of the nature of wholeness in a person, irrespective of their experience, and that lead to questions about the nature of wholeness in general. If there are some readers who are put off by what may seem too much naked philosophy, let me remind them that "metaphysics is just an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly" (Wm. James, Principles of Psychology, 1890). Contrary to Dr. Libet's belief that we have had quite enough philosophy, it seems to me that we are in desparate need of critical examination of our premises, frames of reference, and intellectual tools, which is what philosophy is about. The ideas which have been most useful to me come largely from the philosopher Wm. Wimsatt of the University of Chicago (1976). He has written very clearly about levels of organization, emergent properties, the mind-body problem, and reductionism. I came to understand that in my youth I had been led astray by the hard sell and high social standing of naive reductionism. Thus, the explanatory account of consciousness which I am now seeking goes beyond reductionism, and integrates elements from the levels of brain physiology, information processing, phenomenology, and our larger contexts. And thus I differ from my fellow editorialists. What makes a reductionist naive or not is whether he recognizes the intrinsic limitations of his heuristics. Heuristics are useful shortcuts; they give approximations that may be good enough. They are short because they leave something out. The fundamental reductionist heuristic for explaining a system is to take it apart, (finding the joints may be tricky... and we always assume that there are joints), study the properties of each type of part in isolation, and explain the intact system in its context as a function of the properties of the parts. This works best for smaller simpler systems which are organized in a simple hierarchy. A simple hierarchy is one in which the interactions of elements at one level produce emergent elements at the next higher level, with little or no feedback from above; i.e., the ensemble properties have little effect on the constituents. Wimsatt details the problems that arise in the analysis of more complex systems, such as a termite colony or a family or a brain, in which emergent properties have significant feedback effects on the parts. When the ordering of levels becomes unclear, he suggests the use of the term "perspective" instead of level. Why hierarchies may appear to be so ubiquitous in an evolving universe is explained by Herbert Simon in his “Architecture of Complexity (1969), and the application of many of these ideas to contemporary theories of biological evolution is presented by Buss in The Evolution of Individuality (1987). There is another type that we might call the "pernicious reductionist". This one believes that the parts are more real than the whole, and the smaller the parts the more real they are. The more real they are, the better the explanation you can make with them. But as I pointed out above, an explanation is already as good as it gets when you have accounted for as much variance as you need to account for, for your purpose. Furthermore, in practice, reaching down to lower and lower levels of organization for the units of explanation will eventually introduce more varience. See Wimsatt (1976) for a discussion of "real". I am working toward a theory of wholeness in people. I was appalled to find that I did not have adequate language to talk about these issues. There is no special technical term to denote wholeness, but I believe this is one of the qualities we refer to with our common word "self". Unfortunately, the word self as used in technical psychology, philosophy, religious and mystical studies, as well as common speech, is usually only vaguely defined, if at all, and often carries with it a great deal of other conceptual baggage. Rather than invent and promote another term, I prefer to define it strictly and see if the utility of this usage gathers supporters. I use self to denote the overall organization which makes a person an entity. A person is made up of component subsystems, but organized as perspectives, rather than as simple hierarchical levels. The organization changes over time, and may include subsystems outside the skin. The subsystems can be tightly integrated, or autonomous, or somewhere in between. It is in this sense that I speak of a more or less integrated self. The self is the organization, not just another subsystem. This definition preserves the intended meaning when we discuss "a change in the self", or "a development of the self", or "a loss of self". Wholeness is characteristic of certain types of organization; thus a particular self (as organization) could be whole or not. Because of our different backgrounds, goals, and approaches, we editors cannot yet agree on our terms. Professor Libet called for explicit conceptual definitions and operational criteria (not the same thing), and Professor Horowitz stressed our need for more qualitative examples along with the definitions. Natsoulous uses subscripts to distinguish six meanings of "consciousness" (1983), and three variants of "awareness". In the text above I used consciousness and awareness interchangeably and without definition (cringing each time). Consider the following list which I collected from the other guest editorials, which I believe are meant more or less synonymously: consciousness, conscious experience, conscious thought, ordinary alert consciousness, conscious awareness, awareness, subjective experience, phenomenology, imagery, phenomenonological experience of images, sense of self, volitional control). It does not serve clarity to just string the candidate terms together. The least that we must do is provide in our papers explicit definitions for how we are using the problematic terms. It is tedious, but that is where we are. Welcome to "Consciousness and ..."! BIBLIOGRAPHY
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