'self' behaving in an imagined 'world'. In the example in the section on spatialization, it was not your physical behavioral self that was trying to 'see' where my theory 'fits' into the array of alternative theories. It was your analog 'I'.
If we are out walking, and two roads diverge in a wood, and we know that one of them comes back to our destination after a much more circuitous route, we can 'traverse' that longer route with our analog 'I' to see if its vistas and ponds are worth the longer time it will take. Without consciousness with its vicarial analog 'I', we could not do this.
4. The Metaphor 'Me'. The analog 'I' is, however, not simply that. It is also a metaphor 'me'. As we imagine ourselves strolling down the longer path we indeed catch 'glimpses' of 'ourselves', as we did in the exercises of Chapter 1, where we called them autoscopic images. We can both look out from within the imagined self at the imagined vistas, or we can step back a bit and see ourselves perhaps kneeling down for a drink of water at a particular brook.
There are of course quite profound problems here, particularly in the relationship of the 'I' to the 'me'. But that is another treatise.
And I am only indicating the nature of the problem.
5. Narratization. In consciousness, we are always seeing our vicarial selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives. In the above illustration, the narratization is obvious, namely, walking along a wooded path. But it is not so obvious that we are constantly doing this whenever we are being conscious, and this I call narratization. Seated where I am, I am writing a book and this fact is imbedded more or less in the center of the story of my life, time being spatialized into a journey of my days and years.
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New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing story, perceptions that do not fit into it being unnoticed or at least unremembered. More important, situations are chosen which are congruent to this ongoing story, until the picture I have of myself in my life story determines how I am to act and choose in novel situations as they arise.
The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing.
The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth, purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in consciousness.
But it is not just our own analog 'I' that we are narratizing; it is everything else in consciousness. A stray fact is narratized to fit with some other stray fact. A child cries in the street and we narratize the event into a mental picture of a lost child and a parent searching for it. A cat is up in a tree and we narratize the event into a picture of a dog chasing it there. Or the facts of mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness.
6. Conciliation. A final aspect of consciousness I wish to mention here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most mammals. It really springs from simple recognition, where a slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some previously learned schema, an automatic process sometimes called assimilation. We assimilate a new stimulus into our conception, or schema about it, even though it is slightly different. Since we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world. We are putting things together into recognizable objects on the basis of the previously learned schemes we have of them.
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Now assimilation consciousized is conciliation. A better term for it might be compatibilization, but that seems something too rococo. What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what narratization does in mind-time or spatialized time. It brings things together as conscious objects just as narratization brings things together as a story. And this fitting together into a consistency or probability is done according to rules built up in experience.
In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. If we are narratizing ourselves as walking along a wooded path, the succession of excerpts is automatically made compatible with such a journey. Or if in daydreaming two excerpts or narratizations happen to begin occurring at the same time, they are fused or conciliated.
If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of the mountain meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other.
You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world.
Let me summarize as a way of 'seeing' where we are and the direction in which our discussion is going. We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be
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manipulated like things in space. Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts.
Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things.
Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.
This has been a difficult chapter. But I hope I have sketched out with some plausibility that the notion of consciousness as a metaphor-generated model of the world leads to some quite definite deductions, and that these deductions are testable in our own everyday conscious experience. It is only, of course, a beginning, a somewhat rough-hewn beginning, which I hope to develop in a future work. But it is enough to return now to our major inquiry of the origin of it all, saving further amplification of the nature of consciousness itself for later chapters.
If consciousness is this invention of an analog world on the basis of language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, what then can we say about its origin?
We have arrived at a very interesting point in our discussion, and one that is completely contradictory to all of the alternative solutions to the problem of the origin of consciousness which we discussed in the introductory chapter. For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.
C H A P T E R 3
The Mind of Iliad
THERE IS an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.
Such perhaps is the present moment. For all the scientific alternatives that we faced into in the Introduction, including my own prejudgments about the matter, all assured us that consciousness was evolved by natural selection back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before. We felt assured that at least some animals were conscious, assured that consciousness was related in some important way to the evolution of the brain and probably its cortex, assured certainly that early man was conscious as he was learning language.