Consciousness is the melody that floats from the harp and cannot pluck its strings, the foam struck raging from the river that cannot change its course, the shadow that loyally walks step for step beside the pedestrian, but is quite unable to influence his journey.
It is William James who has given the best discussion of the conscious automaton theory.11 His argument here is a little like Samuel Johnson’s downing philosophical idealism by kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” It is just plain inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends. If consciousness is the mere impotent shadow of action, why is it more intense when action is most hesitant? And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain.
Emergent Evolution
The doctrine of emergent evolution was very specifically welcomed into court to rescue consciousness from this undignified 9 Shadworth Hodgson, The Theory of Practice (London: Longmans Green, 1870), 1:416.
10 And volitions merely symbols of brain-states. T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Appleton, 1896), Vol. 1, p. 244.
11 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), Vol. 1, Ch.
5), but also see William McDougall, Body and Mind (London: Methuen, 1911), Chs. 11, 12.
12
Introduction
position as a mere helpless spectator. It was also designed to explain scientifically the observed evolutionary discontinuities that had been the heart of the metaphysical imposition argument.
And when I first began to study it some time ago, I, too, felt with a shimmering flash how everything, the problem of consciousness and all, seemed to shiveringly fall into accurate and wonderful place.
Its main idea is a metaphor: Just as the property of wetness cannot be derived from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen alone, so consciousness emerged at some point in evolution in a way underivable from its constituent parts.
While this simple idea goes back to John Stuart Mill and G. H.
Lewes, it was Lloyd Morgan’s version in his Emergent Evolution of 1923 that really captured the cheering. This book is a thor-oughgoing scheme of emergent evolution vigorously carried all the way back into the physical realm. All the properties of matter have emerged from some unspecified forerunner. Those of complex chemical compounds have emerged from the conjunction of simpler chemical components. Properties distinctive of living things have emerged from the conjunctions of these complex molecules. And consciousness emerged from living things. New conjunctions bring about new kinds of relatedness which bring about new emergents. So the new emergent properties are in each case effectively related to the systems from which they emerge. In fact, the new relations emergent at each higher level guide and sustain the course of events distinctive of that level.
Consciousness, then, emerges as something genuinely new at a critical stage of evolutionary advance. When it has emerged, it guides the course of events in the brain and has causal efficacy in bodily behavior.
The whoop with which this antireductionist doctrine was greeted by the majority of prominent biological and comparative psychologists, frustrated dualists all, was quite undignified. Biologists called it a new Declaration of Independence from physics and chemistry. “No longer can the biologist be bullied into sup-
T H E P R O B L E M
13
pressing observed results because they are not discovered nor expected from work on the non-living. Biology becomes a science in its own right. Prominent neurologists agreed that now we no longer had to think of consciousness as merely dancing an as-siduous but futile attendance upon our brain processes.12 The origin of consciousness seemed to have been pointed at in such a way as to restore consciousness to its usurped throne as the governor of behavior and even to promise new and unpredictable emergents in the future.
But had it? If consciousness emerged in evolution, when? In what species? What kind of a nervous system is necessary? And as the first flush of a theoretical breakthrough waned, it was seen that nothing about the problem had really changed. It is these specifics that need to be answered. What is wrong about emergent evolution is not the doctrine, but the release back into old comfortable ways of thinking about consciousness and behavior, the license that it gives to broad and vacuous generalities.
Historically, it is of interest here to note that all this dancing in the aisles of biology over emergent evolution was going on at the same time that a stronger, less-educated doctrine with a rigorous experimental campaign was beginning its robust conquest of psychology. Certainly one way of solving the problem of consciousness and its place in nature is to deny that consciousness exists at all.
Behaviorism
It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. History has not recorded whether or not this feat was attempted by the early behaviorists. But it has recorded everywhere and in large 12 The quote here is from H. S. Jennings and the paraphrase from C. Judson Herrick. For these and other reactions to emergent evolution, see F. Mason, Creation by Evolution (London: Duckworth, 1928) and W. McDougall, Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution (New York: Van Nostrand, 1929).
14
Introduction
the enormous influence which the doctrine that consciousness does not exist has had on psychology in this century.
And this is behaviorism. Its roots rummage far back into the musty history of thought, to the so-called Epicureans of the eighteenth century and before, to attempts to generalize tropisms from plants to animals to man, to movements called Objectivism, or more particularly, Actionism. For it was Knight Dunlap’s attempt to teach the latter to an excellent but aweless animal psychologist, John B. Watson, that resulted in a new word, Behaviorism.13 At first, it was very similar to the helpless spectator theory we have already examined. Consciousness just was not important in animals. But after a World War and a little invigo-rating opposition, behaviorism charged out into the intellectual arena with the snorting assertion that consciousness is nothing at all.
What a startling doctrine! But the really surprising thing is that, starting off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a movement that occupied center stage in psychology from about 1920
to 1960. The external reasons for the sustained triumph of such a peculiar position are both fascinating and complex. Psychology at the time was trying to wriggle out of philosophy into a separate academic discipline and used behaviorism to do so. The immediate adversary of behaviorism, Titchenerian introspectionism, was a pale and effete opponent, based as it was on a false analogy between consciousness and chemistry. The toppled idealism after World War I created a revolutionary age demanding new philosophies. The intriguing successes of physics and general technology presented both a model and a means that seemed more compatible with behaviorism. The world was weary and 13 For a less ad hominem picture of the beginnings of behaviorism, see John C.