The Problem of Consciousness: Tracing It to The Source

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When it comes to the philosophy of consciousness, philosophers sometimes like to trace the problem back through history to find where they went wrong. That is to say, if there is indeed a problem, the solution may not be to go forward but to go back, seeking a critical point where we made a wrong assumption or followed a train of thought not wholly logically.

If we are to go back in history, how far back do you think we ought to go before introducing MM-Theory into the development of thought on the matter? At what point should we accept everything that came before and reject everything that came thereafter, substituting MM-Theory in its place?

We certainly would have to go beyond Locke, as the paper The Inconceivability of Consciousness makes clear. What about the dualism of Descartes? Well, we did seem to start there, at least in the way we began the Basic Theory, but we did so not to defend it, but to tear it down. What we showed in the Basic Theory, and followed through with in the Advanced Theory, was that the reality of the world must be present in our experiences of it. Reality isn't something that parallels mind, as any hardgoing dualist theory would imply, but lives within it. Of course, the dualism of Descartes is one that relates the mind to the body, not so much to reality itself, but this is more a matter of scope than of kind. That is to say, the relation between mind and body is just a special case of the relation between mind and reality. Reality, it is assumed in classic Cartesian dualism, is the realm of the material, of the extended, whereas mind, or perception, is the realm of thought. The body is just one entity within the former realm, the one that seems most intimately mixed up with consciousness. But that is neither here nor there insofar as we are rejecting dualism. The more important issue is what the rejection of dualism entails regarding our search for a place in history where MM-Theory would have saved us a lot of confusion and blind wondering.

Descartes didn't invent dualism. Dualism was a mistake plaguing philosophers since the time of the Greeks. Descartes simply rendered his version of dualism as one of substances - mind and matter were two different substances. The word 'substance' was undergoing some significant changes around Descartes’ time - it came to bear similar connotations to "stuff" rather than the archaic Aristotelian connotation of "thing-ness" - and Descartes was making use of this new meaning to refine the concept of dualism in the hopes of making headway on the problem of consciousness. But not only do we need to undo this refinement of dualism, but we need to get rid of dualism all together.

Dualism finds its roots in a time before philosophy itself. We need to go back to prehistoric times to understand where the problem began. Back then man recognized no difference between perception and reality, between thought and truth. Man did have a rudimentary idea of "mind" but it wasn't the elaborate and flourished idea philosophers grapple with today. It was more or less synonymous with what we call the "imagination". Man always had an imagination - and he knew it. This is what eventually came to be known as "mind" today.

But the concept of the imagination was rather simple. Man did not have an extended concept of "perception" - that the world he saw might be illusory only, or that his eyes might deceive him. He had no concept of belief - he only knew truth. It may have been his truth, as we would rightly recognize it today, but for him it was the truth. In other words, all that man knew of mind, other than his imagination, was the variety of its projected forms. There was no perception per se, but real things in the real world.

MM-Theory regards the projected form of things their true form. The concept of an unprojected form of experience is something that has been handed down to us by dualism. Experiences never really become unprojected, but we still find use in the concept. We use the concept in order to talk about mind and experience as opposed to real things in a real world, but we recognize these as things united with the real world rather than separate entities or a distinct phase they enter in and out of. But primitive man had no such concept. The world was never "unprojected" for him. The only thing "mental" for him was the imagination.

But in regards to the imagination, what does it mean to say that man recognized it as "mind"? Was it something unprojected? No, it was projected as all other things, but it was the thing it was projected as which was different. Just as rocks and trees are real things, and 2+2=4 is a truth, and pain is bad and pleasure good, the imagination was really mental. Mind was a real thing. It didn't take the same form as physical things, or absolute truths, or good and bad, but none of these things ever took the form of any other of these things. They were each comprised of their own unique domains of reality.

But what made the imagination especially unique was that it was the domain of the "unreal" - that is to say, everything we imagined, we duly recognized as not really there in the "real" world. This is not to say it failed to project, but simply that, although the things therein were envisioned similarly to things in the world of sensation, they were not really there in the world of sensation. In other words, "unreal" only means "not in the domain of sensory things" (in fact, it means not in any domain other than its own, but because the imagination is primarily a visualization faculty, it is to be contrast foremostly with the visual world).

This was an evolutionary necessity. It was necessary that we regard the imagination as unreal, as under our control, as ours. This was because of its primary function. Its function was to simulate the world of sensation such that we could form models of it and use those models to make predictions and gain better control of it. It was an inner laboratory, so to speak, in which we conducted thought experiments, testing the real world in a safe and controlled setting. But this required that we deem its contents unreal, for otherwise we'd be struck with alarm every time we imagined a predator or other kinds of dangers. We had to recognize that this wasn't actually happening in the "real" world, and that it was always under our control.

But of course, man can't get far before encountering the schism. Man must eventually come to experience occasions when he is deceived by his senses, or what he thought was true but turned out to be wrong. To be wrong is not enough per se to create the mind/body problem, or the problem of reality and perception. One must first reflect on the erroneous belief and contemplate what made reality seem as though the belief were true. One must take the apparent reality and question what it was if not the actual reality. Man can go so far as to posit a difference between reality an appearance, but to lump appearance together with mind, or the imagination, one must first draw the link between the two. This link is formed when one considers the false appearance to be unreal - that is, bearing the same ontological status as the products of imagination. When man recognizes this similarity, it makes sense to suppose that he only imagined reality to be as it appeared. So to say that certain beliefs or perception are really mental was, originally, to say that they were imagined.

But now the conception of the imagination takes an interesting turn. It is no longer the domain of the manifestly unreal, but can sometimes spill over into other domains, or at least to appear to be doing such. In other words, the imagination can sometimes seem to be real things or matters of fact. Man begins to question what he sees and believes. He sees food; he wonders if he's only imagining it. He believes certain things to be the case; he wonders if these are nothing more than his thoughts.

This shift in the conception of imagination was brought to its ultimate conclusion by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Descartes recognized that the deception of the imagination could be brought to bear on all aspects of reality we felt ourselves in touch with. Anything we perceived, believed, felt, or were in any way consciously in touch with could be doubted, could be a product of the imagination. Kant sealed this line of argument by showing that everything necessarily was just perception - what he called 'phenomena'. His argument was that if we have no way of knowing whether any of our perceptions, beliefs, etc. were real or not, then they are all necessarily only appearance, and so all we have are the way things appear - that is, perception. He didn't want to cast out reality so he had to invent 'noumena'. This is what the dualism of mind and reality leaves us with - a world of perception that we are intimately involved with, and a world of things as they really are that we have no epistemic or experiential relation to.

This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Various forms of monism have been adopted to counter this problem. We won't get into these here, nor the reason I'm opposed to them (though for anyone who has read MM-Theory, my reasons can easily be surmised). I would simply like to end on the following note. We have traced dualism to its source. Dualism begins when man learns to allocate his experiences of reality to the imagination, subjecting their authenticity to doubt. He then questions whether what he sees, believes, or feels in any other way is real or just in his head.

This was the birthplace of the problem of consciousness. If we want a monism, we have to back track to this point. We have to avoid the mistake of taking our experiences of reality and allocating them to the imagination. But what can we do instead? After all, we still misperceive, misbelieve, misjudge, misunderstand, etc. What are we to make of these if not illusions borne of the mind? The solution that MM-Theory offers is that we take the dynamics of mind - the believing and then disbelieving, the perceiving and then misperceiving, the judging and then misjudging, etc. - and plasters them directly onto reality - that is, the dynamics of mind are the dynamics of reality. How this works out is outlined in the paper Reality and Perception. In that paper, we find a new understanding of the nature of reality. Reality really is dynamic in this way. It's not that when one finds that his beliefs were mistaken that they were "merely" mental - it's that reality itself has changed. He finds himself in a new reality, with a new timeline. Looking back on this timeline, he finds he once believed things erroneously, but there was another configuration of reality with a different timeline. In the past of that reality, his beliefs were true, and it was that reality from which he migrated to the new one (all this is made more clear in the aforementioned paper).

Well, I have nothing more to say on this matter. I just wanted to write out my thoughts on where the problem of consciousness began and how MM-Theory would have taken it in a new problem-free direction. That's it.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/