I and Thou (Q2Q IV)

This is the fourth in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts, in which I study the phenomenon of consciousness with an eye toward discovering what kinship the topic may have with religious experience, Christian or otherwise. The most recent entry in the series was, until now, The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, says that anything we call "mental" may be divided into two aspects, the psychological and the phenomenal. The two are conceptually different, although any mental function such as cognition, perception, or sensation, or any mental state such as pain or belief, is typically a combination of both.

"At a first approximation," Chalmers points out, "phenomenal concepts deal with the first-person aspects of mind, and psychological concepts deal with the third-person aspects" (p. 16). The first-person aspects concern the person-as-subject, i.e., as a subjective experiencer. The third-person aspects concern the person-as-object, i.e., as a behaver or doer.


It is my own contention that the phenomenal mind is not just a first-person "I" mind; it may also involve a second-person "Thou" mentality. For us to treat others as if they have the same potential qualities of experience as we do is to treat each of them as a "Thou," not an "It"; as a person, not an object or thing.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

This may be what Martin Buber was getting at in I and Thou: the crucialness of dialogues and of "interhuman meetings" among persons who recognize one another as such — i.e., as capable of the same subjective, conscious experiences as one's own self is. The publisher's description of the book adds that

Buber goes on to demonstrate how these interhuman meetings are a reflection of the human meeting with God. For Buber, the essence of biblical religion consists in the fact that — regardless of the infinite abyss between them — a dialogue between man and God is possible.

Religion would be meaningless without the possibility of dialogue between persons, eh? It would seem, then, that religion and spirituality, properly understood, may be dependent in some way on qualia, the phenomenal qualities of our conscious experience, since only persons such as we are sufficiently self-experiential to recognize their own potentialities in other persons!


Still and all, there seems to be yet more going on here. Perhaps "Thou-mindedness" fits into a third category of mental aspects which Chalmers notes: the relational.

"Certain beliefs" that we entertain in our minds, Chalmers says, "may depend on the state of the environment as well the internal state of the thinker" (p. 21). Belief is accordingly, in his view, one of several "intentional" states we find our minds in, along with that of desire and that of hope.

In this usage, "intentionality" represents the defining characteristic of mental states that are "about things in the world" (p. 19). Per Wikipedia, "Every psychical, or mental, phenomenon, every psychological act, has a content, and is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire, etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted."

Even so, we also seem to have inward states associated with our beliefs and desires; these qualify as phenomenal. When we take together the phenomenal (or first-person) and psychological (or third-person) aspects of belief (hope, desire, etc.), Chalmers says, we have possible grounds for finding that there is a third — a relational — component of our various mental states.

When it comes to this putative relational component, though, Chalmers seems to think that "there is no independent third class of phenomena forcing itself on us to be explained" (p. 21). When we have accounted for the phenomenal and the psychological, that is, we will have sufficiently accounted for the relational as well.


I think Chalmers commits a subtle error here. What he says may be true of what Martin Buber calls a basically lifeless I-It relationship, but I doubt that it is true of a fundamentally living I-Thou relationship.

When we believe (or hope) that the "intentional object" toward which an existing mental state is presently directed is a person, not a thing, we experience a unique sort of phenomenon: the kind that is given rise to by perceiving our interlocutor as having the same capacities as we do for first-person, qualia-based, inner experience.

Indeed, the characterization just given, "intentional object," is all wrong here. What we are beholding is an "intentional subject."


So it remains quite true that we can't really plumb the quintessential religious experience — the I-Thou relationship with God and with one another — without understanding phenomenality in addition to psychology. But on top of giving phenomena their due, right alongside the merely psychological, we must also recognize that what is truly vital, spiritually speaking, is the relationship itself, not the phenomenal and psychological components which combine to enable it.