The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V)

I now take up the fifth installment in a series of posts I have labeled "Quickening to Qualia." This post follows on I and Thou (Q2Q IV), in which I argued that we are able to have an I-Thou relationship with God — with one another, too — because one of the components of our human mentality is intrinsically relational.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

The relational component of our human mental capacity is brought up briefly by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. This philosopher of mind says our minds are both psychological and phenomenal. Our minds correlate our behavior with our circumstances and are aware of our inner states, but beyond that, they experience.

Our minds' ability to know "what it is like" to, say, see the color red is part and parcel of subjective experience. Subjective experience is connected with sensation, perception, cognition, and the other aspects of human psychological capacities. Still, conscious experience is fundamentally a separate kind of thing. It is phenomenal, not psychological.

A third mental component, the relational, comes into the picture for Chalmers only as a stopgap against the possibility that the phenomenal and the psychological do not wholly exhaust the mental capacities we humans have. His true interest is in the phenomenal component of the human mind, our consciousness or subjective experience. He says it serves to give us access to "qualitative feels" or qualia: notions like redness and surprisingness. Qualia are the stuff of consciousness.

To me, Chalmers misses a bet by saying — even in the teeth of a possible third component of the mind which he dubs relational — that "there is no independent third class of phenomena forcing itself on us to be explained" (p. 21). He thinks once you explain the phenomenal and the psychological, you can most likely combine the two explanations rather trivially to explain the relational.


I think — to pick up on ideas explicated by the theologian-philosopher Martin Buber in I and Thou — this may be true for I-It relationships, but not for I-Thou relationships. Religion, in Buber's view, would be meaningless without the possibility of a dialogue between two persons.

I look at it this way:

1. We gain spiritual life by entering into an I-Thou relationship with a personal God.
   
   
2. We cannot enter into an I-Thou relationship with God unless we are ourselves persons, albeit imperfect ones. As persons, we are possessed of free will, and we can choose not to allow God to perfect us in our personhood. But we can also allow God to leverage our natural personhood into a permanent spiritual life with him.
   
   
3. We cannot be persons, possessed of free will, as all persons are, unless we can have the experience of selfhood. (Chalmers calls this "self-consciousness.")
   
   
4. We cannot be self-conscious unless we are conscious: unless we are capable of having subjective experiences by virtue of the phenomenal components of our minds.
   
   
5. The fact that we are conscious is surprising, given that (per Chalmers) we conceivably might have evolved as zombie creatures with only psychological, not phenomenal, components to our mentality.

I think of the search for an I-Thou relationship with God — in which God, not us, does most of the work of fitting us for such a relationship — as the essence of faith.

In the Christian view of faith, we are told by God, working in our hearts and via the Bible and the Church, what we must do and must not do; this is Judeo-Christian morality. It is all about avoiding the things that lock us into damaging I-It outlooks and encouraging the things that open us to life-giving I-Thou relationality.

I-It outlooks subliminally treat all others as objects, as dead things. They eventually deaden the "I" half of the I-It equation, as well as the "It" half.

I-Thou relationality lets God into our lives, both individually and communally. That is when he can begin the work of radically changing our imperfect natural selves into perfect spiritual beings.


By virtue of the logic above, we would have no hope becoming spiritual selves in I-Thou relationality with God if we were not, equally surprisingly, conscious to begin with. Our consciousness underpins our self-awareness, which underpins our existence as persons who possess free will and can accept or refuse Gods' redemption, which underpins our ability to learn to relate, in I-Thou fashion, with the One God Who is in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit.

The Christian notion of the Holy Trinity, by the way, has been called by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity a union of three divine persons. The first is the Father, the Lord God of the Old Testament. The second is his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who was of the same sort of Being as the Father "before all worlds." The third divine personage, the Holy Ghost, is the spirit of their mutual love.

I wonder if Buber, if he were Christian — he was in fact Jewish — would have said that the Holy Spirit is the original I-Thou relationship!


Chalmers addresses the question of the reasons, metaphysical or otherwise, why brains such as ours which are complex information processors can also have conscious experience. I have not yet read far enough into his book to know what answers he comes up with. My answer is similar to that of Robert Wright in Nonzero. We could have found ourselves inhabiting an externally identical zombie world, but didn't. That is because of our surprising consciousness alone.

But evolution needn't have made us conscious, since our inner experience has nothing to do with what natural selection "sees" and ratifies. Natural selection is interested only in what we do, not in how we feel about it. So the surprising experience of selfhood which depends on our equally surprising experience of consciousness cannot be explained by Darwinian principles.

That suggests that God made a world in which there would evolve creatures with enough information-processing "smarts" to also be conscious, so to be able to be made to have, through faith, perfect spiritual selves.


As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity's final chapter, "I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own."

In Chalmers's analysis, with the exception of the phenomenal properties of "my" mind, most of what I call "me" can indeed be explained, if not easily, someday by cognitive scientists studying the specifically psychological properties of the mind. Only phenomenology (remember, Chalmers says little about relationality) is deeply mysterious and truly surprising.

The deepest mystery is not why there exist the psychological states that arise from physical changes in the brain in response to environmental stimuli; these states alone are what cause our subsequent behavior. It is rather why psychological states invariably co-occur with experiential states. "Perhaps it is logically possible," writes Chalmers, "that one could have the experience without the causation, but it seems to be an empirical fact that they go together" (p. 22).

Put another way, the unfailing link between our psychological mind and our phenomenal mind is something of a brute fact in search of an explanation. This is what Chalmers calls "the mind-mind problem" (p. 25).

Perhaps the basis of an explanation is in the five steps of logic listed above. In a nutshell: God's plan insists that we live in a world of consciousness, leading up to selfhood. So that is exactly the sort of world he created.