 |
| Martin Buber's I and Thou |
 |
| Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny |
Wright says natural selection is indifferent to consciousness, since the latter has no causal or functional effect. Because it doesn't really "do" anything, it doesn't make us fitter in any Darwinian sense. So why does it exist?
 |
| David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind |
Furthermore, its existence can't be explained in a reductive manner by analyzing it functionally, structurally, etc., and then giving a purely physical explanation of the involved causation. Consciousness's basic nature is mental, not material.
So, says Chalmers, our conscious experience of such things as "what it is like to see the color red" can never be explained by a knowledge base, however complete, of all the physical facts. Should we one day learn everything there is to know about, say, bats at a physical, biological, neural level, we even then could not know for sure whether bats are conscious.
Hence, consciousness does not automatically emerge from physical facts in an ineluctable way, as a matter of priori logic. We ourselves could be physically and functionally identical to what we are and still, for all mere argument could tell us, we might lack consciousness. The fact that we don't lack consciousness can accordingly be attributed only to some natural law afforded to this world in the same way as all the other natural laws have been afforded.
The law might specify, for example, that if there is information processing going on at a functional, physical level, then associated with that processing there is a qualitative experience that occurs at a phenomenal level. That qualitative, phenomenal experience is consciousness.
A corollary law might hold that the experience of consciousness which is associated with the processing of information will be faint or rich, depending on how simple or complex the underlying information processing is. Because the human brain is more complex than that of a bat, human consciousness is markedly richer than putative bat consciousness.
Those who believe that natural laws come from God are, of course, free to agree with me that the law of consciousness comes from God also. Chalmers, who owns to no particular religious orientation, says God hypothetically had to do "more work" to add the necessary law of consciousness to the others he was ordaining for nature. In this way, Chalmers's argument that consciousness is naturally, not logically, supervenient on the brain's functions suggests, in my theistic view, that evolution by natural selection — the force which tailored the human brain's functionality — is OK with God.
Why so? Because in tuning human brain functionality to a high level of complexity, natural selection provided an opportunity for the application of the law of consciousness to humankind in a uniquely non-faint way.
The above, in itself, is far from the whole story. I find that Martin Buber goes to great lengths to differentiate experience in general from what he calls "the cradle of Real Life" (p. 9). Specifically he says, "I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou."
The qualitative feel of the experience I have when I encounter another person does not in and of itself deserve the label I have invented, "Thouness." It remains an experience, on my part, of an It, says Buber, a "thing among things" (p. 8). To say the primary word I–Thou to a human being or to any other interlocutor is, on the other hand, to transcend mere experience.
To say the primary word I–Thou to a human, to a spiritual being — to God — or even to a tree is relational, not merely experiential. It does not blot out ordinary experience, it goes beyond it. As consciousness is something "extra" vis-à-vis the human mind, I–Thou relationality is something "extra" vis-à-vis ordinary conscious experience. It is that which unites in a seamless and eternal whole all experiential events concerning the relatant to whom I can say Thou.
When Thou is present, says Buber, mere things are nonexistent. Things have qualities of which consciousness is cognizant. Through these qualities a thing can be discriminated from other things — which precludes I–Thou participation in wholeness and unity. In this sense, ordinary conscious experience affiliates more with the I–It attitude than with the I–Thou. Buber tersely writes:
— What, then, do we experience of Thou?
— Just nothing. For we do not experience it.
— What, then, do we know of Thou?
— Just everything. For we know nothing isolated about it any more. (p. 11)
In view of the above, "Thouness" cannot be taken to represent just another phenomenal quality among qualities — even if it is stipulated to be first-among-equals among all the qualia which may be presented as "raw sensation" to the conscious "inner mind."
The I–Thou encounter might at best be thought of as the completion of conscious experience in a relational fusion which admits of no further isolation or separation.
One could also say that I–Thou relationality is the limit of conscious experience, analogous to the limit of a mathematical function. For example, the limit of y=x, as x approaches infinity, is itself infinity. I–Thou relationality might be said to be the limit of personal consciousness as it approaches a sense of sheer totality.
Consciousness per se is a prerequisite of Buber's view of the relational. I—Thou awareness is perhaps the perfection of consciousness, with all of its usual localizations removed.
Bridging the idea of consciousness per se and Buber's notion of the Thou is the idea of self-consciousness. Chalmers discusses self-consciousness — the sense of self — as being subtly different from self-awareness, but in some views of consciousness they are the same. (This Wikipedia subtopic may be of help here.)
Chalmers says of the sense of self:
"One sometimes feels that there is something to conscious experience that transcends all [its] specific elements: a kind of background hum, for instance, that is somehow fundamental to consciousness and that is there even when all the other components are not. The phenomenology of self is so deep and intangible that it somehow seems illusory, consisting in nothing over and above specific elements [of ordinary conscious experience]. Still, there seems to be something to the phenomenology of self, even if it is very hard to pin down. (p. 10)
If we visualize this "background hum" of one's sense of self achieving its fullness or completion in meeting and engaging in dialogue with another Thou who likewise has such a personal "background hum," we may be getting very close to what Buber was talking about in I and Thou. We can see why Buber insisted that we do not merely "experience" the Thou: that would make it seem like "Thouness" is nothing over and above the list of specific qualities we sense in any old I–It (or I–He or I–She) experience.
An experience of "Thouness" would accordingly seem to be the submerging of one's own "background hum" in the larger, cosmic one, transcending all "ordinary" experience. One loses oneself, in speaking the primary word I-Thou, only if one has a self to lose. One has a self to lose only if one is richly conscious. One is richly conscious only if one has a highly evolved brain: so says the law of consciousness instituted by God.
No comments:
Post a Comment