Thouness (Q2Q VIII)

In Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII), the preceding post in my "Quickening to Qualia" series, I spoke of "Thouness." I said "Thouness" was, to the conscious mind, a notion like "redness." That is, it is a quale — the singular of qualia, which from the point of view of theorists of consciousness like David J. Chalmers, are the stuff of our subjective inner experience.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

In The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Chalmers makes a case for consciousness — subjective experience — being unlike every other aspect of the human mind. I use an analogy of my own to model the difference: conscious experience happens in an experiential "inner mind," with an interface with the "outer mind." The latter consists of all our mental operations that can be termed psychological, or functional, or behavior-causing.

The outer mind of perception and cognition, thought and emotion, memory and learning can be fully explained by taking the arena of explanation down a level or so into to the purely physical — whether the physical is construed as neurons in a network, or the brain's biochemistry, or the chemical makeup of brain tissue, or the basic subatomic particles physicists study.

The conscious inner mind cannot, however, be fully explained in the same physical way. There is something in the natural world — consciousness — whose facts and principles are not merely physical; so Chalmers shows. That something is nonetheless governed by natural laws, even if these laws are not precisely physical laws. One of these laws — the laws that are "hypothetically" ordained by God, in Chalmers's non-religious parlance — is that the phenomenal mind of our subjective inner experience supervenes on our psychological mind of cognition, perception, behavior causing, etc.

Thus, in my analogy, whenever information is processed by the outer mind, conscious experience is enabled in the inner mind. If the outer mind perceives a red tricycle, the inner mind receives, as it were, a certain "raw sensation": the "redness" of that tricycle. "Redness" is one of the multifarious qualia to which the inner mind is receptive.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I suppose that "Thouness" is likewise a quale to which the inner mind is, or can become, receptive. My idea of "Thouness" is taken from Martin Buber's I and Thou. Buber's 1923 book (I have a 1958 English version translated from the original German) is, alas, not easy to understand or paraphrase.

Buber was a German-Jewish thinker whose thought about how God and humans relate to one another is just as profound from the Christian perspective as the Jewish. My earlier attempts to read his book, going back to my college days in the 1960s, resulted in only a shallow comprehension of his message. I have begun to reread it now, to try to correlate what he says with what I am gleaning about conscious experience from Chalmers.

Buber begins his book by positing two "primary words": I–Thou and I–It. (I–He and I–She are no different than I–It). Each of the two primary words signifies a distinct relation: a relation, not a thing. The I in I–Thou is, somewhat surprisingly, not the same I as in I–It. Each I implies a unique attitude. "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude" (p. 3).

"If I face a human being as my Thou," Buber adds (p. 8), "and say the primary word I–Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things."

Buber's translator, Ronald Gregor Smith, writes in his preface that Buber, in writing so directly and concretely about abstract notions such as these, lays a "special claim upon the reader" (p. viii). It occurs to me that the quale which I am calling "Thouness" is itself characterized by a similar "element of claim, calling for a specific response."

If, per Smith, "the question for Buber [is] how may I understand my experience of a relation with God?" — if Buber reveals that relation's "inner nature" as "direct or immediate," albeit perceived through "concrete human experience" and "the hallowing of the everyday" — then I am encouraged to view the Thou relatant of I–Thou — whether divine or human — as one in whom I can meet "Thouness," rather than one in which I merely experience what it is like to use "Itness."


For me to recognize and meet "Thouness," my inner, conscious mind has to "receive" it as a quale. If the inner mind supervenes on the outer mind, which processes all stimulations from the "outside world," then perhaps the outer mind has to be configured in a certain way before the "Thouness" of another person can get through to my inner mind.

I draw an analogy with the color vision of cats. Cats are not thought to be able to distinguish the color red — the price of having superior night vision to ours. If cats have an inner mind (Chalmers sees little reason to limit consciousness to just humans) they might nevertheless come equipped with an inward receptivity to the quale "redness."

In other words, if we could perform the necessary surgical procedures on a cat's retinas, brain, etc., to allow it to be able to distinguish the color red, the quale "redness" could concevably be "sensed" or received by its inner mind.

The tradeoff would be that it would lose its vaunted night vision. In the wild, night vision helps it to hunt and eat to stay alive. Night vision is key to the cat's ability to manipulate things in its environment — i.e., prey — in a using relationship which Buber would call I–It.

Once this hypothetical operation on a wild feline's vision were performed, the cat would be able to distinguish the redness of its prey's blood for the first time — if, that is, it could still locate its prey. More likely, it would have nothing to eat. Just before starving to death, it might twig to something noble like "Cats do not live by prey alone." Then it would go to cat heaven.


What if, for us if not for cats, "Thouness" is originally like "redness" is for cats — impossible to activate? We need to undergo some sort of "operation" on our outer mental apparatus before the quale of "Thouness" can get through to the inner mind. Meanwhile, "Itness" gets through just fine, so we don't starve to death.

That, at any rate, is the point of view which I would like to explore in future posts in this series.