What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI)

In my series of posts under the umbrella title "Quickening to Qualia," or Q2Q, this is the sixth. The fifth, this one's predecessor, was The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Thus far, when I wasn't rambling on about what I imagine to be the religious implications of my topic, I was considering what it means to be conscious, a subject investigated 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. The psychological properties of mind comprise just about everything we, in our everyday way of thinking, would call mental. Most or all of what we think of as cognition, not to mention perception or sensation, is, to Chalmers, psychological. Such psychological operations of the mind are basically functional. They take in information, they process that input, they produce output. The output typically determines behavior.

As all this goes on from one moment to the next, there is something else going on as well: experience. We have an experience of what it is like to be pricked by a rose, even as our functional minds react in a more practical way. These what-it-is-like experiences are the phenomenal components of our minds. It is by virtue of them that we are truly conscious.

Chalmers puts it this way (p. 11): "On the phenomenal concept, mind is characterized by the way it feels; on the psychological concept, mind is characterized by what it does."

All of our mental states are apt to have phenomenal and psychological aspects yoked in tandem. This is why our everyday language is ambiguous between the two. When we say we are "conscious" (see pp. 26-27) we often mean simply that we are awake, not asleep. Or, if we claim to be "conscious" of something, then either we have knowledge of that thing, or we are paying attention to it. Behavior under our "conscious" control is, basically, voluntary behavior.

We can be "conscious" of internal states of mind; this is introspection. Often, if we wish, we can report verbally on our "conscious" internal states.

We even have the ability to think about ourselves: "our existence as individuals ... our distinctness from others" (p. 27). It is in this respect, I think, that the phenomenal, as distinct from the psychological, is at its most diaphanous.


Chalmers has it that all these everyday ideas of what it means to be "conscious" are really about awareness, not consciousness per se. All forms of awareness, whether focused externally or internally — including self-awareness — are in and of themselves functional and, accordingly, psychological.

"Self-consciousness" is consequently an ambiguous term. On the one hand, it "can be understood as awareness of oneself" (p. 29). This is a functional, psychological idea. It might better be styled "self-awareness."

On the other hand, "self-consciousness" has "a certain sort of phenomenal state associated with" it (p. 27). I take it that he means here roughly this: an experience of what it is like to be self-aware.


Awareness is accordingly, per Chalmers, "psychological consciousness," which is functional, as distinct from "phenomenal consciousness," which is not. Now, it is the latter which Chalmers means, most of the time, when he uses (just plain) "consciousness." I have to admit to wondering, by the bye, why he doesn't simply replace this term with another: experience.

True, experience is another word with more than one everyday meaning. But it is one which, to my mind, carries the intended overtones of indescribable savor or ineffable aura better than the relatively neutral "consciousness": "I can't tell you what it's like, you just have to experience it."


At any rate, whether you choose to call it the one or you call it the other, it grows ever more diaphanous over the course of Chalmers's first chapter, as he teases apart all the concepts which might be, and often are, referred to as "consciousness."

We need to be cognizant, he says, not just of a distinction between the psychological mind and the physical body (i.e., the brain). We also need to take into account the distinction between the phenomenal mind and the psychological-functional-causal mind — no matter how diaphanous the former concept becomes by comparison with the latter.

Why? Even thouugh the two mental capacities typically co-occur, "one can wonder how to explain the phenomenal quality [of experience], and one can wonder how to explain the playing of the causal role, and these are two distinct wonderings" (p. 22).

Put more succinctly, we can ask ourselves what it is like to be self-aware ... and, since we can, we require an explanation for this fact. It will never come, says Chalmers, from a consideration of the psychological-functional-causal mind alone.