I’m Conscious, are You?

I Think, Therefore…

I’m conscious. At least I think I am. I am aware of existing in my office in front of my computer. I can feel the chair underneath me and smell the coffee in the mug on the table beside the keyboard. There is the gentle sound of birdsong coming from outside the window. I am aware that I am thinking of the words to use as I type them and the mistakes that I have to correct. I can remember what I had for breakfast and the dreams I had last night. I look forward to taking the dog out for a walk.

Count the number of times “I” was used in the above paragraph. Everything about my consciousness relates directly to me. I exist in this present time. I feel, see, hear, smell and taste. Consciousness seems to be a uniquely subjective experience.

While I know exactly what it is that I experience, I can never know what it is that you experience. I will never know the glory of the redness of your red, or what happens in your nose when you smell onions. I can guess that what you experience is pretty much what I experience, but I can never know for sure. There is also a bigger question: where, exactly, does my consciousness reside? In my mind, or in my body?

Mind and Body

The mind-body problem has intrigued, baffled and infuriated philosophers, scientists and theologians. The problem involves a debate over the existence of ‘thinking stuff’ as well as just ‘stuff’. Does the mind exist separately from the brain? Is there a specific area of the brain in which consciousness resides? Does the concept of a mind composed only of physical matter negate the concept of spirit or soul?

Times Past, Times Present

It is not only contemporary theorists who have considered the mind-body problem. Nearly 300 years ago, Bishop Berkeley wrote “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge” (1) in which he considered the physical world to be a ‘convenient fiction’ embodied in a kind of linguistic game containing the discourse of the physical sciences. This means that the physical world is an illusion and that only the mental world exists. Peter Lloyd has taken this argument to argue that reality is constructed by language, or the ‘language game’. One can examine figurative expressions such as ‘he flew off the handle’ and can see that it is absurd to claim a real existence for ‘the handle’. He says: