CONSCIOUSNESS: THE TRANSMUTATION OF A CONCEPT

It sometimes happens in the history of science that well-used, highly entrenched, revered and respected concepts come unstuck. That is, under the suasion of a variety of empirical-cum-theoretical forces, certain concepts lose their integrity and fall apart. Their niche in the theoretical and explanatory scheme of things is reconstructed and reconstrued, and new concepts with quite different dimensions and dynamics come to occupy the newly carved niche. The ‘spirits’ and ‘prin­ ciples’ of alchemy, the ‘crystal spheres’ of pre-Galilean astronomy, ‘daemonic possession’ of Medieval medicine, ‘phlogiston’, ‘ether’, and ‘signatures’, are now nought but dry bones of an earlier intellectual ecology. The theme of this paper is that a similar fate may befall concepts respected and revered in our own prevailing conception of how humans works, and the concept on which I mean to focus is consciousness. To the degree that there are already afoot misgivings about the integrity of the traditional conception of consciousness, some of the problems discussed will be familiar, especially to psychologists. But the extent of the erosion of the concept by recent empirical findings is, I suspect, greater than hitherto reckoned. The aspects of the orthodox concept which I shall discuss include the alleged transparency of the mental, the supposed unity of conscious­ ness and the idea of the self, and the allegedly special relation thought to obtain between language and consciousness.