I readily admit (and did so in the contribution) that the claim that the subject of consciousness is the episode (or stream) of consciousness itself is rather counterintuitive.[1] However, part of this counterintuitiveness can be ameliorated easily enough. To begin with, I should have made clearer that I was talking about what I like to call the “phenomenological subject” of consciousness. I did use the phrase, but I did not explain it and should have done so. The phenomenological subject is just that to which the objects of phenomenal consciousness seem to appear. In other words, granted that consciousness seems to have a subject-object, relational structure, the phenomenological subject is just the subject-pole of conscious experience in so far as it is given (reflectively as well as pre-reflectively).
Now, suppose we interpreted the Humean “no-self” intuition in the strongest possible way. In that case, we would conclude that there is no phenomenological subject at all. As I argued in the paper, I think the Humean intuition is not to be dismissed. However, I do think that the subject-object polarity of consciousness is a datum and not projected or inferred. If one is already sympathetic with the idea that consciousness is always aware of itself (is its own “secondary object”, as Brentano put it (see Brentano 1995, pp. 128ff.), or is always non-positionally conscious of itself, as Sartre put it (see Sartre 2004, p. 8)), then it is not much of a stretch to identify this feature of “reflexivity” with subjective character and, if we must reify, make the episode or stream into the phenomenological subject. As long as one understands that by “subject” here, I just mean the subject-pole of conscious experience, a pole that one is phenomenally conscious of, then one will get my meaning. Given a commitment both to some version of the Humean intuition and to the intuition that one is phenomenally aware that consciousness has a subject-object polarity, one will need to resolve the tension between these in some way. Self-representationalism and self-acquaintance theories can do this in a very elegant way, I argued, a way that neither first-order nor higher-order representationalisms can. All of this is compatible with the evident fact that we normally experience ourselves as having a body in space that bears various relations to objects in space; but the phenomenological subject of consciousness should not, in my view, be identified with the body or with a representation of the body.
One might, of course, use “subject of consciousness” in different ways. One might, for example, mean “that organism or system to which we attribute consciousness” or “that which is the substrate of consciousness in an organism”. We might then speak of the “metaphysical subject” or “ontological subject” of consciousness, rather than the “phenomenological subject”. The metaphysical subject of consciousness need not appear to or be represented in consciousness. I have nothing against the idea that the organism (or a set of sub-processes of it) is the metaphysical subject of consciousness. I grant, moreover, that we normally speak in such a way that the grammatical subject of attributions of consciousness (or conscious mental states) is a noun that refers to an organism. We say things like “Skipper, my dog, sees his food coming” or “The bird saw me walking toward it and became frightened”. Indeed, insofar as consciousness is a property of or process going on in the brain of organism, there is nothing erroneous about such attributions. However, given the falsity of animism and the commitment to what I like to call encephalism (the view that consciousness resides in the brain), the ontology of consciousness cannot just be read off of the grammar of such attributions, not that Schlicht is suggesting that it could.
It would, however, be more accurate to say in the Skipper case that there is a process of phenomenal visual consciousness having such-and-such representational content and being connected in such-and-such a way with Skipper’s volitional, appetitive, and motor systems (all, of course, related to Skipper’s organismic homeostatic systems) going on in Skipper’s brain when, in normal conditions, the food is presented to him. Of course, I just referred to Skipper qua organism multiple times in reformulating this apparently simple attribution, but that just has the effect of roughly localizing the conscious process and, of course, connecting it to Skipper’s behaviors and functions as an organism. No one should deny that consciousness, as it has arisen in organisms with an evolutionary origin, has a biological function, though it is highly debatable that consciousness should be defined or analyzed in terms of such functions. It may well be that it serves these organismic functions but could exist in substrates that do not have them or need them. In fact, I would put my money on the claim that artificial consciousness is possible in systems whose homeostatic functions can be carried out in a way that its consciousness does not contribute to at all. But that is a debate for another time.[2]
The counterintuitiveness of claiming that the phenomenological subject of consciousness is the episode or stream of consciousness might derive in part from the oddness such a view would seem to introduce into our quotidian attributions of conscious mental states, if we were to try to make our ways of speaking match this theory. It would be rather odd indeed to say, “Skipper’s current episode of consciousness sees the food coming”. But the view I defend does not really legitimate such locutions. Those attributions run together the phenomenological and metaphysical notions of “the subject”. The sense of counterintuitiveness that comes from saying “the episode sees…” (etc.) stems from the fact that the episode is not the metaphysical subject.
When we make normal attributions of conscious mental states to a creature, we encode information about the location or individuation of the conscious episode (and this gets construed as “ownership”—it’s Skipper’s seeing), information about the representational content and modality or attitude the episode involves (food and seeing, respectively, in this case), and a sort of folk theory about the relational structure of consciousness. That folk theory puts whole organisms or agents, as it were, “behind” the conscious mental state, as the point of view or subject pole from which the experience emanates or, to use another metaphor famously attacked by Dennett (see 1991, ch. 5), as the spectator in the “Cartesian Theater”. That folk theory is hopelessly homuncular, it seems to me. It offers no analysis of what a subject is and gives no hint as to what the real conditions of unity are for either organisms or subjects. (By contrast, self-representational and self-acquaintance theories try to preserve what is right about the Cartesian Theater intuition while avoiding a commitment to homuncularism.)
When we say “Skipper sees” we do not really mean that Skipper is, as it were, behind some sort of internal telescope looking out of his eyes or at some internal screen, though the first theory of seeing that some kids come up with is indeed the homuncular and regressive one according to which there is a little person in our heads looking at just such an internal screen. It seems that what is encoded in the folk theory implicit in our normal conscious mental state attributions is something like a homuncular projection of our third-person experience of other conscious organisms onto the organism’s first-person experience. In other words, we see Skipper with his excited behavior and the food out there in front of him, some distance from his body; we then imagine that this relationship that we see “sideways on” (to borrow a phrase from John McDowell, see e.g., McDowell 1994, pp. 34-36) is, so to speak, rotated 90 degrees and moved inside Skipper’s head—with Skipper as an irreducible agent assuming the position behind the eyepiece of his internal periscope.
That may be a bit too fanciful an exercise in the conceptual archaeology of folk-psychological mental state ascriptions, but the main point is just that our normal attributions of conscious mentality seem to run together generally accurate information about individuation or location (“ownership”), content, and attitude with a naïve and homuncular picture of subjective character. So, yes, it is true, I would say, that the organism is the subject of consciousness in the sense that conscious episodes (so far anyway) take place in organisms (actually in their brains) and causally depend upon organismic metabolic and homeostatic processes for their existence. In this sense, the organism is the metaphysical subject of consciousness, and this is properly reflected in our usual mental state attributions. However, I would emphatically (perhaps even hysterically) deny that the whole organism could be the phenomenological subject of consciousness. This is something also reflected in our usual attributions, but this is because the metaphysical and phenomenological subjects are simply conflated by folk psychology. The whole organism could not be the phenomenological subject for two reasons.
First, if one agrees with me, as Schlicht seems to, that subjective character and the subject-object polarity are phenomenally manifest even in pre-reflective consciousness, but one adds to this the claim that the phenomenological subject is the organism, then it would seem to follow that we are always aware of ourselves qua organism when we are consciously aware of anything—since, again, all consciousness by hypothesis has subjective character. Now, this could mean either that we represent ourselves qua organism or that we are acquainted with ourselves (and we are, in fact, organisms). Surely we do not, at the level of consciousness, represent ourselves qua organisms all the time, unless all one means by that is that consciousness has a biological function of some sort (that is, in, say, the teleofunctional sense, consciousness is “about” the organism and its ongoing relationship to the world). The latter is undoubtedly true, but that is not a phenomenological characterization of subjective character; rather it is a thesis about the function of consciousness and its relation to organismal homeostasis. Of course, one could make an identity claim according to which subjective character (as experienced) really just is the suitably integrated representation of the organism, but this then would mean that one is embracing some form of P-theory (a theory according to which conscious representational states are distinct from non-conscious ones in part because they target some privileged object, e.g., the organism, a substantial self). If the claim is taken to mean that the organism is self-acquainted, then I might be willing to agree depending on the spin one puts on that claim.
One might just mean that there is some sub-process of the organism that is self-acquainted (that is self-manifesting or directly phenomenally self-representing, if one prefers). If that is all that is meant by the claim, then I can agree. Something like this is exactly the position I defend in the paper. After all, the central claim was just that consciousness is self-acquainted. And it was an unstated assumption of the paper that consciousness is a sub-process of the brain, and the brain a part of the organism. If, on the other hand, one means that the whole organism is directly acquainted with itself, this seems to me to be either an unexamined endorsement of commonsense, homuncular ways of making conscious mental state attributions (criticized above) or the claim that consciousness necessarily involves the entire organism.
The latter disjunct seems as false to me as the former. Yes, the prolonged existence of consciousness depends on the prolonged operation of the essential metabolic and homeostatic functions. And, indeed, almost certainly the metabolic functions that support synaptic transmission and some other basic neuronal processes are sine qua non for consciousness as it happens to be implemented in human and animal brains. But none of the specific means whereby our bodies support these functions have to be in place, it seems to me.
We can have artificial hearts and artificial respiration. In principle, we could offload all the metabolic processes outside those internal to the nervous system to non-natural machines. And we could even, in principle, replace the natural generation of essential neurotransmitters with their artificial synthesis and, possibly, artificial projections for distributing them in the brain properly. Homeostasis could be maintained artificially and, in principle, without the relevant brainstem nuclei needing to do anything anymore (unless, of course, some of their activities just happen, for totally contingent evolutionary reasons, to be constitutively necessary for the occurrence of consciousness in brains like ours).
In short, it is certainly physically possible (though technologically beyond our current means) to keep a brain alive and operating in a “vat”! As long as we maintain those processes that are the neural correlates of (are identical to, in my view) consciousness, there would be consciousness in that brain in that vat. I am sorry, but all the evidence indicates that encephalism is true. And it seems to me to be a sort of externalist fetishism to think that consciousness literally extends beyond the brain (save by intentionality and causal interfacing). As Dan Lloyd says, we already are brains in vats! The cranium is the vat! (See Lloyd 2004 pp. 244-245.)
Haven’t we learned from dreams, hallucinations, ALS, direct brain stimulation, and locked-in syndrome that consciousness does not need anything but the relevant brain functions to exist? Of course, the functioning brain depends upon a properly functioning body, but this does not mean that consciousness should be identified with those (other) bodily functions in some way. If we go this route, adding bodily correlates to neural correlates, when the latter causally and distally depend on the former, what is stop us from adding everything the body depends upon to our list of correlates (the gravitational constant, the bonding properties of molecules, the stability of the proton, etc.)?
True, at a certain level of analysis, it is hard to say precisely where the nervous system ends and the rest of the body begins. But then the same can be said for the body and the rest of the world (especially given that we routinely appropriate, by breathing and eating, parts of that world). The boundaries are fuzzy at a certain scale, but this does not mean we should say there are no boundaries at all. Moreover, causal dependencies and interdependencies are myriad, but the causal relation is not the parthood relation—we cannot infer from “X causally depends on Y” that Y is a part of X. Human consciousness, as it is currently implemented, causally depends on respiration, but this does not mean that respiration is part of consciousness or that the physiological correlates of respiration are also correlates of consciousness.
If it is true that consciousness resides in the brain and depends on our specific homeostatic and metabolic processes only contingently (and I mean physically contingently, not merely logically contingently), then saying that consciousness requires an organism as a subject-pole starts to look a little fishier. This brings me to the second main reason why I would reject the claim that the whole organism is the phenomenological subject of consciousness.
What, after all, is an organism? It is clearly not just a collection of parts. We can agree with the Aristotelian tradition that it is a functional unity. We can agree that it is a system that, in virtue of its form or organization, is able to give rise to temporal successors (and I don’t necessarily mean offspring) that maintain that form or organization (at least for a while and at least within the range of conditions it evolved to live in). The matter always changes, but the form remains, from cradle to grave.
The organism takes matter from its environment to keep its processes going. And relative to its function of maintaining homeostasis (thereby giving rise to temporal successors that have the same organization it does) and to the scale at which those functions are, so to say, visible, we can truly say that the organism behaves like a goal-directed whole with interdependent parts and processes (and organs—the heart needs the lungs; the lungs need the heart; the kidneys need the stomach, etc.). This is all fine and dandy. But it is clear that organs are not to be identified with the whole organism. Skipper is not Skipper’s heart, though without it (or some suitable artificial replacement) little Skippy would soon cease to be an organism at all and eventually become soil (or parts of other organisms).
More to point here, the brain is not the organism. Consciousness resides in the brain. We could, in principle, preserve consciousness simply by preserving the functioning brain. If this is true, then you do not need an organism for there to be consciousness, you just need a suitable organ—the brain.
I would never deny, of course, that we normally represent ourselves as having a body and relating to a world through that body. No doubt about it. Moreover, I believe it is metaphysically necessary that any consciousness be embodied in some substrate and that this embodiment configures consciousness in a way that is phenomenologically accessible to a certain extent. And, of course, we are organisms with a certain natural history. All of this “facticity” does indeed configure our consciousness to one degree or another. If all the organismal claim comes down to is that conscious beings are necessarily acquainted with their own contingent embodiment in a certain manner, then I will wholeheartedly agree. If it means that, contingently, consciousness evolved out of and is still connected to basic homeostatic functions (in some way), I will regard the claim as a not implausible hypothesis to be investigated.
This last claim is not, it seems to me, exactly what Damasio (see Damasio 2010, ch. 2)and philosophers who follow him on this point, like Charles Nussbaum (2003) and apparently Schlicht himself, mean. They want to say something stronger. Like Francisco Varela (who possibly influenced Damasio on this point, see Damasio 1999, p. 347; cf. Varela 1979; Maturana & Varela 1980), they seem to want to connect consciousness essentially in the constitutive sense to the kinds of processes that are involved in homeostasis and the very emergence of an internal organism/non-organism distinction. It may well be that the subject/object distinction apparent in consciousness is, in evolutionary terms, some sort of extrapolation of this more basic distinction. It is clear, however, that, whatever the exact relation, the organism/non-organism distinction in, say, the immune system, cannot just be identified with the subject/object distinction in consciousness. On Damasio’s view (as I understand it anyway) consciousness arises out of multiple, integrated layers of representation of the organism/non-organism distinction, where this representation itself has a certain regulatory function.
I certainly agree with Schlicht (this collection, p. 7) that, for Damasio, organismal and objectual representations have to be integrated in the right way for there to be something it is like for the organism, and I did not mean to suggest otherwise. This does not, however, make Damasio’s theory a non-representationalist theory (no more than the poise requirement makes Tye’s theory non-representationalist (see Tye 1995, p. 138, 2000, p. 62). As long as representation is considered a necessary condition for consciousness, the theory is representationalist, by my lights. And since the relevant representations, in Damasio’s theory, include, centrally, representations of the organism, it still qualifies as a P-theory in my sense—the organism is a privileged object. The representations that, when integrated, constitute consciousness, must include representations of the organism, according to the theory. Whatever else is represented in conscious mental states, on this sort of view, the organism certainly is. And the organism (ultimately in its guise as the “core self”) could thus serve as the phenomenological subject of consciousness.
I do understand how such a theory attempts to capture subjective character. In effect, it bundles it up into an object of a special sort that is always represented (one way or another) in any conscious mental state. For various reasons (e.g., the Fichte-Shoemaker Regress, see Henrich 1982; Frank 2004; Frank 2007, pp. 157ff.; Shoemaker 1968), I do not think that such a theory can do the trick. Briefly, it is not enough simply to represent some object that you just happen to be. That is not sufficient to ground the manifest indexicality (the “I am this, here, now” aspect) of our conscious experience. Also, it is somewhat puzzling to require that consciousness representations have to have some specific type of content. Consciousness seems to be so flexible in this regard, that is odd to think that there is such a “magic” object of representation. By contrast, I view subjective character (“reflexivity”) as a formal or structural feature of consciousness and not as a matter of representing some object or other (whether consciously or unconsciously)—including “the organism”. In fact, I believe such views, while on the right track relative to views that disregard subjective character, get the cart before the horse. The representation of oneself as a self or an particular organism depends upon reflexivity, and not the other way around.
For an organism (call it O) to benefit from representing an organism interacting with the world and with other organisms, there must be some way that in encodes that it is O (and not anything else). In effect, it needs a “you are here” (or rather “I am here”) dot on its map, a kind of “fixed-point” (see Ismael 2007). The mapper needs to know where it is on the map it has made. On pain of regress, it cannot derive a representation like “I must be here and not there, this organism on the map and not that one” without having some antecedent, unmediated self-reference or primitive self-knowledge (again, see Shoemaker 1968). Without this direct self-reference, the best we could hope for is a system that just happens to control itself by representing something that resembles itself in the relevant ways. Such a system might as well be controlling an exact duplicate in a duplicate room next door. We do not get manifest indexicality, self-location, or subjective character out of this. A system built up around reflexivity or direct self-reference (or primitive self-knowledge, if you prefer), would have all the control functions of a system that lacks it as well as these other features of subjectivity. Following a suggestion by Metzinger (personal communication), though with a certain modification, I would be happy to call this kind of reflexivity “prepersonal”. As such, it is the basis for one’s conscious representation of oneself as a person, organism, or anything else for that matter; but it is not essentially the representation of a person or an organism. Rather, it is the reflexivity of a process that happens to be housed in an organism (and in an organ within that organism) and that allows that organism to self-locate in a multiplicity of spaces (physical, social, semantic, etc.).
I would add that that reflexivity could not itself be purely representational, as I argued in the paper. It very well could be, however, that reflexivity was first achieved in the evolution of organismic control systems and that these control systems have everything to do with the maintenance of homeostasis, though this is a contingency. That does not seem implausible to me at all. But that is a hypothesis about the evolutionary origin of self-acquaintance, not an account of what self-acquaintance is or how it is routinely generated and supported in the brain.