Point of View

Las Meninas (the Maids of Honour), Velasquez, Prado Museum.
Some argue that, because it seems to depict perception itself, Las Meninas is the greatest painting in Western Art.

"All experience is had from a point of view, which is not represented in the experience itself, but is, as it were, its inner limit. Its outer limit is equally elusive, like the boundary of the visual field. beyond which there is nothing else on the same level." Wittgenstein takes up this Schopenhaueresque idea.

Wittgenstein argues "in the Tractatus that, when the solipsist claims that all experiences are had by his ego, he fails to connect his ego with his body and so there is no justification for calling it 'his'. It lacks a criterion of identity and it may just as well be the collective ego of the whole human species - an interpretation which points to idealism rather than solipsism. There is a dilemma here. For if the solipsist does tie his ego to his body, his claim will be self-refuting, because his body is placed in the world among other bodies, each with its own field of consciousness. This shows that the solipsist's field of consciousness cannot be a breakaway world.

The solution to the problem of the ego is implicit in the Tractatus but it is worked out in detail in Wittgenstein's early middle period. The ego itself vanishes without our feeling any sense of loss. My field of consciousness, like the field of vision that it contains, is self-authenticating: if a sensation occurs in it, I do not even have to ask myself whose it is. There is no inner owner for me to point at and I may as well drop the word 'I' and say, 'there is pain'."

- David Pears, Wittgenstein.

the owner of a head

On his commentary page in the latest issue of New Scientist Magazine, the philosopher A.C. Grayling discusses the mystery of how consciousness emerges from the brain. The brain has physical properties - mass etc - but thoughts do not. He writes that hardly anyone now accepts the dualistic concept that mind and body are separate things. But then he goes on to discuss the encounter that obviously occurs between a flower and the "owner" of the head perceiving the flower.
Exactly what is he referring to when he talks about an "owner" of a mind or body? A self or soul separate from the body?
Even scientific magazines, it seems, are not immune from the dualistic thinking perpetuated by the religions they often criticise.

Here's an excerpt from the piece:

"According to one influential school of thought, some of the ways we think about our minds have to go beyond our investigations of what is inside our heads to include the physical and social environment surrounding our heads. This idea is prompted by the thought that what we know when we understand a concept has to involve a connection between a brain event and something in the world. Here is an obvious example: to understand the concept of a flower, and to be able to distinguish between flowers and other things - trees and buildings say - the relevant physiological occurrences inside the head have to stand in a determinate relationship with flowers and non-flowers outside the head. This relationship, again obviously, is empirical: an actual perceptual encounter between the head's owner and flowers (or at least pictures of flowers) must have taken place at some point.

But a less obvious aspect of having a concept of flowers is that whenever we think of flowers, the relationship between what is happening inside our heads and flowers outside our heads has to remain in some form, in order for our discourse to be about flowers rather than some other thing. Nothing mysterious or magical is implied by this; it just means that to explain the thought of a flower as distinct from a thought of anything else, reference to flowers out there in the world is unavoidable.

The notion that thought is thus essentially connected to the outside world is intended to illustrate the more general idea that "mind" is not describable in terms of brain activity alone. Instead, it must be understood as a relationship between that activity and the external social and physical environment. Philosophers give the name "broad content" to thoughts that can only be properly described in terms of their thinkers' relationship to the environment. Some even argue that there can be no such thing as "narrow content" - that is, thoughts that are specifiable independently of their thinkers' environments and just in terms of what is going on inside the skull.

If it is right that all content is broad content, then the implications are very great. It means that understanding minds involves much more than understanding brains alone. It involves understanding language, society and history too."

- A.C. Grayling

New Scientist, 4 October 2008

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The implication is also this: if a self exists, it must be singular, and it must be co-extensive with the entire world.

Ownership of Consciousness

"The ego is not the owner of consciousness;
it is the object of consciousness."
- JP Satre

Sartre like Heidegger uses phenomenology to attack the Cartesian ergo sum. There is no "I" that thinks, but only thought and reflection upon this thought. With Sartre the dissolution of the Cartesian egological self initiated by Nietzsche reaches its climax. There is no entity that is original, no basis for a reality of ego. Indeed the self only succeeds in reaching authenticity through the act of evacuating into the world. Solipsism becomes unthinkable from the moment that the "I" no longer has a privileged status. Philosophically Sartre stands in opposition to Hegel's absolute idealism, but the ego follows again the same path in the process of exposition. Having established an understanding within holistic practice their thesis suffers complication via the reintroduction of the will. First Sartre contends that "there is no 'I'" on the unreflected level. The act of directing ones consciousness towards the world of objects Sartre describes as intentional but is itself an unreflective noetic act. Reflection upon it produces a new object which did not exist before the act was grasped - the ego. Hence this reflected consciousness generates the "I". This becomes the transcendent object of the reflective act but is not in itself a part of that act. Thus this reflection not only discloses objects, but produces and constitutes them. Sartre goes on to state that we have no privileged access to our own ego over and above "the ego of another". The ego cannot belong exclusively to itself. Sartre refers instead to consciousness to instigate beings freedom because the ego's relation to the world is patently a fabrication. For Sartre, the self is an object constituted within the phenomenal field. "The ego is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness". Consciousness is a kind of pure transparency, a mere openness to a world to which it adds nothing of its own. Against this Sartre conceives the character of "authenticity" whereby consciousness is able to make itself free because every intentional act is self-originating, self-determining and "absolutely free". His only reconciliation with holistic meaning rests in his joining Marx, for he says the whole problem of recognising ones own, and others, authenticity, must be shifted to the domain of concrete social and political action.