ANTECEDENTES

According to David Hume there is no evidence for the exis-tence of the self, conceived as some underlying substance doing the thinking. He points out that introspection does not enable him to find such an entity, or even to form an idea of what this entity, “self,” might be like. Upon introspection, Hume finds perceptions, but no perceiver, objects of thought

or consciousness but no thinker. The thesis of the inten-tionality of consciousness is the thesis that all and only mental phenomena are intentional. Put plainly, to be conscious is to be conscious of something. Introspection shows this concep-tion of the mind to be plausible. There is no thinking without thinking of some object or other. Jean-Paul Sartre takes this notion of intentionality a step further by claiming that, not only is intentionality a feature of consciousness, it is the only fea-ture of consciousness. Consciousness reveals objects which appear to consciousness. What is the thesis of intentionality?

Sartre writes: “Consciousness is defined by intentionality. By intentionality consciousness transcends itself . . . The object is transcendent to the consciousness which grasps it, and it is in the object that the unity of the consciousness is found.”⁶ In other words, consciousness is like a transparency; when we try to single it out, we “fall through” to its object. If we try to sin-gle out the consciousness that is conscious of a desk without thinking of the desk itself, we fail.

Having so purged consciousness, what are we to make of such activities as memory, perception, imagination, experience, and so on? The only remaining option is that they are charac-teristics of objects that we normally describe as perceived, imag-ined, etc. I do not love Tasty Wheat; rather, I find Tasty Wheat lovable. I do not fear Agents; rather, I find them fearsome.

Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “There is no such thing as the sub-ject that thinks or entertains ideas.”⁷ All features of an object lie on the side of the object, not the subject. Because the mind is a limit to the world, it is not a constituent of the world. The rea-son is that being the ground of the worldliness of the world, the measure of what it is to be a constituent of the world, the mind cannot itself rest on that ground, it cannot be a measure of it-self. This is the only sense in which it is a transcendental feature of the world.⁸

6 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Noonday, 1957), p. 38.

7Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.631, italics mine.

8 Panayot Butchvarov makes this same point about the concept of identity and its role in structuring the world. See his Being Qua Being (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 255.

Searle admits that consciousness and its chief feature, inten-tionality, are the most important features of mental phenomena, and writes that these features are so difficult to explain and “so embarrassing that they have led many thinkers in philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence to say strange and implausible things about the mind.”⁹ Churchland likewise admits that introspection “reveals a domain of thought, sensa-tions, and emosensa-tions, not a domain of electrochemical impulses in a neural network.”¹⁰Any relation needs at least two relata. If one relatum is missing, then a relation is not logically possible.

If there isn’t a traditional self, then the self cannot be related to the external world in the traditional way. Under the conception of consciousness mentioned above, the self cannot be related to the world in the way which had been previously supposed, because the self does not exist in the way that was previously supposed. If there is no self or if there are no relations, or if perception is not a relation, we are forced to reverse idealism, in the sense that instead of putting the world into the mind, we need to put the mind into the world. (Idealism is the view that nothing is material, and the world is just a group of immaterial ideas in our minds. Obviously, idealists and materialist don’t mingle much at parties.) A one-term theory of perception is plausible because, given certain conceptions of mind, it is the only logical alternative.

This should not lead us to believe that we have no access to the outside world, but rather to understand that a door to the outside world requires an inside world from which to pass. The whole point of reducing the mind to a transcendent conscious-ness is the elimination of the subject, and hence, the Elimination of the Inside World (the world of the traditional mind). This is why I reject talk of “subjective” facts in the traditional sense because (as explained earlier) there is no thing (no traditional mind) for the facts to be subject to. The type of subject which may have such an effect on objects of awareness is exactly the kind of subject whose existence this view denies. We are left with a new view, in which (1) materialism is in a sense true,

9 John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) p. 15.

10 Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p 26.

because everything in the world is material; and (2) dualism is in a sense true, because of the existence of consciousness, which is the one true immaterial thing. (The reader probably is seeing that our language is a bit limited: how can there be an immaterial “thing”? If it’s not material, isn’t consciousness NO thing? Yes. It’s just that we don’t have a noun that refers to no thing, except “nothing.”) Consciousness is not a thing, but is something, in a sense: It is the revelation of objects themselves.

Just as a race seems to be composed of the running itself, so consciousness is composed of the revelations presented by consciousness.