I'm no fan of sharp lines. I'm deeply committed to the idea that the world -- especially the most complex parts of it, like the mind -- is thoroughly vague, blurry, splintered, dissociative, in-betweenish. But one thing I can't get my head around is an in-between state of consciousness -- a state of mind that is somewhere between being an experience and not being an experience. I see no theoretical reason to suppose such states can't exist; and given gradualism in the development and phylogeny of brains, there seems to be excellent reason to suppose there'd be a vague zone between conscious and nonconscious. But that idea, despite its appeal in the abstract, eludes my understanding when I try to reflect on it more deeply.
Of course there could be peripheral experiences, such as the experience of feeling your feet in your shoes when you're thinking about other things. (Maybe there aren't such experiences in fact, but that's a different question; at least they're conceivable.) Such states may in some sense be "less conscious" than experiences in focal attention, as it were. But, it seems to me, if you experience your feet in your shoes, no matter how peripherally, inarticulately, fuzzily, inattentively, then you genuinely experience them in that peripheral, inarticulate, fuzzy, inattentive way. If frogs (or ants or slugs or whatever) have the hazy beginnings of conscious experience -- say visual and tactile conscious experiences -- then it seems to me that they are genuinely conscious, in that hazy way. Either their stream of conscious is a total blank (i.e., there is no stream of conscious experience, for them) or it has some limited range of components. If the former, they have no conscious states; if they latter then they are conscious. I cannot envision a "between" state here.
Thus, it seems to me that "being conscious" is more like "having money" than "being red". (Does Searle say this somewhere?) Having money comes in degrees -- some people have more and some have less. But even one cent is money. Either you have money or you don't (setting aside issues like debt and illiquid goods). Being red also comes in degrees -- one thing can be redder than another -- but there are "in-between" states -- shades along the spectrum from red to purple, say, or red to orange, where it makes sense to say "Well, it's a vague matter whether this shade counts as red or not -- it depends on how one draws one's lines -- it's kind of between red and purple." What I don't see is how that could be the case for consciousness. Can we say of a state -- a peripheral conscious state in a human being, or a state in a frog, that whether it's a state that is experienced, whether it has "phenomenal character", is a vague issue, that it depends on how one draws one's lines, that it's kind of between having a phenomenal character and not having one?
Surely there are those who will say yes. And I'd like to say yes. But I can't quite figure out how this could be so (without adding something to "conscious" to change the meaning from that intended here -- like changing it to mean "self-conscious" or "acutely aware"). So I'm rather stuck. Is this just a failure of imagination?
Submitted by Saul on
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