It was a bumper year for pinecones on a path I walk often. How many pinecones am I conscious of as I walk that path? As you may suspect, my interest in here is more a matter of consciousness, than of pinecones.
The Visual Field (or What’s on the Retina)
One tempting answer is “all the pinecones that were within my
visual field.” We might instrumentalize
this by getting a video camera with exactly the breadth of field of my eyes and
making sure it points exactly where my eyes point. This is not as easy as it
sounds. Human eyes blink and saccade. I am going to miss some pinecones and hit
others at the fringes of my visual field.
Moreover, the fringe is bigger than you might think. The
information getting to the optic nerve at any one instant is a small part of
our apparent visual field. My impression is that all the pinecone images are
reasonably sharp and in color. However, the normal human zone of sharp color
vision is of an area only a little larger than one’s thumbnail with the arm
fully extended. Our sense that the visual field is much greater than this
arises because it is built up through the operation of those saccades and very,
very short-term memory. In the lab, a
device can detect just where the saccade is taking the eyes and supply to a
screen supply content from just that eye-aimed spot.
Were you attached to such a device and looking at a screen showing
a text, but only so much of the text as you were looking towards at each
instant, what would appear on the screen at any instant would be only a couple
of words of text. That is what an observer not attached to the eye movement
tracker would see. But you would think you were seeing, all at once, a text
well larger than this paragraph.
For this reason, the total number of pinecones we can count
playing back an eye tracker equipped video camera (using slow motion as needed)
may be slightly different from what we would get if a camera simply duplicated
the apparent breadth of my visual field. Pinecones on the outer parts of that
field might be missing from the eye tracker version because their brief
appearance on the non-tracked version was missed because of a blink or because
no saccade happened to quite reach them. Also, extras might appear on the eye
tracked version because a longer than usual saccade just happened to reach a
cone.
So, let’s take the count of pinecones that appears on the
tracked video to be the number that I “saw.”
If our eye tracker equipped video camera were set up right, that number
should be the same as the number of pinecone images that were on my retina.
(Some things on the retina may be there too briefly or be too small to get
transmitted up the optical nerve or to register at the first brain stage of
processing, but assume any of my pinecone images are big and long lasting enough.) There is, then, a respect in which I “saw” all
those pinecones and no others. There is a basis for saying that their images
were “in my consciousness.” There will, however, also be reasons for saying
that many of those images were not.
Awareness
If asked whether I was aware of pinecones as I walked the
path, I should respond, “yes, many pinecones.” There would no way to get any
real count this time. Certainly, however many of the pinecones we have just
been talking about, weren’t in this new set. It is a well know feature of human
life that we can look right at things and not be aware of them, e.g. I don’t
notice a pen on the desk when I am looking for my car keys. Also, were there a racoon
on the path in front of me, my pinecone awareness is likely to drop markedly,
no matter how many of their images are on my retina.
Attending To
The number of pinecones I attend to will be even fewer. They are more likely to achieve that status if
I step so as to avoid them or I kick them off the path. I also sometimes attend
to particularly large or particularly small pinecones.
Thinking About
Few, even of those pinecones I attend to, do I think about. It
might be “there are three more right in the middle of the path” or “hard to
kick that one aside.”
“In” Consciousness – A Conclusion
There would be circumstances in which I might be said to
have been conscious of any of these different pinecone collections. The ones that
were unambiguously “in my consciousness” were those I thought about at the
time. Yet those I attended to or was merely aware of might also be said to be “in
consciousness” in weaker senses. I suppose pinecones of which I was not aware,
but I saw, as would be shown by the eye tracker video might even be said to be
in consciousness in a very weak way.
For example, were I asked to list all the objects that were
on my desk when I was looking for my keys. I do not list a pen. I am then shown
two photographs with the pen in two different (neither outlandish) positions.
There is a good chance that I would be able to pick out the correct one, even
though I had not been aware of the pen or its position when key hunting. Would
this show that there was a respect in which the pen was “in my consciousness”
after all?
I am not, in fact, concerned to decide the question whether the
pen was in my consciousness. Indeed, I think consciousness is not the sort of
thing about which we should expect to get neat “in/out” determinations. That is
because consciousness is not one thing at all, and certainly not like a
receptacle with determinate contents. There are many different consciousness
phenomena, related phenomena but many of them not so very closely related. Consider
being conscious of a violine high c, of balancing on one foot, of your memory
of the Marseillaise scene in “Casablanca,” of factoring a four digit number
into primes. “In” anything is just not a very apt way of putting what is common
to these different experiences.
Philosophers have held, or have been understood to hold, that
there is no such thing as consciousness. In recent times Dennett and Carruthers,
for example. They are right about a lot, but were they thought to be claiming
that there is no such thing as consciousness, that would go too far. What I
think is undeniable, however, is that we are in important ways wrong about consciousness,
and never so wrong as when we are in the grips of the mainstream philosophical
tradition on consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment