1 The Inner and the Outer World, Philosophy of Mind, University of Oxford ID: O10P426PHV
The Myth of the Solipsistic ‘I’
Why do we appear to ourselves the way we do and why does the world appear to us the way it does? If all was provided for in a given, just simple and familiar: Would we marvel about it?
Joana Kompa Stella
Working Notes on the Architecture of our Mind and its Abilities
Our unique private experience and our exclusive Cartesian access to our Self have always been the topic of controversy. One of the most quotes arguments against consciousness is that its non-physical properties seem to exhaust themselves subjectivity, quality, non-physicality and intentionality. Our subjective state seems something so intimate and at the same time so incredibly difficult to grasp. In the following I shall propose a model that may explain some of our intuitions about the relation between our inner- and the outer world. Before we start on any speculation on the nature of internal and external reality let’s have a look the most obvious bridges between them.
You may follow me through this little philosophical meditation:
a.) We can always communicate about what we experience, verbally and non-verbally. Mostly it is at the discretion of the Self if or if not we like to elevate experience to the level of communicable states. We can very well decide to keep silent or dismiss experience, e.g., because we feel that it may be misleading or irrelevant. We could say that qualia has optional extensions and that it is in our exclusive disposition to use qualia in any way we see fit. Non verbal experience includes pictures, sounds, rhythm, gestures, notion of Gestalt, morphological changes and music.
Joana Stella Kompa: The Myth of the Solipsistic ‘I’, 2011
2 The Inner and the Outer World, Philosophy of Mind, University of Oxford ID: O10P426PHV
b.) Many experiences are actually not of private nature and we share them with others; such as rituals. The privacy of qualia if over-emphasized in the Western tradition.
c.) All experience is conceptually linked to our consciousness to make sense out of what we witness: our mind tries to understand experience consciously, sub-consciously and emotionally and relates it to specific concepts and ideas that we have formed before (We could call this our internal history record, our conceptual relation to prior cognitive states and our memory thereof).
d.) Experience involves two actors: ‘us’ as the entity who experiences {subject} as well as the experienced {object}. Hence, as a result of a subject taking information from an object in measure to entangle it into Gestalt, the resulting experience reaches our Self as a composite {subject-object} state. This bi-directional stream carries information of both: the conceptual capture of the object by the subject as well as the phenomenological appearance retrieved from the object for the subject. We do not just look at a flower passively - we are taking in its information.
e.) For communicative states, since we do not measure objects but exchange information with fellow subjects, the form of the experience is {subject-subject}, or inter-subjective in short. Experience is thus never merely subjective or private as many philosophers suggest. By logic it cannot be: in order to preserve the entropy of information experience carries bi-directionally content from two sides. In the case of mutually engaged speakers it is easy to demonstrate that speaking means to do something, this is to perform a speech-act. The experience of speech-acts includes thus normative prepositions and contextual implications and descriptors. However, even while in speech it is up to the discreteness of our Self to distance ourselves internally from the conversation and start our personal meta- narrative about the conversation at hand. One of the amazing abilities of our mind is that we are fully aware of processes running parallel on different speaker perspectives: e.g., while attending a meeting and listening to the 3rd person narrative of the facilitator, we already form our own 1st person opinion and may ask ourselves how others feel from a 2nd person narrative. We could call this multiplied perspective processing which is a highly sophisticated social skill. And even beyond this capability we can furthermore anticipate the other participant’s behaviors and reactions as a running simulation parallel to the factual setting of the meeting. This means we can relate to future dispositional states of others based on our formative account with them.
f.) The ‘I’ oscillates in its perspective between two positions: the first ‘native’ state lies within the borders of the internal world. When we are in introspective mode or a mode where sensations play a major role the self remains within its most comfortable center. The second state is the ‘I’ moving to the periphery of its internal world and taking a Self-critical, ‘objectified’ stand between the internal and external world. This is the perspective we take when we take critical account about our own perceptions and biases. In the following we shall call these states simply I1 and I2 with I1 assuming activity in an out- of -focus and relaxed state (speak: primary consciousness) and I2 assuming activity in an in-focus and self-reflected state (speak: secondary consciousness; the consciousness about consciousness). The range between these two states defines our cognitive spectrum.
g.) Besides communication we have perceptions and sensations as the main information highways of our consciousness: Perceptions relate to the representation of the state of the external world (in relation to us) whereby sensations relate to the representation of how external states affect our internal states as well as they conclude status reports about the same.
Joana Stella Kompa: The Myth of the Solipsistic ‘I’, 2011
3 The Inner and the Outer World, Philosophy of Mind, University of Oxford ID: O10P426PHV
h.) Verification of information is handled on three domain-levels: we have discrete information processing of the inner world (1st person narrative), subject-independent verification outside the subject by others (3rd person narrative) and finally inter-subjective verification between the Self and others (2nd person narrative). The integration of all speaker- and world-perspectives is necessary to strive for a coherent account of balanced reality. This is a simple thought- experiment: What happens to our consciousness and our relations to Self, World and Others if only one specific narrative perspective is left out or experiences impairment?
Body, Awareness and Qualia
When we talk about qualia we have to specify which qualia we are talking about: peripheral qualia (which accompanies every second of our life and which resonates as mere awareness in the background of any perceptional and sensational experience), conscious qualia about a specifically noted phenomena (like it is getting cold) or communicated qualia (when we interact consciously with a qualia experience and we decide to communicate it to ourselves or others by taking advantage of qualia’s conceptual-semantic and communicative extensions). Our body and its technological extensions form the interface, the surface for interactions between Self and World. Within the body we experience synchronicity - everything outside the body is asynchronous. Our body is part of the world and, unlike the mind, it is nested in the causality of primary physics.
Conclusions
Isolated subjective experience doesn’t exist as such. The unique discreteness and personal freedom to make conscious decisions about our internal monologue and report however does. The internal world provides us with a plethora of dispositional states in which we can realize our future states. The privacy of the ‘I’ is a myth. It is in contrast the unique structure of our consciousness that it highly integrates 1st, 2nd and 3rd person narrative perspectives in tandem with their corresponding world-perspectives. In highly socialized societies where shared experiences outweigh or equal individual experience the necessity for an internal world is logically diminished. For highly structured individualized societies the internal world plays a larger role as the needs for negotiation between Self- and societal world exponentially increase. This would be in short an outline of what I would consider a more structured, intuitive and functional model of consciousness and experience as compared to many philosophical approaches that mystify the Self, either by elevating it metaphysically beyond critical assessment or by declaring it a redundant ‘non-scientific’ leftover.
Joana Stella Kompa: The Myth of the Solipsistic ‘I’, 2011