Cowboy Bill Rides Herd on the Range of Consciousness

A mere two decades ago, no self-respecting analytic philosopher would be caught dead espousing a theory of consciousness. It just wasn't done. Talk of some mysterious non-material thing called 'consciousness' would cause hard-minded philosophers to cover their mouths and noses with a hankie and turn away, as though they feared contamination from metaphysical impulses and phenomenological extravaganzas of idle speculation. While it was all right, and even noble, to be conscious, one certainly was not supposed to have a metaphysical theory of what made it possible to be conscious.

All that seems to have changed in a few short years. Today, you can become a philosophical celebrity just by throwing around a little cognitive neuroscience, talking about the "hard" problem of consciousness, and wrapping the whole subject in mystery. How are we to explain this fairly sudden and radical transition in our thinking about consciousness? What propelled us from the philosophical milieu of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, with its characteristic avoidance of the whole idea of consciousness, to our current fascination with the subject? The answer seems pretty clear. It has been the rise of cognitive neuroscience. The scientific study of cognition has, once again, made it respectable for hard-minded philosophers to talk of consciousness, just so long as they can back up their theoretical speculations with at least some reference to empirical evidence of some sort.

Here's where Cowboy Bill (Willy James, that is) comes riding into view. He's one of the James boys, although his brother, Henry, wasn't much of a cowboy. A century ago he gave us what may be the best account of consciousness ever articulated, and he based it on extensive work in biology, neuroscience, and psychology. James did this, and he did something more, something that might still serve us today as a theoretical model for much contemporary cognitive neuroscience. What he did was to give a remarkable phenomenological analysis of aspects of conscious experience, which he tied to what was known at that time about the biological basis of mind, thought, and language.

Whenever I read James on mind, I get this "Aha!" kind of feeling—a sense that what he is saying is right, or could be made right with just a little tweaking. You could back up almost everything he said on the subject with evidence from recent cognitive science, just like he would have done, were he alive today. Let's see how this might work, starting first with James's account, and then measuring it against the work of Antonio Damasio, who has provided one of the more comprehensive contemporary treatments of consciousness from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience.

The first important thing Cowboy Bill tells us is that we humans are inescapably embodied creatures. There is no disembodied "I"—no transcendent ego—that serves as the site of all my experiences and thoughts. There is no disembodied me that thinks my thoughts, feels my feelings, and performs my actions. There is only the continuous flow of thought, experience, and feeling all tied up together, but without any little transcendent self to do the tying up. Cowboy Bill describes our passing thoughts as cattle grazing on the vast range of potential consciousness:

And by a natural consequence, we shall assimilate them [these thoughts] to each other and to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as we think, and separate them as a collection from whatever selves have not this mark, much as out of a herd of cattle let loose for the winter on some wide western prairie the owner picks out and sorts together when the time for the round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he finds his own particular brand. (James 1950, 333-34)

So, some of Wild Bill's thoughts have the "Lazy WJ" brand on them, which lets...