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Consciousness: Thoughts
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In psychology, consciousness is the subject's immediate apprehension of mental activity. Although Freud thought that conscious processes are "the same as the consciousness of the philosophers and of everyday opinion" and "a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description" (1940a [1938], pp. 159, 157), he argued that they could not be considered the "essence" of mental life. Rather, consciousness has a fugitive quality and does not "form unbroken sequences which are complete in themselves" (p. 157). "The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is in itself unconscious and probably similar in kind to all the other natural processes of which we have obtained knowledge" (1940b [1938], p. 283).
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Rudolf Steiner believed animal consciousness to be the experience of desires, hopes and fears without self-awareness and the ability to view the body and those emotions from the point of view of an inner observer. He thought plants too have a form of consciousness, perhaps resembling human sleep. The German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) wrote: "Mind sleeps in stone, dreams in the plant, awakes in the animal and becomes conscious in man."
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With the dawn of scientific psychology in the late nineteenth century, the central philosophical controversies about consciousness center around whether consciousness can ever be explained by an objective science of the mind. The biologist Thomas Huxley provides an early attempt to express the sense of mystery: ‘How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp’ (1866, p.210). Since that time there have been many scientific advances in understanding the mechanisms of perception, thought, and communication, and many philosophical advances in understanding the nature of intentionality and meaning. According to Thomas Nagel and many other philosophers, such advances must leave an unexplained residue, concerning what it is like to have phenomenally conscious experiences (as illustrated in the introduction). Nagel writes that ‘[c]onsciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable’, identifying ‘subjectivity’ as its most troublesome feature:
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[I]n efforts of difficult self-restraint and deliberate reflection, the consciousness of the ego reaches its highest level. Besides this experience of the varying degrees of the obtrusiveness of the self, we are all conscious at times of trains of thought taking place automatically within us, which seem to possess a certain independence of the main current of our mental life. Whilst going through some familiar intellectual operation with more or less attention, our mind may at the same time be occupied in working out a second series of thoughts connected and coherent in themselves, yet quite separate from the other process in which our intellect is engaged. These secondary "split-off" processes of thought may, in certain rare cases, develop into very distinct, consistent, and protracted streams of consciousness; and they may occasionally become so complete in themselves and so isolated from the main current of our mental life, as to possess at least a superficial appearance of being the outcome of a separate personality. We have here the phenomenon of the so-called "double ego". Sometimes the sections or fragments of one fairly consistent stream of consciousness alternate in succession with the sections of another current, and we have the alleged "mutations of the ego", in which two or more distinct personalities seem to occupy the same body in turn. Sometimes the second stream of thought appears to run on concomitantly with the main current of conscious experience, though so shut off as only to manifest its existence occasionally.
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The collective energy generated from the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of the almost six billion people on this planet creates an atmosphere, or "consciousness climate". When events such as a terrorist bombing that kills hundreds, people all over the world are affected. They feel the tension wave of those unstable situations even though they're not directly impacted.
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Arguments of a far more empirical sort have challenged the causal status of meta-mental consciousness, at least in so far as its presence can be measured by the ability to report on one's mental state. Scientific evidence is claimed to show that consciousness of that sort is neither necessary for any type of mental ability nor does it occur early enough to act as a cause of the acts or processes typically thought to be its effects (Velmans 1991). According to those who make such arguments, the sorts of mental abilities that are typically thought to require consciousness can all be realized unconsciously in the absence of the supposedly required self-awareness.
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