The first thing to notice about the two words is that both of them have Intentional and non-Intentional uses. On the Intentional side, we speak of being conscious of this or that, aware of this or that, aware that such and such is the case, and – less naturally – conscious that such and such is the case. On the non-Intentional side, we speak of being just plain conscious or unconscious, and of being a conscious form of life, and, in rather artificial speech, of someone’s simply being aware, in the sense of being ‘on the qui vive’ or sensitive to the current situation. We also speak of conscious and unconscious motives or desires, but these can be assimilated under the Intentional idioms, as motives and desires we are conscious of.
Since ‘conscious that’ is at least unusual if not outright one of those things we ‘do not say’, and since ‘conscious of’ and ‘aware of’ are as close to being synonymous – to my ear – as any terms we are apt to find in ordinary language, a step in the direction of clarity and order can be taken by abandoning ‘conscious that’ and rendering ‘conscious of’ always as ‘aware of’, thus forming all the Intentional idioms with ‘aware’. Then if it can be agreed that the non-Intentional use of ‘aware’ (as in ‘the younger generation is so aware!’) is just a fancy way of speaking of alertness (‘heightened awareness’), it can be subsumed under the non-Intentional sense of ‘conscious’, where it means, roughly, ‘conscious to a high degree’ – whatever that means. The move, then, is to group all and only the Intentional senses of our two words under ‘aware’, and all and only the non-Intentional senses under ‘conscious’, and the excuse for the move is that no real violence is done to the variety and fragile subtlety of common talk, and a great gain in order is achieved.
Now there is no special reason to suppose that when we speak of someone being aware of something (or, to use the abandoned idiom, conscious of something) we are speaking at all to the subject of that person’s being just plain conscious – in a non-Intentional sense. There may be something like an implication involved, such that in order to be aware of something one must be conscious, but this does not require that awareness (always of something) is the same phenomenon as consciousness. To keep the issues as separate as possible, I shall treat the two terms one at a time, examining awareness first, and returning to consciousness later in the chapter.
There are two quite different sorts of features of situations that govern our talk of awareness. One of these is our dependence on awareness of things for manoeuvring in the environment. It is this feature we allude to when we say ‘he must have been aware of the tree, for he neatly swerved around it’. A little girl darts out into the street; if I do not apply the brakes, there may be at the inquest some question about whether I was aware of her, but if I do brake, my awareness of her will not be at issue, but only, say, when I became aware of her, whether I was speeding, and so forth. If we are tempted to say that dumb animals are aware of things, it is in virtue of their reactions to the environment: the cat springs but the bird flies away, so we suppose that at the last instant the bird became aware of the cat; the bee diverts from its bee-line to avoid collision with a tree, so the bee was aware of the tree. This raises a difficulty, however, for ‘aware’ is Intentional. Was the bird aware of the cat as a cat, or just as a hulking presence or even just as danger? Was the bee aware of the tree as a tree, or just as an obstacle? The latter alternative suggests oddly that the bee could be aware of the tree in a rather sophisticated, abstract way as an obstacle, the way a man might view a tree merely as something to be got around. One might say it is at least certain that if bees are aware of things at all they are not aware of things in a way at all like the way people are aware of things. One is tempted to add: we cannot know what bees are aware of; if only they could tell us!
We are tempted to say this by the other feature governing our talk about awareness: our ability to make introspective reports. The reason we feel safer in ascribing awareness of things as certain things to people is that they tell us. We do not know what it is like to be a bee or a bird, but we know what it is like to be blind or myopic or to have tunnel vision, because people suffering from these conditions can describe their experiences. The human capacity for making introspective reports is seen as a mode of access to the content of awareness, and in virtue of the invulnerability to error examined in the last chapter, its deliverances are seen as reliable – indeed conclusive – evidence of the content of awareness. We ask the driver if he was aware of the little girl, and his reply ‘No, all I was aware of was a swift blur of motion’ settles the content of his awareness provided we do not doubt his sincerity.
The difficulty is that these two features – behaviour control and introspection – do not always mesh as we would like. A man may have driven for a hundred miles, and when we ask him what he was aware of along the way, he may reply ‘Nothing, since the route was familiar and I was engrossed in conversation with my passenger.’ If we allow his account to stand, then we must admit that awareness and behavioural control are separable, for the fact that he successfully steered the car around dozens of curves will have to be viewed as no evidence that he was aware of them. Alternatively we may bully him into admitting that he was aware of the curves (‘I guess I must have been aware of them in an abstract or vague sort of way’), but his acquiescence in this amounts to the abandonment of his status as authoritative introspector. The man’s ability to speak and more specifically to report his experiences counts for nothing over the muteness of the bee if his accounts are overruled on behavioural grounds. There is an activity which is giving error-free introspective accounts of awareness, but it can be subverted by a misplaced allegiance to the other feature of awareness that interests us: behavioural control. Consider the man who reasons thus: I must have been aware that the glass had reached my lips, or I wouldn’t have tipped it. This man is not introspecting. He is speculating, framing a hypothesis on no more evidence than any other observer might have. He should have said: I was not aware of the glass at all; I was listening attentively to the conversation, and so cannot provide any privileged information on the perceptual cues that must have initiated my drinking. There are times when what we are aware of (in the sense of what we can introspectively report) is also what is relevant to our behaviour; there are times when what we are aware of has nothing to do with our current behaviour; and there are even times when becoming aware of what is directing our behaviour encumbers that behaviour. It has been shown that table-tennis players rely on the sound of the ball striking the table even more than on the sight of the ball. Suppose a table-tennis player said: I had no idea I was aware of the sound – except as a meaningless din – but now I see I must have been, all along. Having said this he would probably start being aware of the sound as more than a meaningless din and then his game would suffer, just as the typist or pianist who pays attention to his finger motions becomes all thumbs.
Awareness sometimes seems to be a necessary condition for the successful direction of behaviour, and yet in another sense awareness is clearly detachable from behaviour control, with some constraints (there are some limits on just how much of what one is doing one can be unaware of). When we say of the driver that he must have been aware of the curves under some description we are relying on the former sense of ‘aware’, and when the driver replies that he was conversing or daydreaming and unaware of the curves he is relying on the latter sense, and the crucial point is that both we and the driver can be right at the same time. These two notions of awareness are entirely distinct in spite of their customary merger; what one can report directly, infallibly, and without speculation or inference is one thing, and what serves, or is relied upon, to direct behavioural responses is another. This can best be brought out by coining artificial terms to mark the difference and observing the way these terms behave when applied to different ordinary situations.
The first step in the baptism of the new terms is to recast all ‘aware of’ contexts into the ‘aware that’ context of propositional attitude
, a move that harks back to the practice – and reasoning – of Chapter 2. For example, ‘I am aware of an apple on the table’ becomes ‘I am aware that there is an apple on the table’. Subtle differences in the normal sense of these two expressions need not deter us; what is true in each case is that one is in receipt of a perceptual report (true or false) to the effect that there is an apple on the table. This use of ‘aware that’ is emphatically not intended to be the ordinary use, from which it differs in several respects. First, the ordinary use is at least often truth-relative, like ‘know’: ‘are you aware that p?’ implies that p is true. Second, ordinary ‘aware that’ is usually used in a way that need have nothing to do with current experiences or present state of consciousness at all; ‘are you aware that he is a judge?’ is not normally taken to be asking about what is running through a man’s head at the moment, but rather what he knows – no matter what his attention is on at the moment. Setting these ordinary connotations aside and using ‘aware that’ simply to get everything into the guise of propositional attitude, the two senses of ‘aware’ can be defined:
(1) A is aware1 that p at time t if and only if p is the content of the input state of A’s ‘speech centre’1 at time t
(2) A is aware2 that p at time t if and only if p is the content of an internal event in A at time t that is effective in directing current behaviour.2
These definitions bridge the gap between the personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. The ordinary personal-level term ‘aware’ is being replaced by two terms that still take persons (or whole systems) as subjects, but have sub-personal criteria. I am proposing to explain the ordinary word ‘aware’ by abandoning it altogether and talking about two very different words, ‘aware1’ and ‘aware2’. To some this may seem like an admission of madness, but there is no alternative method of analysis in this case. It is not the case that there are two clearly different ordinary senses of the word ‘aware’, the way there are two senses of ‘feel’ (‘I feel dizzy’ and ‘He is feeling his way around in the dark’). If there were, there would be no problem. Rather, what I have called the two senses of ‘aware’ are mingled and confused in our ordinary use of the term, so that, for instance, when we say the dog is aware of the bone we think we are saying just the same thing about the dog as we say about the man when we say that he is aware of the bone. It is this confusion that leads to most of the problems about awareness or consciousness. When we suppose, on the basis of our casual observation of behaviour, that dumb animals are aware of various things, and when we wed this supposition to our personal experience of awareness, we are left with the problem that if dumb animals are aware of things, have conscious experience, we can never know what it is like, since they cannot tell us. In supposing that the awareness we posit on the basis of clever behaviour is at all like human awareness of the sort we make introspective reports about, we only follow the actual, ordinary paths laid down by ordinary usage, but in following these paths we are led to error and confusion. Recognizing this confusion we may decide, as in fact some philosophers have, that dumb animals are not aware of anything, but this goes just as much against the grain of ordinary usage. To say of a man that he is not aware of anything is to suggest that ‘his mind is a blank’ and moreover that he is stumbling around most ineffectually, and this is not what we wish to say about animals. We do talk of an animal ‘being aware of every move we make’, and in some sense we are right, but not in any recognizably separate ordinary sense of ‘aware’.
Given the two new definitions of awareness, it is at once clear what one could mean by saying that animals are not aware of things in at all the same way people are: animals are only aware2 of things, which is saying very little, since nothing in our definition would prevent certain cybernetic machines from also being aware2 of things. People are aware2 of things, but they are also aware1 of things, a possibility ruled out in the case of dumb animals. The temptation lapses to say we cannot know how animals are aware of things, and if only they could tell us. If animals could tell us, they would be aware1 of things, which is entirely different. The concepts of awareness1 and awareness2 are distinct, and it is only when the halo of intuitions around one of these merges with the halo of intuitions around the other, as it does in our ordinary word, that confusion results. One can say, using these new definitions, that insects and birds and such are simply not aware1 at all, and then the question cannot be asked: But if the bee was not aware of the tree, how did it know enough to fly around it? The bee was aware2 of the tree. The driver who ‘paid no attention’ to the route was not aware1 of the curves (as curves or as anything else), but he was aware2 of them as curves. Consider the following exchange: ‘Fred, you haven’t heard a word I’ve said!’ – ‘Quite right, Ethel. All I heard was an incessant babble of noise.’ What was Fred aware of? There are several possibilities. Had he been truly paying attention to her, Fred would have been aware1 of what she said, and also, of course, aware2 – as his responses would indicate. Or he might have been aware1 of her talk only as a babble of sound (like listening to a babbling brook), or even entirely unaware1 of her noise-making (as of the clock ticking). In the latter two cases he may have still been aware2 of enough to grunt ‘Oh really?’ occasionally at appropriate moments. The fact that the ‘Oh really?’ was inserted at syntactically appropriate moments would suffice to show that Fred was aware2 of the talk as more than a meaningless din of babble, even if he was not aware1 of the sounds at all. The intermediate case of being aware1 of the sound as babble would in fact be highly unusual – a case of sitting back and adopting an aesthetic attitude to the musical tumble of syllables without being aware1 of their meanings. No doubt this is not what Fred meant to suggest; most of the time he was probably entirely unaware1 of Ethel, but aware2 of the sentences to which he responded occasionally ‘unconsciously’.
I do not want to suggest that the concept of awareness2 is tailor-made for the use of investigators in animal behaviour and the brain. They may devise much more useful and rigorous concepts. The chief value of ‘aware2’ is in putting off those who would insist that awareness is a prerequisite of regular, appropriate behaviour, and hence confuse the two functions of the ordinary word. The term is at least harmless, which is a step in the right direction. The more important concept, awareness1, is restricted to creatures that can express, or in other words, speaking creatures. Non-speakers can no more be aware1 of things than be guilty of mispronunciation. Of course any machine that, like our perceiving machine, had a speech centre attached would be aware1 of the content of the input to this speech centre, and this may seem to be an intolerable situation, but only if one clings to the folklore that has accrued to the ordinary word ‘aware’. There is certainly nothing wrong with a machine being aware1 of certain things if all this means is that it can express these things correctly. But if that is all the word means, there is still a great deal to explain or explain away, for I wish to show that there is no important residue in the ordinary concept of awareness that is not subsumed under either awareness1 or awareness2. There is no room, I wish to show, for a concept of awareness3, which would apply only to people and rule out all imaginable machines.
XV AWARENESS AND CONTROL
The remarkable running together of the two notions of awareness in our ordinary concept is perhaps to be explained by the fact that there is a high degree of coincidence of the two in human affairs. To a great extent we are aware1 of those of our activities we are most concerned to control well. We pay attention in order to do better, but is there anything in the concept of awareness1 to suggest why this should work?
In § XIII we drew an imaginary line dividing the perceiving machine into its two functional parts, the afferent analyser and the speech centre. Let us call this line in any analogous system the awareness line. In the case of a manufactured machine it is plausible to suppose that we could draw a neat physical line separating the two stages, but it is much less likely that we could draw the analogous line in a person’s brain.
It would probably be gerrymandered out of all intelligibility. That would not, however, diminish the importance of the theoretical line, and there are even a few guidelines that could be followed in an attempt to plot it. It has been suggested that feedback loops serving to correct malfunctions at each level in the production of utterances would be present in the speech centre part of the system. Such loops could not extend back into the analysis part of the system – for what standard would there be for them to test against? So if such feedback loops could be anatomically distinguished (and this would be no mean trick, for we cannot expect these ‘loops’ to be anything but extremely complex and possibly ephemeral structures), once one had reached the end of the feedback hierarchy (and this might not look spatially like a hierarchy), one would have reached the ‘edge’ of the speech centre, the awareness line. Like the Equator, the awareness line is not itself a physical feature but rather a conceptual line projected on to a physical system. Once one has the concept of a great circle equidistant from the Poles one can determine the location of the Equator, which is not arbitrary or conventional, and the same holds for the awareness line in principle. Given the interlocking definitions of what it is to cross the awareness line and what it is to be aware1 of something, the sentence ‘one is aware1 that p when p is the content of an event that crosses the awareness line’ is analytically true, but not trivial. Before the Equator was mapped ‘one is in the Southern Hemisphere once one has crossed to the south side of the Equator’ was uninformative in just the same way. The definitional circle is broken once one provides an independent characterization of the line, but one need not do this before making use of the concept.
Content and Consciousness Page 15
