Two Questions
Why do we study History?
Even if you do not consider yourself to be much of a Historian, chances are that you have some answer to this question.
In the first place, you understand that History is an account of the past that strives to be true (i.e. more than just “a story”).
In the second place, you have most likely come across the aphorism, “those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it”, or perhaps, “know the past to know yourself.”
Putting this all together, you may arrive at the following intuition:
History is an account of the past that people find meaningful — meaningful to their present selves, and meaningful only insofar as they believe it to be true.
Therefore, History is subjectively meaningful by virtue of its objective truth
Does this, then, answer the question, “why do we study History?”.
Perhaps it does, or perhaps it does not, but either way the point of this blog is not really to answer this particular question. Instead, the point is to appreciate how we cannot even begin to answer this question, the “why-question,” without also running into a “how-question,” specifically, “how do we study History?”.
I have spent much of my life struggling to answer the why-question, and I was able to make progress only by separating the how from the why, and by appreciating the extent to which the how-question might be fruitful on its own terms. Even if you do not consider yourself much of a History-aficionado, I hope to convince you that the how-question, “how is History experienced,” will be interesting for you. Indeed, I believe that the following investigation will be of great interest to any person who has pondered the concepts of meaning, truth, and being, and the larger relationship between these rather abstract concepts and their own, very real, human-being.
The Phenomenological Attitude
The investigation undertaken by this blog begins with the following attitude:
Instead of obsessing over the question, “why do we study History?”, let us instead direct our focus towards the question, “what is it like to study History?”
Before History is studied, created, or reinterpreted, it is first and foremost experienced. Taking a phenomenological attitude means that we care about the experience. It means that before we entertain the intuition, “people find History to be meaningful,” we ask the more fundamental question, “how is this meaning experienced?,” and that we appreciate above all how something is meaningful only insofar as someone experiences it to be meaningful.
The phenomenological attitude allows us to appreciate the subjective mental experiences – of meaning, historical meaning, and even “History,” as things unto themselves. In other words, it allows us to distinguish the subjective experience of “History” as a thing apart from the actual and objective record of things past, or History. Without this distinction, our entire investigation into “the way that History makes us feel” becomes little more than a ploy to dismiss the work of Historians as being somehow “subjective,” or, “more feeling than fact.” But the point of this blog is not at all to question the merits of academic History (which is nuanced for this very reason). It is instead to question the very notion that subjective mental experiences are not important or, put differently, to subvert the very presupposition that such “feelings” are not also “facts.” Consider your own sense of conscious-being as you read this sentence, what sort of subjective sensation do my words impart to you? The experience of consciousness is tautologically subjective, but who can deny that it is, by virtue of its inescapable presence in our lives, also an objective fact? As such, this blog makes the following hypothesis.
In the same way that the mental experience of consciousness is an objective reality for everyone, not just the Scientists and Philosophers who study consciousness, the subjective experience of historical meaning is an objective reality for everyone, and not just the Historians who study History.
Indeed, the two experiences of consciousness and “History” as a lived-experience, or “Living History,” may be intimately related. The inspiration for “Living History” came after already having some sense of the beingness of History (i.e., “one’s own social-narrative being within the larger social-narrative of History,” and even, “the History, i.e. upper-case History, as being itself a kind of personified, imagined being”), and then finding in Neuroscientific and Philosophic theories of consciousness a means to integrate these intuitions. This phenomenology of “History as being as History” may, in turn, serve to bridge competing theories on consciousness.
However, the more immediate inspiration for this blog comes from a feeling of dissatisfaction after reading books that purport to relate History with recent advances in Cognitive Science, specifically “Theory of Mind.” Therefore, before we get ahead of ourselves with the (not so uncontroversial) topic of consciousness, let us start-off our journey on more concrete ground by:
Introducing a longstanding phenomenological paradox between objectivity and subjectivity in the study of History (Preliminary Observations One and Two)
Introducing the cognitive concept of “Theory of Mind” within the context of History’s subjective allure (Preliminary Observation Two)
Showing how phenomenology is the only fruitful and non-absurd way to reconcile the subjective experience of “Theory of Mind” with the study of History (Blog Manifesto, Part 1).
Suggesting how this approach might demand, in turn, a consideration of the role of consciousness in the phenomenology of History.
In this way, even if you come to be unconvinced by my hypothesis on “History as a bridge to consciousness,” I hope to at least convince you of the necessity of this phenomenological investigation. Perhaps you will be inspired to take it towards your own destination?
Phenomenology of History: Two Preliminary Observations
Observation One: The Feeling of Arriving at Non-Subjective Truth
To the question, “why do we study History?”, we have as an intuition, “History is subjectively meaningful by virtue of its objective true.” Now, instead of attempting to answer the why-question once and for all, let us instead turn to the how-question and ask, “how does this intuition feel?”. The intuition instills in my mind the impression of something meaningful resting on something objective or, conversely, of objective truth serving as a foundation for something that needs a concrete foundation, i.e., meaning. What drives this feeling?
Consider another set of everyday aphorisms, “knowledge is wealth” or “knowledge is power.” Sure, a barista will not accept my “knowledge” in lieu of my cash, and back in middle-school my “knowledge” would not have been of much use when confronting bullies, but what both examples hint at is the value of knowledge in social interaction. Knowledge does indeed represent social wealth insofar as people value it. To say that someone “is knowledgeable” is to say that this person possesses knowledge that is useful yet rare enough to warrant the adjective title. It says in simpler terms that we value not only the knowledge but also its possessor. Furthermore, I do not “choose” to value a dollar bill insofar as I believe the dollar to be universally accepted. In much the same way, I do not “choose” to accept objective knowledge insofar as I believe it to be, by its very definition, universal. As such, the feeling of power might implicitly attach itself to feeling of having a historical belief. The following assumptions are, I think, key to the linkage.
Assumption One: That my historical knowledge is the “objective truth,” or the “fact of what happened.”
Assumption Two: That while another person might possess a different “fact of what happened,” she must at least accept the notion that there existing a “fact of the matter.”
Assumption Three: That in the above assumption, the truth in there being an objective truth is itself so obvious that anyone who does not accept it must be insane. Consider the question, was Christopher Columbus born in Milan? Even if do not know the answer to the question, you understand implicitly that this is a Yes/No question and that he could not have been born both in Milan and someplace else. Even if you told me that this Columbus character is a historical conspiracy who never actually existed, you would still be buying-into the notion of there being some “fact of the matter.” But if you told me that he at once did and did not exist, then I would have no choice but to consider you insane.
Assumption Four: That when confronting someone who possesses an alternative (i.e. false) historical belief, I have the option of either arguing the false belief out of her (Assumption Two) or simply dismissing her as insane (Assumption Three), and that in both cases I am devaluing her socially.
In this sense, possessing historical knowledge feels to me like possessing social power. I am not saying that these somewhat Machiavellian assumptions represent the only reasons for valuing historical objectivity and, critically, I am not even saying that they represent reasons at all. Instead, I am sharing more personally how my own belief in the mutual exclusivity of my historical beliefs arises, in me, the residual feeling of power. Furthermore, insofar as the act of studying History implies not only having but also acquiring beliefs, the process feels to me like one of self-empowerment. Granted, many if not most of our historical beliefs are uncritically imbibed from childhood, be it from family or a textbook, but this feeling of empowerment is especially active, I think, whenever one reads a history book on one’s own volition. In such cases, one is self-aware of how the “doing” of History is a result of one’s self-agency.
Given this totality, the feeling of historical objectivity becomes peculiarly subjective: the act of acquiring an objective historical belief ends up reifying one’s own subject. This peculiarity is all the more strange given how History is a special kind of objective knowledge that is itself about human subjects. Is this what accounts for its meaning?
Observation Two: The attraction of History as Social-Narrative Drama
What does it mean for something to be phenomenologically meaningful? The only requirement, I think, is that the object impress itself as a vivid mental sensation. It is not critical that one be able to explain the sensation, and it is often the case that the most vivid sensations are the ones that are the most inexplicable. The Mona Lisa is probably the most universally familiar example. However, for the purposes of this blog, I will use as a case in point the American TV show, Friends. You might think this to be a somewhat strange example as the show is considered by no one to be high-brow art. But this is very much the point. I am myself not a very big fan of the show and yet, despite lacking explicit reasons to like it, I am hooked after watching only a couple episodes. What accounts for this magnetic attraction?
Consider a more pedestrian example (literally). While taking a walk in a local park, my attention is drawn preferentially and spontaneously towards other humans along my path. It is drawn especially towards humans who are themselves engaged in social interaction. I observe a mother talking to her child and I ask myself, what is she saying to him? Why does he frown as she speaks, and why does he shout ‘NO!’ after she finishes speaking? Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists refer to this sort of spontaneous mindreading as “mindreading” (no surprise), “mentalizing,” “folk-psychology,” or by its more academic moniker, as “Theory of Mind” (a somewhat confusing distinction — “Theory of Mind” refers to our innate “theory” of other' people’s minds, the academic theory that makes this claim would be The Theory of “Theory of Mind,” from now on out I will use quotation marks to help clear the distinction). The idea is that our brains have some hardwired machinery that functions not only to direct our attention towards social interactions, but also to infer causality in such interactions by “getting inside the minds” of others. Core to the idea is that both processes are involuntarily. I ask myself, why is the child shouting ‘NO!’? Well, it is probably he had some desire or belief that his mother has invalidated — for example, perhaps he desired to sleep over at a friends’ house, or perhaps he believed that he should, in the first place, be free to choose where he spends his nights. Of course I really have no clue as to what is going inside the boy’s head, but the point is how my mind involuntarily directs my attention towards the interaction and, in doing so, demands some explanation for it. The point is furthermore how my mind not only asks but also answers the question, “why is he shouting?”, by assuming that the boy’s behavior to be a simplistic outcome of his beliefs and desires. Above all, the point is how my explanation feels like a true story, a kind of history, regardless of whether or not it is correct.
All of the characters in Friends are trivially easy to mindread — except, perhaps, for Phoebe. But if you think about it, this is her entire shtick. Phoebe balances out the show by being the one character whose actions and intentions are not totally transparent. And this lack of transparency never worries us, the audience, because she always carries a smile on her face, and because the lack of transparency alongside this aloof smile is, after all, “the joke.”
This might explain why Friends is so magnetic. I do not need a reason to be captivated by the social interactions between Joey, Monica, and Ross, they are rather captivating in and of themselves. Furthermore, thanks to the exaggerated acting of the characters, I never have much doubt as to what inner mental states (i.e., beliefs and desires) are driving their behavior. And yet, in spite of its lack of character-depth, Friends is also rather complex insofar as it demands a good deal of “nested mindreading” (to understand, for example, that Joey is nervous because he knows that Ross is yet to find out how Monica is hiding a secret from Rachel etc.). This, I think, helps to explain why the show is so addicting: it stimulates our brain’s already over-active social machinery. Finally, we may observe how Friends is gripping only insofar as it is “bingeable,” and how its ability to hook us over time depends not so much on its web of interaction, so much as how it develops this web over scenes, episodes, and seasons. Just as my own “Theory of Mind” resolves social mysteries with stories that are phenomenologically satisfying, the TV show Friends is phenomenologically gripping insofar as it structures my social perception of Joey, Monica, and Ross into a narrative-structure, or story.
Theory of Mind and History
Theory of Mind has been of great service to the creators of period drama. But are these dramas more story than History?
How might this overpowering attraction towards narrative-drama be implicated in the study of History? Just as one appreciates its benefit to writers of historical fiction (think of TV shows like Rome), one also begins to appreciate how it represents more of a curse to the objectively-minded Historian. Indeed, if “Theory of Mind” is innate to every human being, and if academic Historians are human beings (last I checked, they are), then how could they claim to be above this inescapably human bias? As a little thought-experiment, consider your own recollection of Ancient Roman History. Is it possible for you to conceive of the Roman Empire without also visualizing the “grand dramas” of Caesar and the Senate, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, and so on? But what if the key to understanding Rome, its rise and especially its fall, lay not in these “grand dramas,” but rather in more widespread social or even material developments?
Historians are of course well-aware of this problem, and I provide a brief overview of their treatment of it in this article. They have been aware of the problem long before any Cognitive or Evolutionary Psychologist came up with “Theory of Mind.” In recent years, however, there have been two important developments pertaining to the connection between History and “Theory of Mind.”
A certain professor of Philosophy at Duke University, Alex Rosenberg, published a book entitled How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories (2018). He claims that History is inherently flawed insofar as Historians are incapable of answering important questions without resorting to their simplistic “Theory of Mind.” More specifically, he argues that they cannot answer questions like, “Why did Hitler declare war on America?”, without presupposing not only the beliefs and desires that may have led to Hitler’s decision but also, and more fundamentally, the very assumption that Hitler’s cognitive decision-making was based in the first place on his self-avowed beliefs and desires. Rosenberg’s ancillary claim on the fundamental irrationality of human-decision is well-supported by the empirical evidence, so his critique of History has very high-stakes. If we take him on his word, then History becomes one big delusion.
Taking a very different approach, some Historians have co-opted “Theory of Mind” into their own Histories. You have most-likely heard of one such figure: Yuvahl Noah Hariri (author of Sapiens, 2011). Hariri argues that human-beings have used their “Theory of Mind” throughout History to construct “interpersonal-realities”: Religion, Empire, Money — in short, the “stuff” of History. His claim is that these interpersonal-realities exist not only on a real-world level (i.e., the existence of the Roman Empire in 200 A.D.), but also on a more phenomenological level (i.e., the belief that a Roman citizen might have in the eternal right of Rome), and that the latter is what makes the former possible. For Hariri, therefore, our capacity for inter-personal realities is what sets us apart from other animals. It is the reason for why human society has become exponentially more complex with every new millenium since 4000 B.C.E., while chimpanzee society has remained more or less the same.
I hope that you can appreciate the starkness of this contrast. For Rosenberg, “Theory of Mind” is synonymous with the doing of History, and History is therefore useless. For Harari, History is not useless (otherwise he would not have become a Historian), and Theory of Mind is instead the very content History.
For Harari, Theory of Mind makes History. For Rosenberg, it breaks it.
As we will see in the next section, this blog envisages not only to resolve the contradiction, but also to make an even bolder claim. This is:
That apart from Religion and Ideology, the experience of History might be yet another inter-personal reality (borrowing Harari’s term): a reality whose phenomenological manifestation is prior to that of Religion and Ideology, and closer perhaps to the universally-experienced phenomenological reality of social-narrative consciousness.
But above all, the claim is that recognizing History in this subjective way need not invalidate the potential for historical objectivity (as argued by Rosenberg).
How will we do this? The solution is as simple as it is elusive: by distinguishing the research of academic Historians from the lived-experience of everyday people — that is, by recognizing the lived-experience of History, or “Living History,” as a thing unto itself. Unlike Rosenberg, I have no need to offend academic Historians in advancing my claim, and I hope that some find it useful.
Blog Manifesto
Why Phenomenology?
On face-value, it would make sense to present this manifesto at the top. But the decision to place it here is deliberate. Indeed, I do not want to give the impression that this blog is interested, only arbitrarily, in connections between Cognitive Science and History. While we will indeed be making these connections, our motivation for doing so is rooted in a very serious dilemma, a problem that is of immediate concern not only to Historians but also to anyone who possesses some sense of “History.” Take a second to consider your own historical beliefs. You might find some of them to be especially meaningful, but the meaning will no doubt rests on the foundation of objective truth, or more precisely, your belief in the objectivity of your historical belief. As we saw in the first phenomenological observation, objectivity is what gives historical truths their special power. However, what if your personal belief in the objectivity of your historical beliefs was, well, exactly that — a subjective belief. In other words, you implicitly understand your version of History to be the correct version, but is this implicit understanding nothing more than a subjective, perhaps even egocentric, delusion?
We all carry different versions of History, and since these Histories contain mutually exclusive claims to truth, they cannot all be correct (the same can be said of certain religious beliefs). Indeed, we saw in the second phenomenological observation how human beings are drawn towards an understanding of History that prioritizes character-drama, as if History were no more complex than Friends, so there is a good chance that most people’s version of the past is quite off-the-mark. But do Historians fare any better? Do they at least have some chance attaining the holy-grail of objectivity?
Two recently published books answer this question in very different ways. We we were introduced to the books in the previous section. They are Sapiens (2011), by Historian Yuvahl Noah Harari, and How History Gets Things Wrong (2018), by Philosopher Alex Rosenberg.
Rosenberg answers the question directly (look no further than his book-title). History cannot be objective, he writes, because it relies on false Theory of Mind assumptions – specifically, the assumption that a person’s decision-making is a simplistic outcome of her self-avowed beliefs and desires. Harari, on the other hand, does not provide an explicit answer to this question, but he does maintain the possibility for historical objectivity by virtue of his book being, in the first place, a History book. Of course, this implicit approval is nothing special. It is necessarily shared by every Historian.
As such, our special reason for shedding a spotlight on Harari is that he, more than any other Historian in public eye, should have been able to relate Theory of Mind and with the subjective experience of History. Why does he refrain from making this connection? While we should be wary of mindreading Harari ourselves, it is likely that he was self-conscious of the apparent absurdity of making a subjective analysis of History within a History book. In other words, if History is no more than a kind of mental construction, then how could his own History, and for that matter any History, make a strong claim to the objective “fact of what happened”? One may consider, analogously, how if a Scientist told you that “Science is nothing but a subjective illusion,” then you probably would not take the work of this Scientist very seriously.
In this way, both Rosenberg and Harari are aware of how the “subjectivity” of History is a high-stakes issue, and how Historians are adamant to defend their work as being otherwise “objective.” The purpose of this blog, in turn, is to simply point out how this debate might be somewhat of an obsession. By this, I do not mean to imply that the question of objectivity is unimportant. The problem is of course foundational to History, and thankfully there is an entire academic discipline devoted to it: Historiography. Instead, the point of this blog is to suggest that we can temporarily suspend ourselves from this problem, this “objective versus the subjective” mindset, and, in doing so, appreciate the subjective experience as a thing unto itself (and by means as a “bad thing”).
To be clear, both books were written for popular consumption, and while Sapiens has at least been a major success in this regard, neither one is considered to be very academically rigorous. It is perhaps because of this demand to satisfy the layperson that each author makes, in his book, an equally grandiose claim. Rosenberg’s core argument, the notion that “Historians always get it wrong,” is inherently provocative. If you take Rosenberg on his word, then you will come to see all Historians as frauds. If you are a teenager, then you will be left with little motivation to do your History homework every night.
Harari’s Sapiens is, on the other hand, no less grandiose insofar as it presents itself to be the History for all mankind (quite literally, for all Sapiens). The scope of Harari’s History stretches all the way from the Internet Age to our hunter-gatherer past. Using this epic canvass, he presents a superficially “Scientific” creation-story for just about every institution – Religion, Money, Nations, and so on. The explanations themselves represent little more than a synthesis of longstanding theses in Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology, but this lack of originality does not diminish the overall impact of the book. When it comes to Sapiens, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, although the points themselves are not quite revolutionary, Harari manages to spin them together into a kind of modern Bible — an elegant and captivating “answer-it-all” for all the mysteries and enigmas of our modern world. If you take Harari on his word, then you will no longer wonder why we use money, why some of us identify with certain nations, or why others believe in certain Gods. You will understand that the foundation for all these institutions lie in the human brain. You will understand that it lies in the social cognitive capabilities we evolved as hunter-gatherers, and you will understand furthermore how these cognitive modules continue to serve as the basis for complex societies today — how they allow us to assign social value to inanimate objects (in the case of money), or to expand our “tribal group” to include people who we have never actually met (in the case of Nationalism and Religion). Are these explanations correct? There is certainly some truth to the notion that the social wiring of our brains has shaped the structure of our social world, but it seems somehow paradoxical for Harari to make this point within an all-encompassing History. Why is this?
President Barrack Obama discussing Sapiens, especially the feeling of duty that Yuvahl’s grand-narrative instills in him (“use your time well”).
While Sapiens does not have personally identifiable characters like Friends, it does manage to bottle-up the entire human experience into a narrative that is no less absorbing. It is impossible to read Sapiens with a self-removed attitude, as the book makes sure to include you (yes, you!) within its grand narrated. If you are like me, you will be overcome with a humbling sense of global identity. You will pause to wonder how all institutions, from a hunter-gatherer tribe in Papau New Guinea to modern countries like the United Stated States of America, all rest on the same social-cognitive foundation. Given this feeling of global membership (very fitting for the 21st century), it is little surprise how Sapiens is adored by world leaders such as President Obama, and it is furthermore little surprise how Harari’s next book, Homo Deus, extends this universalizing narrative into the future (or rather, our future). Read Sapiens and you will feel like you are part of humanity’s grand mission here on earth, read Homo Deus and you will feel, viscerally, the unprecedented challenges to our shared narrative. In brief, it is impossible to take away objective knowledge from Sapiens without also being overcome with the tautologically subjective feeling of being “part of” something larger, indeed, part of the largest tribe that Sapiens have every known — the global community of mankind, truly, all Sapiens.
But there is a strange irony here. If you are already aware of Harari’s large and sometimes cult-like following, then you may have already caught wind of this irony. It is as follows:
Harari writes a History that defines, deconstructs, and explains the subjective foundation of human institutions or, in his words, the cognitive construction of our “inter-personal realities.” However, to what extent is his own History such an “inter-personal reality” (or “social phenomenon”). And, if it is indeed such a reality or phenomenon, then who is to say that the value of his History is not also “constructed,” i.e. on the same subjective foundation as the very Religions and Ideologies that he applies a supposedly “objective” magnifying glass to. In other words, who is to say that his History is not “just subjective,” and therefore neither objective nor even really a “History” so much as a “story.”
While Harari is by no means a paragon of objectivity, I do not think that lack of rigor is his biggest problem. Harari writes for the layperson. He is not fooling any academics. If Sapiens makes you feel like a better world-citizen, then good for you, and good for Harari. The real tragedy, I think, lies not so much in in what Harari does, but rather as in what he fails to do. The problem is not so much the subjective experience that his book imparts to its readers, but rather his seemingly self-conscious denial of the existence of such subjective experiences, indeed, as they relate not only to his book, Sapiens, but also to History more generally. Let me explain what I mean.
A Roman Coin featuring on its front Emperor Philip (“Philip the Arab”), the Emperor of Rome during the first have of the third century CE. On its back side, it features the iconic image of Romus and Romulus, the mythic founders of Rome, suckling at the teeth of their wolf-mother. From Roman lira to American pennies, has there every been a coin that does not carry some symbol of collective-narrative?
Harari’s notion of “inter-personal reality” points to an interesting connection between the human brain and human society, but this connection has already been made by countless Philosophers and Sociologists. Indeed, Philosopher John Searle uses the term “Collective Intentionality” in lieu of “inter-personal reality.” However, while Searle may be excused for failing to problematize the role of narrative in the construction of “inter-personal realities,” Harari, as a Historian, is not. In Sapiens, he equates money, religion, and ideology on a level playing-field, as if they were all equal and analogous forms of such reality. But when we take a second to ponder these examples ourselves, it becomes clear that the latter two, religion and ideology, are fundamentally different owing to their narrative component. Indeed, is it even possible to conceive of religion and ideology without their “us-to-me” and “me-to-us” narratives? Furthermore, returning to the seemingly dissimilar example of money, has there ever been a coin that was minted without symbols of shared narrative-memory? From the image of Romus and Romulus on a Roman Lira, to an inscription from the Holy Qu’ran on an Abbasid Dinar, and finally to the bust of a mythologized president, Washington, on the U.S. Penny, the exceptions are very rare. In sum, we may ask if it is even possible to conceive of “inter-personal reality” without conceiving of shared-narratives. Why does Harari gloss over this seemingly obvious observation?
When we consider the pervasiveness of social narratives in “interpersonal reality,” and consider furthermore how these social narratives intersect with and inform our own personal life-narratives, then it becomes clear that the cognitive foundations that allow for religion and ideology are not exploitable capacities, as Harari describes them, so much as they are inescapable conditions (of being human). The claim that I am hinting at here, and that I will be arguing more thoroughly in below sections, is that social-narratives are ingrained in human self-consciousness. Our reality will always be subjective by the condition of our consciousness, and if we consider the extent to which our consciousness might be social-narrative in form and construction, then we will will be guaranteed to have a viscerally subjective experience every time that we confront the “outside” social-narratives of History — our “inside” social-narrative will engage with the “outside” social-narrative in a way prior to self-construction and therefore also self-agency. If you want an example of this, look no further than Sapiens itself. The book presents itself to be objective story of humankind, but the experience that it instills in its readers is anything but. Harari must have been aware of the apparent contradiction and this is perhaps why he refrain seriously considering social-narratives (and by extension History) as cognitive phenomenon.
Is Harari justified in his fear? If we try to deconstruct History as a subjective experience (in the same way that Harari deconstructs religion and ideology), then will we be forced to dismiss History as being “no less” objective than religion and ideology? Will we have to go on to throw away all of our History books into the dustbin? Indeed, is Rosenberg correct in suggesting that all History is “just subjective“ (and therefore also a waste of time?).
It seems natural to think in this way, to feel as though objective reality and the subjective experience are mutually exclusive possibilities, but this, I think, is not the case. It is not a zero sum game. The trick is to understand the word, History, in two senses. In the first sense, History is the objective “fact of what happened.” This sense is of course real, and below we will discuss the imperative to recognize it as real. But this recognition should not lead us to deny the existence of History’s subjective experience (i.e., the feeling one gets from reading Sapiens). We must recognize that the experience as a thing unto itself. This recognition is phenomenology. Taking a phenomenological attitude means that we recognize that things might exist out there in the real-world, but that our perception of those things in our heads is its own thing (and that studying the latter experience is by no means a waste of time).
To stress why this bracketing is necessary, we may consider how, without it, Harari and Rosenberg arrive at opposite albeit equally disappointing conclusions:
Harari believes implicitly in the objectivity of his own History (and History more generally). This by no means unusual, but his unwillingness to confront the assumption births a blind-spot to the existence of History as a subjective or mentally imagined phenomenon. More specifically, he foregoes an analysis of the role of narrative in “inter-personal reality” (in money, religion, and ideology), and therefore does not consider how History itself might be such an “inter-personal reality” (like, or perhaps above, money, religion, and ideology).
Rosenberg, in arguing that History is “just subjective,” denies that there is any such thing as historical objectivity. The claim is absurd and, as we will see, even he himself does not really buy-into it.
For both Harari and Rosenberg, History is synonymous with the objective “fact of what happened.” The assumption is no doubt intuitive, but is it really the end-all-be-all?
We observed in the first phenomenological observation how people implicitly valuate a historical belief based on its perceived objectivity. And while objectivity is not the only reason we value History, it would still seem to be a necessary requisite. For example, consider the Holocaust and the controversy surrounding its deniers: we value the Holocaust not only for the fact of its “having had happened,” but without this objectivity, without our belief in there being a “fact of the fact that it happened,” there would be no controversy.
In this way, we all understand the imperative of historical objectivity — without it, we would be forced into the untenable position of validating Holocaust deniers. That said, we should not be so hasty so as to assume that that historical meaning is the same thing as historical objectivity. Rosenberg falls for this trap. He fails to make this distinction and, as a result, his exposition into the subjective biases of historical meaning ends with rather incredible claim that “all History is false because it is just subjective” (not his quote, my paraphrasing).
Rosenberg is correct to point out how Theory of Mind presents a bias to History, but Historians have been aware of this bias towards narrative-drama before any Scientist came up this specific hypothesis. Rosenberg knows this, so he ups the ante to make his thesis a total denial of historical objectivity. The following quote is from the last chapter of his book.
As we saw in chapter 2, there are too many forces operating on the trajectory of human affairs even to be enumerated and that weighting them in any one individual case, let alone in more than one over time, is a fool’s errand.” (pg. 242)
Good History, for Rosenberg, is “Objective History,” and Objective History is that which avoids completely avoids subjective mental realities. Rosenberg considers Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steels to be among the rare examples of “Good History,” all because Diamond’s environmentally-deterministic account removes causal agency from human subjects, and therefore makes no attempt at “mindreading” (e.g. by shifting causal agency from humans to environmental factors like climate and disease). However, while Diamond’s History is considered by some to be overly deterministic, the larger issue with Rosenberg’s upholding of this kind of “nature over mind” History to be the only type of “Good History” is that one is left unable to explain, objectively, subjective mental realities. In simpler terms, it means that if we were to create a History of the Holocaust, then we would have to steer clear of the subjective mental realities of Nazis and Jews, i.e., the lived-experiences of the very people who either executed and experienced it. But how could such an account be, in any sense, a History on the Holocaust?
The shortcoming in Rosenberg’s thinking reaches a point of total absurdity in the last pages of his book, in which he decries History to be almost as bad as Nazism, insofar as both Historians and Nazis are intoxicated by their “addiction to stories.” Apart from being a wantonly provocative point, how is this not also a historical one, and at that a “subjective” one according to Rosenberg’s own rubric? (See diagram on the right).
In the view of this blog, Rosenberg does make a good point regarding the extent to which Nazism might carry its own narrative-identity, or “Living History,” but it is unfortunate that instead of considering this subjective experience on its own terms, Rosenberg is content to use it as a flimsy nail for his still flimsy thesis.
All in all, the notion that a History’s “being about” subjectivity is the same thing as “being itself subjective” is of course a fallacy. Granted, it is difficult for Historians to get at these subjective realities empirically, as they cannot literally get inside the brains of dead people. But the larger notion that Historians should not even attempt to understand these realities (that they should just “get over it,” pg. 160) is completely unacceptable. It is unacceptable for the following reasons. The reasons are summarized below. However, if you want to read about them more in-depth, click on this link to a separate page.
As you will see, my motive in explicating these reasons is not so much to put-down Rosenberg so much as it is to appreciate how we may learn from his mistakes, and how this blog might arrive at a richer understanding of historical subjectivity.
In the first place, the notion that Historians, and that human beings in general, can simply “get over it” is false. Consider the Holocaust again — if you are Jewish or German, then you do not choose to ask historical questions concerning the Holocaust, these questions rather come to you. As such, what Rosenberg misunderstands is the phenomenological quality of historical meaning, specifically its antagonistic relation with free-will. In the next section of the manifesto, below, we will hone-in on the paradoxical quality of historical meaning and how its relationship with consciousness. But for now, we may observe the irony of how Rosenberg’s presumption of free-will is itself a false “Theory of Mind” assumption (click link for more details).
In the second place, Rosenberg misunderstands what History is all about. He constructs a straw-man of academic History with questions like, “Why did Hitler declare war on America?”. But Historians are, for the most part, not interested in “getting inside the head” of characters like Hitler. When they do engage with subjective mental realities, they are more interested in confronting these realities as things unto themselves (i.e., Nazism as ideology). Put differently, most Historians are already phenomenologists to some degree. Most Historians are able to free themselves from intimate mind-reading by asking phenomenological how-questions like, “how did Nazism become acceptable in 1930s Germany,” instead of why-questions like, “why did Hitler declare war on America?”.
As I argue in this mini-article, ‘Three Reasons to Drop the Why,’ the problem lies not with History, but with these sorts of why-questions themselves. These questions invite our oversimplistic Theory of Mind to explain the “why” of human decision-making, whereas the more nuanced how-questions at least allows for complexity. This, as you might have already guessed, is our reason for focusing on the how-question, “how is History experienced?”, instead of the why-question, “why do people study History?”. For Rosenberg, this why-question serves as the foundation for his thesis, so it is no surprise that his thesis falls flat. It is once again supremely ironic how he falls victim to his own Theory of Mind.
Above all, this blog actually agrees with Rosenberg insofar as History can be, in some sense, subjective, but it is dissatisfied with the dead-end conclusion that “History is just subjective.” Instead, this blog envisages to actually describe the subjective experience by making connections between human cognition, the phenomenology of History and, in between the two, the phenomenology of being (or consciousness). Rosenberg begins this project by noting the relevance of one cognitive module, Theory of Mind. But, this simplistic view of human-cognition only scratches the surface (see diagram below).
Finally, on the topic of human decision-making, Rosenberg is content to use the Scientific evidence to show how decision-making is not rational, but he does not seriously consider what, if not syllogistic logic, actually drives human-decision making?”. This is unfortunate, because the Neuroscience of decision-making is a very active area of research, and there is no reason for why we should not be able to relate findings from this field, i.e., empirically-derived drivers of human-decision making, with the historical record of dead people’s decisions. This will be a secondary objective of this blog, behind the primary objective of describing the phenomenology of History. However, we will see that two are not so dissimilar.
As you read on, I beg that you recognize the distinction between these two senses of History: the subjective experience (“Living History”) and the objective record. In this section I introduced Nazism as one kind of “Living History,” but I do not at all mean to imply that Nazism is anything like academic History. This implicit judgement would lead us to the same trap that crippled Rosenberg as well as Harari — the dead-end conclusion that History must either be absolutely objective or “just subjective.” The point, instead, is to suggest how Nazism might offer a narrative experience that instills in its believer a sense of social-narrative meaning. Harari repeatedly refers to Nazism as a “belief-system,” but this, I think, does not cut it. “Belief-system” implies implies a set of discrete beliefs that one chooses, rationally, to accept. But as we we will see, agency and rationality in decision-making are largely illusory. The phenomenological experience of becoming a Nazi is not quite rational (I would think). Furthermore, it is likely linked inextricably with one’s newfound identity as a Nazi, and this identity-transition, in turn, is possible only insofar as Nazism itself contains some sort of “habitable” social-narrative (consider Mein Kamp, or “my struggle”). But what exactly do I mean when I say that the social-narrative of Nazism is “habitable?”
Why Consciousness?
The above revelations on historical meaning (i.e. Holocaust) are striking insofar as they betray a core “Theory of Mind” assumption, specifically the assumption that human-beings have free-will in choosing to ask certain historical questions. As such, Rosenberg’s critique falls flat for two overarching reasons. The first reason, discussed above, is that he recommends us to simply “stop” doing History as if this were even possible. But asking someone to “stop” asking historical questions concerning the Holocaust is tantamount to asking that person to stop being conscious. Clearly, historical meaning interacts with our minds at a very fundamental level — at a level prior to the construction of ourselves as rational decision-making beings. In other words, if we recognize the negation of free-will that this imperative instills in us, then we must also break the assumption that History is something that is out “out there,” something that we choose to study. In other words, we must break the presupposition that History is only in our conscious awareness, and not also of our conscious awareness. And we may ask, to what extent does “Living History” quite literally “live-in” our subjective feeling of consciousness?
It is very curious that Rosenberg, while discussing Theory of Mind in depth (our understanding of other people’s minds), completely avoids any discussion on consciousness and especially conscious metacognition (our understanding of our own minds) . While he is correct to point out how our innate “Theory of Mind” is illusory insofar as it presupposes simplicity and agency in decision-making, he does not seriously consider the extent to which we apply this “theory” also to ourselves. As such, he does not consider the extent to which represents it subjective blindfold not only for Historians, but indeed for any human-being who possesses a brain (including, one would think, Rosenberg himself), and who feels therefore the universally human feeling of being a conscious agent with free-will, of being guided in our decision-making by our self-avowed reasons, beliefs, and desires. He does not consider these things, I think, for two reasons. In the first place, he has the implicit value-judgement that illusions are “not important,” indeed, insofar as they exist “just in our heads,” but not out there in the “real-world.” In the second place, and related to the first, he understands that equating consciousness to an illusion would be tantamount to admitting that he is himself delusional. Please forgive me for performing mindreading on Rosenberg, of course I do not know for certain what motivates his thoughts, but this seems self-evident given how he titled his previous book The Athiests Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (2011).
Without this phenomenological nuance, Rosenberg insists that subjective mental realities like Theory of Mind are somehow “incorrect” (and that if Historians were only to stop using it, then everything would go back to being “objective”). But how can a subjective mental experience be “incorrect?” Since colors also do not exist in the real-world but only in our minds (objects reflect varying spectra of light-waves, but they are not themselves “red,” or “blue”), would Rosenberg also suggest that colors are somehow “incorrect”? The notion is absurd because the experiences of colors, Theory of Mind, and of course consciousness are neither “correct” nor “incorrect,” they are only that — felt experiences. As we will see in the next section, this kind of non-phenomenological myopia has stymied Scientific approaches to consciousness for decades. We will see in the next section how it has even led some Scientists to the absurd conclusion that consciousness does even exist (because it does not exist in the same way that atoms or plant-cells exist).
Thankfully, there are more nuanced theories of Consciousness that are coming out of the Neurosciences and Philosophy. The underlying foundation of these theories is as follows: that while consciousness is, in some sense, an inescapably subjective illusion, the illusion is itself real insofar as we experience it to be real, and that there is furthermore no reason why we might not be able to approach the feeling of being conscious using Neuroscientific perturbations and recording of brain-states. Given how these theories confront the inescapable subjectivity of human reality, it is no surprise that Rosenberg, a dogmatic “facts over feelings” Atheist, pays them no heed.
In the next section we will attack head-on the elephant in the room of consciousness. However, I realize that my attempt to dissect consciousness will have a depressing effect on some of my readers. If you feel this way, I would ask you to do the opposite of what Rosenberg suggests: to enjoy life with its illusions, truly, for its illusion. If you have ever had the experience of falling in love with someone, then you understand that the experience is completely irrational — your free-will ceased to be of any use (hence the phrase, “falling in love,” and not “deciding to love”), and you become ethereally aware of the rather flimsy illusion that is your sense of atomic selfhood (hence feeling of becoming “whole” with another person). When love ends in heartbreak, then the illusion of wholeness shatters and you become viscerally aware of your total lack of free-will (to control not only how your ex-lover feels about you, but also how you yourself feel about this ex-lover). But on the flip side, when the subjective experience of love is reified and sustained, what is more beautiful? What is more worth living for?
Love is of course an illusion (“love is the drug”), but it is of course real insofar as we experience it to be real — it is arguably the most real thing that we will ever experience. We human-beings are not neutrons are atoms, we have this sense of subjective consciousness filled with all sorts of illusions (illusions such as love and, as I will argue in this blog, History), but this is nothing to be ashamed of. We should love our illusions. They are, after all, what make us human.
So in the next section I will make the case that consciousness is an illusion, and that Neuroscience can probe the illusion, specifically its biological construction, in ways that conscious self-introspection just cannot. But while I do this we must keep in mind that for all humans, you and me included, there is no “getting past” the illusion. The point is not to deconstruct the illusion and therefore dismiss it, but instead to deconstruct and understand it.
And one final point: Just as one might say that oxytocin is the “love compound,” but one recognizes at the same time that this is by no means an exhaustive explanation for love, Science can only help us to understand the construction of consciousness, but it will never reduce consciousness into some non-illusory or material thing. Any theory of consciousness must seek to understand the program, not the hardware. And just as I cannot hope to explain love in all its felt varieties, I will not pretend to be able to do the same with consciousness. That being said, while consciosness is not one felt-experience (since, like love, we might all feel it somewhat differently), we can recognize some universal features. In the next section, I will point out distinct pathologies of these features (i.e. out-of-body illusion), and thence set ourselves with the more humble task of asking how these features might be implicit in the construction of “Living History.”
How exactly will this discussion on consciousness lead us to “Living History”? And where will we go from there?
A Small Taste of The Things to Come
In the same way that we not only love but also feel as though love is real (hence the existential terror of breakups), we feel not only conscious but also as if our consciousness, especially our self-consciousness, is real (hence existential crises in general). In a similar way, we saw in the first phenomenological observation how History feels to us as though it were something that is in our possession, something that we have dominated in accordance with our own free-will. But just just like the feeling of being “madly in love,” the subjective experience of History is beyond our free-will: it is not really something that we “decide to do,” so much as it is, like falling in love, something that we quite simply “fall into” (i.e., while remembering the Holocaust).
The hope therefore, is that by understanding the construction of the conscious-self, we might discover the sedimented building-blocks of “Living History” ingrained within the construction of ourselves as conscious beings. This will be the task of the next section, but just to give you some larger perspective (and also just to ready your tastebuds for the main entree), we will go on, in the section after this next section, to ask what component(s) of this self-construction might be responsible for the felt-awareness of life-meaning. We will ask, in other words, if there might be some evolutionary foundation to the feeling that our lives here on earth have some purpose. I realize that this existential notion of life-meaning sounds a bit “self-helpy,” but I promise that my intent is not so much to answer the question, “what is the meaning of life?”, so much as it is to suggest how the question might itself be implicit in Theory of Mind and therefore also in our feeling of being consciousness (assuming that Theory of Mind is itself formative to consciousness).
In the beginning of this section we exemplified Nazism as a kind of “Living History,” let us momentarily return to this idea. One can imagine how a disillusioned teenager might find existential life-meaning through affiliation with a Neo-Nazi gang (this is after all the stereotype of Neo-Nazi gangs: that they attract disillusioned youths). What motivated the teenager to find meaning in this way? And what kind of meaning did he find in the first place? In this section (“From Mind to Meaning”), we will explore how this sort of social realization of life-meaning is as inescapable as the social-narrative foundation of our consciousness. Just as our feeling consciousness instills in us the illusion of atomic individuality (and how, as we will see in the next section, the ‘me’ betrays a ‘we’), the claim is that we are not always aware of this imperative to life-meaning and, even when we have some sense of it (i.e., “as finding one’s own meaning to life”), we are still deluded as to the extent to which this meaning construction is an individual endeavor and not, like consciousness, a social one. The overarching claim, then, is that our ‘me-story’ betrays a ‘we-story,’ and that our ‘me-meaning’ furthermore betrays a ‘we-meaning.’ Seen in this way, “Living-History” is a kind of “meaning-being” that lurks within the subconscious recesses of our conscious selves.
Putting this altogether, if we accept that social-narrative consciousness is inescapable, and that the social-narrative life-meaning is furthermore inescapable, then we will come to see History not just something “out there,” nor as something that we only sometimes experience subjectively, but instead as a necessary outcome of human cognition, as “Living History. Even if we are not ourselves aware of our having any such things as “Living History,” the claim is that it still shapes our behavior and especially our social interactions in real and impactful ways.
In this way, we can envisage a kind of pyramid between mind, consciousness, life-meaning, and “Living History” (see diagram below). Intuitively, the mind is at the foundation of the pyramid, as the phenomenological experiences of life-meaning, consciousness, and “Living History” exist only insofar as they are in the first place imagined. However, we cannot understand the organic function of the mind in the vacuum of its world, especially the social world that includes other people and stories about other people. The brain, in other words, works not only as an output machine, but as an input machine, and all of its subjective constructions, consciousness, life-meaning, and perhaps even “Living History” are not just outputs but also cyclical inputs. From a cognitive perspective, imagination is not very different from perception, and when we understand this, the diagram starts to look more like a circle than a pyramid. Like consciousness, “Living History” is not just a consequence but also a cause of our lived-experience.
Uncovering Consciousness
Section Introduction: From Phenomenology to Neuroscience
Before tackling the seeming impenetrable mystery of consciousness, let us first take stock of our aforementioned discussion on Living History. Neuroscientific theories on consciousness are nothing if not controversial, so we better have good reasons for opening up this pandora’s Box.
The opening sections of this blog emphasize the inescapable subjectivity of phenomenological experience. These sections emphasizes, in simpler terms, how History refers not just to the literal record of past events, but also how we, as conscious individuals, interpret and experience these narratives. In this way, the first two observations on “Living History” serve to reinforce this subjective linkage.
In the first observation, we saw how historical beliefs empower us with a feeling of sense-certainty within a social context. In the second observation, we saw how the content of History, specifically the social-narrative content of History, is somewhat like candy to our minds. So both observations point to the subjectivity of historical experience, but whereas the former feels like it is reifying to one self (the feeling of possessing a historical belief validates the “I” self who is possessing), the latter feels rather negating of our self-control or self-agency. So although both observations point to subjectivity, there appears to be a contradiction between the extent to which engaging History either reifies or negates the self. In the blog manifesto, furthermore, we saw how some historical memories (i.e., the Holocaust), possess the peculiar quality of being both reifying and negating (the imperative to understand the Holoucast is not something that we have self-agency over, but the understanding is all the while reifying to our self). It is in light of these apparent contradictions that we are impelled to ask more fundamental questions about this mysterious “self.” How does it come about mentally, and might the construction of this “self” explain how History is at once validating yet also addicting, perhaps even dominating. And what is this “self,” of course, other than self in “self-consciousness?” It is for this reason that we must open the pandaora’s book of consciousness.
Thus far in the blog, I have been stressing the importance of phenomenology. Without this lens, we are condemned to see subjective mental experiences as being somehow “fake.” Of course subjective experiences are not physically real, but there is no need to dismiss them as delusions (recall the example of color). As we approach the enigma of consciousness, we will be sure to keep in mind this phenomenological attitude: while we consider self-consciousness as a “constructed” experience, we will be sure not to dismiss the self as a useless delusion — and to the contrary, we will see how this “self illusion” is perhaps even responsible for much of our success as a species.
This universally recognizable image provides a good framework for thinking about social-consciousness. We are always and only aware of our self-consciousness and therefore also of our “being a conscious individual.” However, although our brains presents us with a “conscious I,” it hides from our awareness the social-framework upon which it is built . Self-consciousness is, much like this iceberg, deceptive.
However, we will also have to go beyond phenomenology. Using a purely phenomenological approach, we are limited to self-introspection, and our self-introspection into our self is constrained to the tautological sensation that “our self feels real.” Just ask yourself this question — do you feel like a person, an “I.” The question would seem to be so tautological as to be stupid, but just because our concept of selfhood feels real, unified, and somehow ethereally spirit-like, does not mean that the feeling is not itself constructed inside our brains. Indeed, as we will see in the following section, there are very specific pathologies of consciousness (i.e., the out of body illusion), which suggest that the feeling is indeed constructed from several components (i.e., the feeling that one’s consciousness is within one’s body). Furthermore, by relating these pathologies with Neuroscience, we gain a deeper understanding of how this self construction might take place. Consider the famous picture of the iceberg on the right. Just like a person sitting on the top of the iceberg, we are only consciously aware of our own consciousness and, as such, we cannot use consciousness to access the deeper foundation of consciousness itself. In other words, if we rely only on self-introspection to understand the self, then we would be like a person making circles on the top of the ice-berg. But Neuroscience, much like the camera that captured this photo, provides a means to bypass the limitations of self-introspection.
The feeling of extended social-isolation is not just sad, it is existentially terrifying. The inexplicable confusion that results from social-isolation is, I think, a window to the extent to which the “Me” betrays a “We.” Here a provide the example of COVID lockdown because it is perhaps very relatable, but the longterm Psychological damage resulting from solitary-confinement in prisons (no doubt a modern form of torture) is perhaps a much more visceral example.
Through Neuroscience, we will see how our feeling of atomic (i.e. individual) selfhood is deceptive. We feel like we are “I”, but this feeling of “I” is itself constructed upon a social template. Or feeling of self-consciousness is, in other words, a “me” that betrays a “we.” Going full circle, this Psychological insight allows us to make sense of some mysterious phenomenological observations that may have previously seemed unrelated to the enigma of consciousness. Indeed, I am writing this blog during the 2020 COVID pandemic, a time at which countless people have found themselves stuck in their homes for months on end. Without the social activity that we are so used to, many of us feel sad, antsy, or hopeless. But there is another, more inexplicable feeling — of feeling like one is an existential crisis, indeed of having spontaneous and overpowering feelings of self-loathing and shame over past events, specifically past social-interactions. Perhaps you were spared from such feelings, but they were at least the case for me and many of my friends. If you experienced such feelings, you might appreciate how they provide a window into the deep or socially-constructed self (i.e., the “underside” of the iceberg) — the existential contradiction is between our feeling like atomic individuals, and the reality of how this feeling is itself constructed and constantly sustained through, paradoxically, through interaction with other people. One’s self-revelation of the paradox is, I would argue, the essence of the existential crisis.
Section Roadmap: From Consciousness to Living History
So the self might in some way be social, but how will this tie-into my larger thesis on Living History? The missing element here is the extent to which the self is also narrative. Putting the social and narrative together, the claim is that social-narratives might underlie the construction of human consciousness. In the following bullet-points, I provide a very brief roadmap for this entire section. The point is to anchor you, the reader, in the important nuances that like ahead.
Redefining Consciousness: Consciousness is not one all-or-nothing thing, and that we therefore need not stymie ourselves with the question of whether or not animals are conscious, or with the presupposition that consciousness is a sort of gradient (in which humans are “higher” and cats and dogs are “lower”). That being said, we may appreciate how human consciousness is different from animal consciousness in two fundamental ways.
Narrative Self-Consciousness: In the first place, we have the peculiar feeling of introspective self-consciousness, and the larger dichotomy between the “feeling self” and the “thinking self.” Our peculiarly human feeling of introspective selfhood is significant here peculiarly human form of self is therefore narrative and social. This in turn leads us to the revelation of narrative in self-consciousness.
Social Self-Consciousness: In the second place, self-consciousness is inextricably social — not so much in its phenomenology (since the feeling of being an individual “I” is after all phenomenologically real), but rather in the construction of this phenomenology. Briefly, what do I mean by this? How exactly might the construction of consciousness be social? There are two ways that one can envisage the linkage between “social” and “self.”
Pre-Linguistic/Innate-Awareness as Social: In previous sections we reviewed how our evolution as hunter-gatherers had the effect of hardwiring in us the peculiarly human instinct of deep mind-reading, or Theory of Mind. In a below section, we will consider if this theory of other people’s attentional awareness also constitutes the basis for our own attentional awareness. In this view, all awareness (and therefore also self-awareness), is innately social, or socially-constituted.
Linguistic/Constructed-Self as Social: Sapiens have the peculiar characteristic of neonatany — unlike puppies and kittens who are born more or less independent, human babies are born woefully dependent on their mothers and larger social group. But this, as the saying goes, is “not a bug, but a feature.” Our extended childhoods allows for our unusually complex brain function, and allows us to pick-up complex skills, chiefly language, from adult mentors. We have already seen in an above bullet-point how language is requisite to consciousness, specifically conscious self-introspection, but the point here is how this “linguistic consciousness” or “introspective I,” might also be inextricably social.
So social-consciousness can be envisaged in two ways: awareness as socially-constituted, or self-introspection as socially-learnt. But the latter option has a rather awkward problem associated with it. Indeed, if the self is socially-imbibed, then are people who grew-up in social-isolation somehow unconscious?
The way to dig our way out of this conundrum is to once again redefine consciousness. If we accept that the construction of consciousness is composite, rather unlike the single and spirit-like experience, then it becomes clear that there is room for some aspects of conscious experience to be innate and others to be imbibed our constructed. It also allows us see how these two forms of social-consciousness are not at all mutually exclusive and, through our old friend Theory of Mind, perhaps even symbiotic on one another.
In this way, we can say that people who suffer from deficits in social-competency (autism etc.), do not at all experience consciousness “less” or “worse” than so-called normal individuals. The claim is simply that they might experience consciousness “less socially” than us.
Living History So if our conscious experience of narrative-self is underwritten by the less visible and well-understood building blocks of social-consciousness, then who is to say that these building-blocks might not also be narrative in form. Indeed, who is to say that each person’s feeling of self-consciousness might not be underwritten by a more subliminal attachment of “Living History” — an attachment that reveals itself in our paradoxically self-reifying and self-negating relationship with actual History (the actual yadda yadda of what happened in the past). This is not a claim so much as a hypothesis — the specific hypothesis being that social-narrative might be requisite to self-construction.
So in the next section I will tackle the most fundamental questions of all. What is Consciousness? Can it be approached Scientifically and, if so, how?
Tackling the Problem of Consciousness
Consciousness: On Everyone’s Minds
Everyone these days is gung-ho about Neuroscience, just turn on NPR. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that people are gung-ho especially about the possibility of using Neuroscience to study that inescapably human enigma: Consciousness. As someone who has worked as a researcher in a Neuroscience department for over two years, I am no stranger to this craze. At parties, I would tell people that I am a Neuroscientist and they would give me an instant (albeit undeserved) social cachet. People’s eyes would light up as they ask me to “explain consciousness” to them, as if there were some simple and agreed-upon explanation. But other people were much less enthusiastic. They would sometimes even get defensive, “how could Science possibly reveal consciousness.” The implication was that Science was in the realm of “facts" pertaining to the real-world (i.e., atomic theory, cell structure, and so on), whereas the enigma of consciousness was squarely within the realm of the Arts, Humanities, and/or Spirituality. Indeed, when it came to the latter, the reason for why the religious folks got defensive was at least understandable: if the mind were an outcome of bodily processes, more specifically neural activity, then there is no soul to speak of, no immortal consciousness to live on after the passing of the body. However, the reasons for why artists and humanities folks became defensive is, I think, a bit more nuanced.
From what I gleamed during these parties, the fear of the humanities folks was that a bunch of geeks in white lab-coats would derive some terribly reductionist “answer” to the enigma, indeed the infinitely beautiful enigma, of conscious experience. I am in fact sympathetic to this fear, as the mystery of the mind has birthed so many great works of art, from the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali to the dream-like films of David Lynch. These people should be relieved to hear that Scientists and Philosophers have by no means reached a consensus on the question of “what explains” consciousness, let alone “what is” consciousness. Simply put, there is no end-all-be-all answer to consciousness.
However, this lack of consensus is a double-edged sword. It also means that the Neuroscience of Consciousness is much less well-established field then, say, the Neuroscience of Visual Perception. These days, indeed, many Cognitive Neuroscientists maintain that one is simply “better-off” avoiding the enigma of Consciousness. As a young scientist, the advice that I often received was this: if you make Consciousness the topic of your research, then you will have a much harder time getting your results published, and the Scientific community overall will take you somewhat less seriously. The implicit notion is that by focusing on more modular aspects of cognition (perception, attention, memory, etc.), one can ask questions that are more experimentally tractable. You can, for example, measure discrimination thresholds for a low-intensity stimulus, or compare which of two high-intensity stimuli is more likely to capture a subject’s attention — these are actually the very experiments that I performed in my two years in a Neuroscience lab. By contrast, it seems strange to approach subjective feelings empirically.
The purpose of this sub-section is two-fold. The immediate objective is to provide a very general introduction to consciousness. What is it? And how can it be approached Scientifically? The larger objective is to address the concerns of my diverse of audience.
To religious folks, I am afraid that I we will have to agree to disagree, as a core pillar of this blog is the notion that consciousness can be understood as a physical process. I will present some evidence in favor of this view, but of course there is no pretending that I will convince you to drop a deep-seated belief in the course of a few minutes. I would, nonetheless, still encourage you to read on. The core attitude of this blog is very different that of the hardcore atheists who say that “all religion is bullshit,” and believe, more implicitly, that “feelings are bullshit, because they are not facts.” To be clear, I am also an atheist, but I find that my own attitude towards the human condition is not too different from that of many religious people. We will likely find common ground.
We will see, furthermore, how this dogmatic denial of “feelings” has in fact undermined Scientific efforts to understand consciousness. Artists and humanities folks will take some comfort in learning how all too many Scientists are indeed deluded as to the extent to which they are “above” feelings. They might be amused to learn how this dogmatism has led to the absurd position that “consciousness simply does not exist.” But consciousness does of course exist, and the saving-grace of Science is that it lives-off disagreement: our being against this suffocating materialism does not make us “against Science.”
Finally, for the Scientists who are wary of consciousness, and wary especially of “Neuro Gurus” who have figured out the “key” to unlocking your consciousness (hint: it will cost you some money), I hope to convince you that my motive is not so superficial. Above all, the claim is that if we want to understand History as a subjective experience, then it is not possible to simply side-step the problem of consciousness. The claim is that the mind is not only predisposed to “like” historical narrative (as argued by Alex Rosenberg), but that these historical narratives interface with our conscious feeling of “being a person” in a symbiotic way, and that to understand the one we cannot remove the other. If I could side-step the black hole of consciousness, trust me, I would. But without consciousness, there can be no such thing as “Living History.”
What is Consciousness?
Before we can ask the question of whether consciousness can be studied scientifically, we must first ask the more fundamental question, what even is consciousness? The most straight-forward way to go about this is to ask yourself, what does consciousness feel like?
The following features are, I think, self-evident.
Feature 1: Awareness and Intentionality.
The most recognizable feature of consciousness is awareness. When we are conscious of something, then we are necessarily aware of that thing. Awareness has the quality of directedness. In other words, one is always aware of some thing. Even if one tries to focus on one’s own awareness, one is still directing one’s awareness to some thing (in this case, towards the subjective feeling of awareness itself). Philosophers refer to this directedness as “intentionality.”
Feature 2: Awareness-In-Agent and Narrative Self
One is aware not only of things, but also of this awareness existing within oneself. On a walk in the park, my mother and I may stare in wonder at a cherry blossom tree, but in this moment I have no problem distinguishing my awareness from hers. My awareness feels like it is inside my body, not her body, and certainly not in the air in between us.
I am aware not only of being an agent, but also a person. Just as my awareness my own, this person is also none other than myself. I access this person every time I ask myself questions like, “should I go out tonight?”, or more existentially, “who am I?”. Regarding the latter question, I am constantly aware of myself as a person with some autobiographical identity, some narrative-existence.
Feature 3: Consciousness feels like…
By looking at a painting, we become not only aware of the painting, but also of the subjective feeling that it imparts to us. In simpler terms, consciousness feels like something. It is interesting to consider how this subjective feeling need always be directed. In some cases, we feel a certain way about some thing, but when it comes to more abstract feelings like anxiety, we may not know what exactly is causing the feeling.
This subjective sensation is often thought of as the greatest challenge to any Scientific understanding to consciousness. The sensation feels ethereal, so it would seem completely counter-intuitive to ground it to some brain-system.
Feature 4: Unified Awareness
At any given moment, you may be aware of multiple things, but there is a constant oness to your conscious experience. Your sensory perception of the object in front of you, your bodily perception, or interoception, of your own heart-beat, and your meta-awareness of own, seemingly ethereal awareness, come together in a single conscious experience. You never feel as though you have two-consciousness, as if your self-perception and your perception of the world outside of you belong to separate consciousnesses. As such, you may consider how this quality of oness extends to your own autobiographical self-consciousness.
The feeling of oness is extremely relevant to any Scientific deconstruction of consciousness, as it instills in our head the intuition that consciousness is one thing, i.e., that it cannot be deconstructed into various components. As we will see below, however, this oness is not a feature of consciousness so much as it is a feature of the feeling of consciousness.
From Mind to Matter: Pathologies of Consciousness
How could something so ethereal as consciousness emerge from something so corporeal as the brain?
We can try to approach this question in the negative. If consciousness was indeed a unified ethereal awareness, a kind of spirit, then distinct brain pathologies should not cause distinct pathologies of consciousness. This, however, is simply not the case. In the below bullet-points, we will return to the four features of consciousness described above, but this time we will describe a pathology of specifically that feature.
Pathologies of Awareness
Ask yourself, what is the difference between perception and awareness? The former is tantamount to “looking at something,” but the latter implies a conscious self who is doing the looking. Perception can be done by a camera, it seems, but awareness is only for (and by) conscious agents.
As astounding as it sounds, there is a brain pathology that causes its sufferers to “see like cameras.” These people suffer from a condition called “neglect syndrome,” as they exhibit a deficit in awareness on one side of their visual field. Remarkably, they are still able to “see” in this visual field. For example, if I were to present a flashing light to one such patient, and furthermore ask the patient to press a button every time she saw the light, then the button-presses would generally correspond in time with the flashing-light. However, if I were to ask this person whether they saw the light, she would say that she had not.
Neglect syndrome and its associated behavior of blindsight are not totally uncontroversial. You can read about these nuances here. The important takeaway here is that people with neglect syndrome have damage in a specific part of their brains and, as a result, suffer from a very specific deficit in consciousness. They are not literally unconscious, as they still think of themselves as being conscious agents, indeed, agents whose consciousness resides within their own body. But, as we will see on the next bullet-point, even this sensation of bodily consciousness is not to be taken for granted.
Pathologies of Awareness-In-Agent, and pathologies of Self-Narrative
Since the neurons in our brain “talk” to each other using electrical currents, Neuroscientists are able to disrupt targeted brain regions using electrical stimulation. Neuroscientist Olaf Blanke has shown that electrical stimulation to a specific brain region, tempo-parietal cortex (TPJ), reliably results in an out-of-body illusion: the subject feels as though her consciousness is floating, somehow, outside of her body.
You have perhaps experienced such an illusion in your dreams (a dream in which you can see yourself), or perhaps through experimentation with hallucinogenic substances, but the remarkable thing to note here is how a seemingly essential component of consciousness can be selectively inhibited through perturbation of brain function. The case for matter-to-mind becomes even stronger.
Of course we are not only an awareness in a body, but also awareness of a person. When it comes to problems of narrative identity, examples abound. If you are psychotherapist, then these problems are your bread-and-butter. I am not going to explicate every single problem, except to point out how our self-described life-narratives have a tendency towards two things: the realization of self-agency and narrative-coherence.
In the first place, we like to think of ourselves as doers who have impacted not only our self (i.e., the ethereal awareness affecting the autobiographical person), but also the world around us (objects and especially other people). We have discussed above how free-will is largely illusory, so the revelation here is how the illusion of self-agency carries through into our narrative consciousness. The illusory quality of free-will is demonstrated more thoroughly by an experiment Libet’s famous “free-will” experiment.
Libet asked his subjects to perform a very simple action — to press a button and report furthermore the time at which they made the conscious decision to press a button. Meanwhile, Libet recorded electrical potential from a region of the scalp corresponding with the “motor-planning” area of cortex. Previous studies had shown that certain scalp potentials corresponded with the time that the brain makes a motor-plan, in this case the motor-plan to press a finger downward towards the button. By comparing the time of this scalp-potential with the time that his subjects reported themselves to have made a decision, Libet found that the conscious decision came reliably after the motor-plan, suggesting that consciousness was not in fact involved in the motor-plan but instead a kind of post-hoc confabulation. Consciousness, it would seem, is a “story” that we tell ourselves to feel like we are in control.
In the second place, owing to the oness of our conscious experience, we imagine that the agent who is doing the actions is always a single coherent consciousness. This might seem to you a fairly tautological point (as you are after all single person yourself), but you can appreciate it by considering the extent to which your subconscious mental processes are by no means “one.” Freud suggested this more than a century ago, and we have today more direct evidence of the extent to which human cognition is performed by separate albeit interconnected “modules” (i.e., a module for making you thirsty etc.). In the fourth bullet-point, on “pathologies of conscious unity,” we will see a direct demonstration of the cosntruction of this narrative unity.
Pathologies in the subjective feeling of awareness as an out-of-body essence
Skeptics of Scientific approach to consciousness will look at the above two pathologies and say that they are not integral to consciousness. Indeed, they might point out that in both cases the affected person maintains some sense of awareness. They are not, in other words, totally unconscious or zombie-like, and we have yet to find cases of people who are unconscious without literally being unconscious (coma etc.).
Does this mean, then, that the there really is some empirically unknowable “awareness essence” that resides in each person? The best refutation of his presupposition that I have come across is provided by Neuroscientist Michael Graziano in his book, Consciousness and the Social Brain. He recounts the following,
“I had a friend who was a clinical psychologist. He once told me about a patient of his. The patient was delusional and thought he had a squirrel inside his head. He was certain of it. No argument could convince him otherwise. He might agree that the condition was physical impossible or illogical, but his squirrelness transcended physics or logic…The squirrel was simply there. He knew it.” (pg. 15).
The point that Graziano is trying to make here is that we all understand this poor man’s delusion to be exactly that — a delusion. Just because the man has the visceral certitude of there being a squirrel in his head, the clinical psychologist understands that this feeling is, in spite of its undeniable reality for the patient, a delusion. Graziano is trying to say that just as this psychologist does not bother looking for the squirrel inside his patients head, we should not task ourselves with finding the “awareness essence” inside our heads just because we, just like this patient, are totally certain that it exists.
Furthermore, if this “awareness essence” were really some constant property separate from the brain, then we would expect the subjective sensation of “feeling like it is there” to always be equally strong. However, this subjective feeling is not always there, and one does not have to be a tantric guru to feel its absence. Every time you daydream, your mind may wonder through a meandering patchwork of topics and, in states of deep daydreaming, you feel as though your “mind is blank.” When you come out of these mental states, furthermore, you feel as though you are “snapping back into reality.” What this suggests is that awareness is a variable and not a constant, and that it varies more specifically with attention. Keep this awareness-attention linkage in mind, as it will become key to one theory of social-consciousness discussed below (Graziano’s attention-schema theory).
The notion that your feeling of conscious being might be a delusion is a tough pill to swallow, there is no doubt about that. But I would advise you to consider the extent to which indigestibility of this possibility is itself due to your valuing real things (real as in existing “out there” in the physical world) as the only “good things,” the only sort of things that are not “just in our heads.” Perhaps we are better of thinking off consciousness not as a delusion so much as an illusion, indeed a beautiful illusion. Scientists try to arrive at an understanding of the real-world through diffraction microscopes and fMRI scanners, good for them. But the rest of us live, laugh, and love within the subjective “illusions” of our conscious reality. There is no getting out of it, so we might as well make the most of our time inside of it.
Pathologies of Unified Consciousness
Some unfortunate sufferers of epilepsy have undergone surgical procedures to prevent episodes of potentially fatal seizures. In a subset of these surgeries, the corpus callosum (the fiber that connects the the left and right hemispheres of the brain) is cut and removed. These “split-brain” patients have both hemispheres functionally intact, but the two hemispheres cannot “talk” with one another. If anyone is capable of experiencing a disunified consciousness, then we would expect it to be these people. However, what they exhibit is something else, something even scarier. This, by the way, is the famous “split-brain” experiment that I referenced in the above section, ‘Introducing the Self-Delusion.’
Gazzaniga presented these patients with an image on the one side of their visual field. The image was a sentence which read “GO TO THE BACK OF THE ROOM.” Since this instruction was “read” by only one hemisphere of the patient’s brain, how does the patient respond to it?
As if conscious of the instruction, the patient moves to the back of the room. However, if we were to ask this patient if she saw the instruction, she would say that shes does not know what we are talking about. But if we were ask the patient why she to the back of the room, then she would invent a reason that maintains her own self-agency as a rational being. For example, she might say that she decided to go to the back of the room to throw away something into the garbage can back there. What is so incredible about this confabulation is that it seems so natural and non-confabulatory from the perspective of the patient, and furthermore that it is reproduced reliably across patients and studies. What this suggests, then, is that consciousness is itself a confabulation.
By now, you are probably weary from this rather dismal picture of consciousness. “Oh, so I’m basically a deluded and egotistical individual, well that’s just great.” But the point of this discussion is not to tell you anything that your ex may have already told you. In the next section, we will ask, if consciousness is a delusion, then why do we even have it in the first place? Consciousness, as we will see, is not such a bad thing.
Consciousness Exists
Scientists like to occupy themselves with matter that they consider to be empirically measurable or, in their words, “real.” The point of Science, in this sense, is to use empirical observations as a means of arriving at “something real.”
Philosopher John Searle provides an example of this in his book, Mind, Meaning and Society (1998)
Eliminative reductions get rid of a phenomenon by showing that it really doesn’t exist, that it was just an illusion. For example, when we explain the appearances of sunrises and sunsets, there is a way in which we eliminate the sunrises and sunsets because we show that they are really only illusions. The sun does not really set over the mountains — rather, the rotation of the earth around on its axis makes it appear that the sun sets (pg. 56).
Can consciousness be understood using this kind of eliminative approach? Given the allure of Science as “being objective,” it should come as no surprise that this has been the approach of many Scientists.
But there is a problem with this approach: if one tries to reduce consciousness into its constituent or “real” elements (cognitive modules or, more fundamentally, patterns of neuronal firing) then one has not really explained consciousness, but rather something else.
John Searle describes the problem in more words,
We cannot perform eliminative reduction on consciousness because the pattern of consciousness is to show that the phenomenon is reduced to phenomenon to just an illusion. But where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the “illusion” is the reality itself…In this respect, consciousness differs from sunsets because I may have the illusion of the sun setting behind the mountains when it does not really do so. But I cannot in that way have the illusion of consciousness if I am not conscious. The “illusion” of consciousness is identical with consciousness.
If you find this all to be a bit confusing, consider the following question: is color “real?” On one level, color is not real because it does not exist in the real-world. Objects in the real-world are not really red, blue, or green. Objects in the real-world do reflect incoming light rays to different extents, and our brains create the illusion of color by comparing these incoming light rays. Red objects are not really red, but the light rays that they reflect are less intense then, say, blue objects. So can we say that we have “reduced” color into wavelengths, and that color does not really exist? Tell this to a visual artist and she will probably laugh at you. Of course color exists, even it does not exist in the real-world. It is a fallacy to think that subjective realities are not also objective in their existing, objectively, as universal subjective realities. As you might have noticed, the overarching intuition behind this blog is that if consciousness and “Living History” both exist as kinds of subjective realities, then it might be interesting to compare the two.
Believe it or not, many Scientists subscribe to an explanation that is tantamount to denying its existence. Daniel Dennet is perhaps the most well-known Scientist belonging to the, “if its not real, then its not real” Scientists. I find it interesting that Dennett is also an outspoken atheist who denied the truth-claims of religion along similar lines.
Of course consciousness is real because, just like color, we experience it to be real. Another way to approach this question would be to ask: “what is the point of having consciousness?” Biological features such as eyes and minds are the outcome of eons of evolutionary selection. The behavioral advantage that these features provide is obvious, and it is therefore reasonable to ask, “what is the evolutionary adaption that consciousness affords?”.
Humans are different from fruit-flies insofar as our success as animals depends not so much on following instinctive behaviors, but rather on using complex behavioral plans, goals and actions. As conscious beings, we can modify our attentional plan such that we focus not only stimuli that are inherently salient (e.g. red-traffic light), but also on those objects that we consciously decide to attend do (if you are learning how to be a waiter at a restaurant, then you are learning how to attend to tables). We can reinforce this kind of deliberate attention using conscious introspection (asking ourselves if we’re “doing a good job” as we attend to tables), and our conscious understanding of ourselves as “needing to keep this job” is furthermore reinforced by less deliberate emotional processes (the feeling of frustration if one misses a table, or the feeling of satisfaction if one finishes a good day of work).
The Degrees of Consciousness
Delusion of consciousness as ethereal and constant essence.
Are animals conscious?
Social Theories of Consciousness (Mind to Being)
Meaning as Socially-Derived (Mind to Meaning)
Ruminating on the Relationship between Being and Meaning (Meaning to Being, and vice/versa)
Theory of Mind and Consciousness
Now returning to the real world, we can appreciate how theories of social-consciousness are contreversial insofar as they implicate something seemingly constant and non-constructed, consciousness, to be constructed and therefore variable. Of course
want to know if Wei will also lack self-awareness. have self-consciousness? After an entire life of social deprivation, will he be able to recognize his own face in the mirror? Furthermore, would this
This notion sounds incredulously post-modern, but we will consider in this section how it might be valid, perhaps even necessary. Indeed, while there exists no real consensus among Scientists over the answer to the question, “what is consciousness?”, these theories are perhaps the most persuasive ones out there.
We can think about social-consciousness in another, more familiar way: by recalling our previous discussion on Theory of Mind. We have already seen how our innate “theory” presents an oversimplified schematic of human decision-making. In reality, people’s decisions are not quite so deliberate. Decisions are made instinctively more often than we realize (see Daniel Kahneman’s “Two Systems” theory in his monumental, Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011). Meanwhile, our self-avowed “reasons” for doing things are often contrived, or constructed “after-the-fact.” In proverbial terms, our self-justifications are usually bullshit. But if this is the case, why do our minds bother coming up with them? And how is it that they arise so spontaneously, indeed, so uncontrollably that we buy into our BS reasons ourselves?
We all have that friend who we consider to be delusional. We shake our heads as he contrives his own “reasons” for why things didn’t work out his way. For example, he might explain his last breakup by finding some problem with his partner, but will avoid completely the possibility that “the problem” lay instead with himself. However, what if your friend is not so unusual? What if he is only human. Cognitive Scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Serbier suggest that your friends’s unfortunate habit might in fact be hardwired. Indeed, this kind of confabulatory reason-making is a well-established in modern Psychology. Apart from Mercier and Serbier, plenty have attempted to answer the question of what, if not “rationality,” drives our spontaneous reason-making? For Mercer and Serbier the answer is inextricably social: in their own words, reasons are constructed for social-consumption.
Their hypothesis is at least intuitive when you consider how justifications always seem to imply some social context. Your delusional friend is trying to justify, to you and himself, why he should not be considered a flawed person in your or his own eyes. Even in cases where the self-justification is never articulated to another person, the justification still implies your personhood there still exists a social context. You might ask yourself, in your head, if you made a bad (selfish etc.) decision, but your mind will This might be particularly obvious with you friend, who is trying to make himself appear right in the eyes of others, I, as in the “I” of conscious self-awareness, does not construct these reasons, they are rather constructed more mechanistically by the human brain. The Enigma of Reason, the two scientists try to answer the question, what actually drives our reason-making? stress how these sorts of confabulatory self-justifications always seem to imply a social-context. In their words, reasons are constructed for social consumption. In the case of your friend, for example, his justifications will always involve is an after-the-fact confabulation, then is, too, our very sense of “self?” Is our conscious feeling of being a single person also, in some sense, a confabulation?