Omnicentrism and Consciousness, or Why Nothing Just Is

Two pieces of writing that strangely speak to each other appeared this past spring in the major New York publications.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Two pieces of writing that strangely speak to each other appeared this past spring in the major New York publications. A New Yorker article, "Feel Me" by Adam Gopnik, explores the scientific and cultural study of tactile sensation. He leaves readers with the conclusion: "We can't shut off our skins. It is the obscurity of the other senses that makes us enliven them with art: touch is too important to be elaborated or distilled. It just is."

In the New York Times, philosopher Galen Strawson writes of consciousness, "It's true that people can make all sorts of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it."

So is empirical sensation the fundamental unit of awareness? I would argue no. Gopnik makes a case that touch--a physical subset of empirical sensation or perhaps an example of it--is fundamental. One could make a case that anything else, from yodeling to psychosis, is the fundamental point on which all else turns.

Debating what constitutes consciousness, an idea as slippery as a sweaty hand, has become fashionable as neuroscience has advanced. The humanists try to keep up with the philosophers, who try to keep up with the scientists. Or so the story goes.

For my money, I'm a pragmatic functionalist on this issue. I believe consciousness is relational, built out of the fundamental relationship of stimulus, "something" and response. If a duck quacks and another duck hears it quack, then the ducks are conscious. This influences my advocacy for animal rights. If something feels pain, it is our moral duty to ease its pain or stop it altogether.

I also maintain interest in the philosophy of my former professor Brook Ziporyn, of the University of Chicago, who also writes for the Huffington Post. Ziporyn's exploration of Chinese philosophy and omnicentrism is brilliant. As he sees it, asness is an essential ingredient in the universe. We come to knowledge through media of various sorts, seldom simpliciter. For example, in my interpretation of asness, I can analyze Spinoza's variables of physical extension and mind as neither dualistic nor monistic, but rather as different ways of experiencing what it is to be--as seen from each angle. (And yet, for Spinoza, the mind is eternal...which leaves an opening for some other enterprising mind.) I think there is also much to be learned from David Chalmers's concept of the extended mind, in which the environment influences the mind, and Edward Slingerland's expositions on embodied cognition.

We see yet another paradox in the thinking around consciousness in the way Gopnik describes the back and forth relationship of touch. Perhaps touch is not a monad and it too can be parsed. For he writes, "Touch is not a one-way deduction of sensation but a constant two-way interchange between what Tyler calls the 'language' of sensation and the raw data of reception."

This is where I think Gopnik gets more of the complicated picture correct than Strawson, who is a critic of narrative meaning in philosophy.

Gopnik writes, "In a similar way, even normal pain has turned out to be intricately story-driven....Itch passes through our bodies in direct currents, as if from ancient history; sex and pain enter our lives communally, loaded with the local news....When it comes to sex, the science of touch confirms that stories, more than sensations, are what stir us. A story-making machine is more likely than a haptic suit to turn us on, as has been the rule of the erotic life of touch since it began." (For a literary investigation of this, check out Margaret Atwood's 'The Heart Goes Last,' which explores sex-bots.)

Whether it may be physical or something else, consciousness will always be in relation. There is the conceiver, the object and what the perception is appearing as. All are subject to change, various forms of consciousness and they imply a multiplicity of conscious life, one which we share in common to varying degrees. In my mind, this guarantees nothing just is, but still reveals an objective singularity of truth: the process of its uncovering and understanding.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot