Marc Carter wrote:
I have a question, though: if I am completely engrossed in a pain, in
what sense would I not be conscious? Even though in this case the
pain and the awareness of that pain cannot be physically separated,
they can be conceptually separated, and so we have that "aboutness"
-- but in this case without the pain there is no consciousness (the
consciousness just is the pain) and the pain is not something that can
live apart from conscious awareness.
There has been a centuries-long debate over whether consciousness
("awareness") or intentionality ("aboutness") is the "mark of the
mental." Franz Brentano was the main 19th-c. advocate for intentionality
(and was vociferously opposed on this by Wilhelm Wundt, among others).
Intentionality, or the most part, lost the debate to consiousness, but
then consciousness almost immediately afterwards lost out to "behavior".
Intentionality experienced a revival in the 1970s and 1980s in modern
cognitive science (by John Searle among others) because no one wanted to
go too near to consciousness again (which was felt to be a morass), but
people were looking for a rigorous way to "mark" the mental in order to
escape the clutches of behaviorism (which was increasingly seen by many
as being sterile). It turns out that intentionality can be handled
relatively well by certain logical formulae that consciousness still
eludes. (See my 1996 Can Psych article for a discussion -
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/cog-orig.htm .) By the 1990s,
cognitive scientists were getting cocky and started re-examining
consciousness again, first very tentatively (e.g., Dennett's "as-if"
account) and later more boldly (e.g., Chalmers' "hard problem"). To m
mind, not much more progress has been made than was made a century ago,
though now we have lots of interesting neurlogical correlates now that
we couldn't have had then.
Mood and pain and mood are two of the traditional picking bones in the
debate between intentionalists and "consciousness-ists": I can feel
vaguely, pervasivley anxious without being anxious *about* anything in
particular. I can feel a pain without the pain being *about* anything
(in the way that thoughts are about things). My philosophy PhD
supervisor, BIll Seager, argues that the anomaly around pain is only
apparent because it leaves out an important factor in the intentionalist
arsenal -- the "mode of presentation" to the mind. One can have the same
object "presented" in a number of different ways: and love the bear,
fear the bear, be curious about the bear, etc. Pain, he says, is not a
conscious state, per se, but a mode of presentation of a particular part
of the body (e.g., My arm hurts). Thus the part of the body is the
intentional object (i.e.,the thing that the mental state is "about") and
the pain is the mode of presentation.
Regards,
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
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