Consciousness According to James

Abstract

To illustrate the Mind's ghostly presence in the current debate on consciousness and its relation to the brain, this paper first reviews Searle's (1995a, 1995b) `The Mystery of Consciousness', next lets William James (1890) enter the debate, and last introduces his theory of consciousness as based on my interpretation of The Principles of Psychology. The theory distinguishes between and explains the neuronal mechanisms of (1) the conscious or purposeful and non-conscious or purposeless actions performed by conscious bodies and (2) their reproductive (R) and productive (P) consciousness (C). Though species-specific, RC is common to the mammalian brain, whose observable actions it demonstrates. RC cognizes the unanalyzed totals and knows nothing about relations between them; its `empirical knowledge' is mere familiarity with the concrete objects and events recognized as `that' or `same'. Specific to the human brain, whose never-observable acts it demonstrates, PC is both evolutionary and developmentally secondary to RC. PC conceives totals, parts, and relations between them; its `relational' knowledge is about the world as conceived and reconstructed through analysis and synthesis. The virtues of PC include disregarding the irrelevant, forgetting the unimportant, and breaking the rules of reproductive thought. Human consciousness is both reproductive and productive.