Consciousness: Event or Construct?

SMITH, N. W. (1997). Consciousness: Event or construct. In L. J. Hayes & P. M. Ghezzi (Eds.), Investigations in behavioral epistemology (pp. 147–161). Reno, NV: Context Press.

The interest in consciousness as a subject of inquiry has been receiving a great deal of attention from psychologists, biologists, computer scientists, communication specialists, philosophers, and an occasional mathematician and physicist over the past several years. The PsycINFO data base shows 1217 entries for the word as a major descriptor from 1984 through 1995. As a further example, the University of Arizona has begun an annual series of conferences on consciousness, and the journal of Consciousness Studies has been launched along with Consciousness Research

Abstracts. Another recent journal is Consciousness and Cognition. Recently an electronic journal called Psyche: An Interdisciplinary journal of Research on Conscious­ ness was introduced. The topic is also popular with the New Agers and with some physicists who are seeking consciousness in the cosmos. And then there are putative altered states of consciousness, involving such diverse matters as hypnosis, hallucinogenic drugs, yoga, meditation, dreaming, out-of-body experiences, biofeedback, parapsychology, and vision quests of shamans.

Rather than attempting to deal with all of these usages, the plan of this paper is to (a) survey the views of a few recent consciousness theorists, (b) determine what, if anything, they have in common, (c) examine the relation of any such commonality to events and constructs, and (d) consider what alternative approaches might be useful for such events and constructs as are involved.

What Some Consciousness Theorists Are Saying

Daniel Dennett (1969) has been one of the long time theorists of this topic. He takes what he calls a “centralist” view in which consciousness consists of internal states and is the core feature of mind, making up several aspects of it. He distinguishes consciousness from awareness, the latter always being “intentional” in the phenomenological sense of that word, that is, awareness of something. Aware­ ness, he argues, is alertness and always has content whereas consciousness is not intentional and therefore does not have content. But he does identify consciousness with a special meaning of awareness involving “the contents of certain states of events” (1969, p. 147). He rejects “mental images”, color perception, and other contents that many others attribute to consciousness. He also rejects “…the little man in the brain [who] takes on the guise of brain-writing reader, an intelligent, communicating system capable of understanding messages” (1969, p. 190). To get around the problem of pictures in the brain and something to look at them, the “Cartesian Theater” in his terms, Dennett (1991) proposes that the brain has multiple channels of specialist circuits that create multiple drafts of fragments of a narrative that are distributed in various parts of the brain. Memories and their distortions depend on what fragments and at what point in the editing of these narratives we tap into them. Consciousness is dependent on specific probing of these fragments. Discernment “is just various events of content-fixations occurring in various places at various times in the brain” (1991, p. 365). Even if Dennett’s theory gets rid of the Cartesian Theater m the brain, he attributes to the brain the character of an autonomous and self-causing agent. Although he denounces the assumption of the brain as “Boss”, he nevertheless conceives of it as a master control organ without any word about what controls it: “The brain’s task is to guide the body it controls through a world of shifting conditions and sudden surprises” (1991, p. 144).

In one of the most unusual books of all time on consciousness, Julian Jaynes (1976) proposes that consciousness gained existence only in relatively recent times when the two brain hemispheres, which he calls the “bicameral mind”, integrated and the mind was no longer bicameral with isolated functions. He argues that the people who built such great civilizations as those of Mesopotamia and Egypt were not conscious but were responding much like automatons to hallucinations that they took to be voices of gods. They followed the directives of these voices and had much in common with schizophrenics of today who have remnants of this bicameral mind. The locus of these voices is in the parietal-temporal area of the non­dominant right brain hemisphere which sends messages in one direction through the corpus-callosum to the person in the left or dominant hemisphere. As social life became too complicated for automaton behavior to cope with, especially in connection with writing, consciousness involving rationality gradually inhibited the regions of the brain containing the gods. Self-1talk replaced hallucinations and messages flowed both ways between the hemispheres. This began occurring about 4000 years ago in Europe and the Mideast.

It appears that Jaynes has not consulted the anthropologists. Radin (1927) pointed out that even among hunter-gatherers there are individuals who are just as thoughtful as any modern philosopher. In a review of Jaynes book, Blakemore (1978) wonders how the gods in the brain composed their commands such as to build great civilizations and originate great inventions and who directed them. Despite his elaborate theory, Jaynes never makes it very clear just what he believes consciousness is. He examines and rejects a number of usages of the term and concludes that it is a metaphor or analog to the real world. Apparently, this is along the lines of the Kantian double world, an inner world that is distinct from an outer one.

Thomas Natsoulas (1978, 1983) uses the Oxford English Dictionary to determine what consciousness is. He seems to accept all meanings from the earliest to the latest as equally applicable. It is noteworthy that the meanings get increasingly mentalistic and internalized with the passage of time. While on the subject of dictionaries, we might note the entry for “consciousness” in those devoted to psychology. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology (Harre & Lamb, 1983) states that it is “a term used very loosely to refer to one of the following”: (a) alertness as contrasted with unconsciousness, (b) awareness of objects, (c) awareness of one’s own actions or self-consciousness, and (d) a mental state that organizes and coordinates thoughts and actions. It finds that these meanings are all controversial. The Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychology (English & English, 1968) gives two pages of definitions and recommends that we replace the term with “subjective behavior”, exactly the argument advanced by William Stephenson (1968) that I will review toward the end of the paper.

For Karl Pribham (1980) both consciousness and attention are necessary concepts because the neurosurgeon must utilize the patient’s attention in order to obtain verbal or gestural responses that will help in diagnosing the amount of brain tissue that is damaged. Consciousness, he holds, is a state with contents whereas attention is the process of organizing those contents into a conscious state, and ‘mind’ is the sum of the content of psychological processing by the brain…” (p. 60). Further, mind is an emergent property that can’t be located in any single constituent part. He agrees with Whitehead that it is a property that extends throughout the universe.

According to Nicholas Humphrey (1983) “conscious mind” is a structure that controls behavior. This structure consists of “sensations, moods, desires, volitions and so on” (p. 48). These control behavior in that one smells a rose because one likes its smell and one raises one’s arm because one wants to. He doesn’t tell us what produces the wanting, but he illustrates his claim with a “just-so story” about creatures ancestral to humans whose “brains would receive and process information from their sense organs without their mind being conscious of any accompanying sensations” (p. 48-49). Humphrey makes three rather apparent major assumptions:

(a) such acts as sensing and desiring are internal conditions that are not behavior; (b) people are divided into a mind and a body; (c) the mind interprets brain action and directs the body.

A book by William Farthington (1992) entitled The Psychology of Consciousness received dual reviews as the lead-off piece in the July 1993 issue of Contemporary Psychology (1993). Both of the reviewers, Ernest Hilgard and Nicholas Spanos, implicitly assume that consciousness is a given-it has existential status. Neither raise the fundamental question that I will take up below of whether it is a construct or an event. According to Farthington, consciousness and mind are not the same thing, mind being a broader concept. Mind is a function of the brain in which it carries out speech, perception, and other mental actions. Consciousness, on the other hand, “is the subjective state of being currently aware of something, either within oneself or outside of oneself” (p. 6). Consciousness has contents including perceptions and images and includes such experiences as love and pain. He borrows from Jaynes to say that consciousness can be best understood as a metaphor. It seems, then, that Farthington believes that mind is the brain producing what he assumes to be mental acts; and consciousness is the content that the brain gives to the world. Further, consciousness is subjective and private and can be known by introspection. It interprets and constructs our world, contains thoughts and short term memories, and provides the capacity for how much we can attend to at once. He holds that consciousness is always about something and has contents.

Finally, I will mention one additional work, this by David Chalmers (1995) who defines consciousness as “the subjective, inner life of the mind” (p. 80) that is an “aspect” of physiological events. He assumes that the brain transforms physical and biological processes into subjective ones that we perceive as the world and summa­rizes a few of the leading theories about it-namely, those of Crick, Penrose, and Dennett-and notes that those theorists are unable to tell us “how these processes might give rise to conscious experience” (p. 82). Even so, he goes on to propose his own biological speculations involving what he calls “the neural processes of awareness” (p. 64) that sound much like the psychophysical parallelism of Leibnitz in neurological guise.

A Comparison

Farthington considers awareness and consciousness to be the same and also believes that intentionality is a characteristic of them. That is, one’s acts always occur in relationship with something: when we see, we see something; when we think, we think about something. Dennett argues that consciousness is different from some meanings of awareness and that intentionality is a characteristic of awareness but not of consciousness. Farthington attempts to distinguish between consciousness and mind as does Pribham, and Dennett refers to consciousness as the “core” of mind. But most others seem to use them interchangeably. Farthington has mind carrying out mental acts whereas Humphrey has “conscious mind” determining behavior. Some, such as Natsoulas and Farthington, make consciousness a concept that embraces many things while Dennett and Jaynes are very restrictive.

Humphrey (1983) notes that biologists contradict themselves by insisting on the one hand that consciousness was selected by evolution and therefore is objective while maintaining on the other hand that it is private and cannot be measured objectively. Baum (1994) points out another peculiar characteristic of consciousness theories: “Consciousness belongs to the little person or autonomous self inside who looks out at the external world through the senses or looks within the inner world of the mind and is thus conscious of both worlds” (p. 45). Farthington illustrates this clearly when he tells us that consciousness is awareness of something either inside or outside. Dennett (1991), too, has consciousness acting both inside and outside and also adds feelings as a third dimension. For any given theorist the mind may be looking either inside or outside or both.

Many of the theorists attribute attention, thought, images, memories, percep­tions, and feelings to consciousness and hold that subjectivity is a major character­istic. Most declare that consciousness is difficult to define and even that it is understandable only as a metaphor or analog. A major point on which agreement occurs is that consciousness exists; and whatever it is, the brain produces it. And with that goes a question that Chalmers raises of how physical events become subjective events-how neural events get transformed into something other than neural events, how they give rise to this baffling thing called consciousness.

If we left the matter at this point, I think we would be justified in concluding that consciousness is nothing more than a tangle of verbal inconsistencies with no more than vague referents together with a heavy dose of psychophysical dualism and that we should, as the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychology suggests, replace it. And that is a conclusion that I could support. But I want to examine what is behind these confusions and see where a further analysis might lead us.

Historical Influences

The confusions, I suggest, have their origin in two intertwined matters, (a) history and (b) the failure to distinguish between constructs and events. The word “consciousness” did not enter the English language until the seventeenth century. Apparently no one found any need to express its meaning prior to that, and this by itself suggests something artificial about it. The dualistic meanings that it attained have swayed the thinking related to it up to the present. More generally, our culture is replete with mind-body thinking and this has influenced the theorists.

The second reason for lack of clarity is the failure to distinguish between constructs and events and this too has a historical basis. A preoccupation with verbalisms began around 200 BC in the Hellenistic period and was then augmented by the verbal constructs of various cults including that of Christianity (Kantor, 1963, Randall, 1970). These verbalisms eventually eclipsed all interest in science and helped bring on the Dark Ages. When science finally re-emerged in the late Middle Ages it was heavily laden with physical and non-physical distinctions and the assumption of the reality of verbal constructs. Psychology took from Christian theology one of these verbal constructs, that of the belief that the individual is governed by an internal psyche or soul or mind. Immanuel Kant had given it a philosophical direction by contending that we know only the contents of this inner mind and not those of the real world. Sensations enter the mind that he called the transcendental unity of apperception and are transformed through twelve categories (much in principle like information processing suppositions of today). Thus we live in two worlds, an inner world that we know and is transcendental and a real physical world that we can never know. Implicitly following in the footsteps of Kant, books on cognition, perception, and some on consciousness refer to this as the representation in us of the world, the authors usually assuming existential status for this representation and thereby confusing a construct with an event. Johannes Miller converted Kant’s transcendental world into a physiological one by proposing that what we perceive is a result of specific nerve energies. That is, we don’t respond to the world but to our nerves that have energies specific to a particular form of stimulation. Eventually the interpretive center became the brain, and the organocentric doctrine became entrenched.

This tradition has come down to us as the effort to find perceptions, thoughts, images, and the like in the brain. And it is this tradition that the major theorists about consciousness draw from when they agree with each other that consciousness is a brain phenomenon. It is this tradition also that has influenced them to place preeminence on such verbal constructs as consciousness, mind, sensations, qualia, cues, and representations and impose them on the events. This construct-based approach rather than an event-based approach together with the historically-based attempt to place the psychological event in an internal mind or in a psychological brain is what has led to such logical problems of the consciousness theorists as mind­ body dualism, anthropomorphic neural interpreters, self-causation, and a double world.

Consciousness as a Construct

A construct is something constructed rather than an original event. It is a representation of a thing or event and takes such forms as a verbal statement, a mathematical expression, a diagram, a symbol, or even a gesture that signifies something specific. Any good construct has a specifiable referent; and we find these in descriptions, scientific laws, and diagrams of relationships.

Why is consciousness a construct rather than an event! Because there is simply no clear event that comprises it. Even as a construct it is vague and the accounts of it inconsistent. It has no specifiable referent. Therefore, it is not only a construct but also one of the most unsatisfactory kind. The fact that such constructs as mind, consciousness, awareness, and the like have no clear referents is why there is no agreement about what they are or how they differ. They are only tangles of words because they consist of no more than words. Frequently the theorist refers to actual events such as attending, thinking, and perceiving. These can be independently identified and examined. But because they are independent events they don’t need something called consciousness to account for them or to prop them up nor can they prop up a construct like consciousness. If these events were said to comprise the construct of consciousness and were so used consistently it would be an acceptable construct-a word that subsumes a clearly identifiable group of events just as the construct personality subsumes somewhat consistent behavior patterns of any given individual; but that usage does not seem to occur for consciousness. Rather, some causal connection is usually assumed: consciousness somehow accounts for these events or the events reveal consciousness, the direction of influence depending on the theorist.

Some theorists assume that these events are “mental”, not behavioral, and therefore have some nonphysical or attenuated existence. Inasmuch as even the events that are said to reveal consciousness are not behaviors but are regarded as existing in some uncertain realm that is different from the brain activity that is assumed to produce them, consciousness can only be a construct of the most confused kind, one whose existence rests on verbalisms from our dualistic heritage. Usually the imposed construct takes the form of epiphenomenalism or emergentism: the brain produces consciousness as an epiphenomenon that emerges from it. A few even argue for a clear-cut psychophysical dualism (e.g., Eccles & Robinson, 1984; Popper & Eccles, 1977; Vendler, 1984).

Others claim that consciousness is brain activity. This is known as identify theory: consciousness is identical with brain action. But just as consciousness lacks a clear observable referent, neither has anyone ever observed the brain producing images, memories, perceptions, colors, neural “messages” as opposed to neural impulses, the interpretation of such messages, or information processing. Sperry (1993) declares that because he seeks psychological events in the brain he has escaped psychophysical dualism, but in actuality the psychological brain doctrine to which he subscribes is the same construct as the old transcendental soul and plays the same role. It is just dressed up a little differently. Ellis (1995) tries to get around dualism, identity theory, and epiphenomenalism by arguing for consciousness as a process in which the brain is a sub-stratum. They are inseparable without being identical, he claims, and function something like the way a sound wave causes a wooden door to vibrate..

Both brain activity as psychological events and consciousness that is supposed to parallel such brain activity are clearly constructs without a referent. These are mythological constructs all, descended from Hellenistic mind-body dualism and institutionalized by the Church Fathers. The consciousness theorists are so firmly within the organocentric fold of received doctrine that they have convinced themselves that neural impulses, which have not even a semblance of the world that comprises our interactions, represent the world inside us; or from them “emerges” our consciousness of that world.

The Events Distinguished from Constructs

Let’s consider further what some of the consciousness theorists refer to as a characteristic of consciousness. Perceptions, memories, images, attention, and feelings seem to be the most common. If we simply change all of these nouns to verbs-perceiving, remembering, imagining, attending, and feeling-it becomes apparent that these are not things or processes (whatever they might be) that can com prise, reveal, or characterize a larger entity called consciousness but are concrete acts of human beings. They are what people do. They are events, not constructs. Further, they always occur in conjunction with something. The phenomenologists call this intentionality and further hold, contrary to most of the other consciousness theorists, that there are no contents of consciousness but rather that consciousness is a relationship. The tree I see is not in me, not even coded in my neurons. Rather, it is standing out there in the yard, and when I see it I am relating to it.

But here I need to note that while the phenomenologists tend to define intentionality as a mutual relationship, they sometimes treat it as unidirectional (e.g., Giorgi, 1976), and for that reason I prefer not to use the term but rather to employ the term interaction as used by J. R. Kantor (1959, 1971, 1984). This immediately indicates a bidirectionality of actions. It gets us out of neurons and the construct of a psychological brain and allows us to observe the events of organism and object in interrelationship or interaction that develops and changes over time with successive contacts in different settings. We can also observe the events of the biological brain and the role of those events in psychological behavior. They are not irrelevant. They are necessary conditions for all of the interactions just as the object is necessary, and the setting in which the interaction takes place is necessary. But brain is not a sufficient condition as the consciousness theorists implicitly assume. It does not manufacture or contain psychological events but does provide one of the enabling conditions. To invoke a mysterious something that arises from the brain and gives form or meaning to those events as Pribham (1980) and Sperry (1993) do, is to start with constructs rather than events and to continue the confusion.

Events in the Field

If we treat perceiving and all other psychological events as fields of interactions (a complex of relationships in a context) (Kantor, 1959; Smith & Smith, 1996) we don’t have to ask how the electro-chemical event of a brain neuron appears not as an electro-chemical event but as the color red or the face of a friend, and we don’t have to propose a ghostly emergent quality(Pribham, 1980;Sperry, 1993). In seeing red we can observe that we must have an eye and a brain that is capable of responding to red, an object that has the potential to be seen as red, and light as a medium of contact between the eye and the object. When these are brought together simultaneously the joint interaction is the seeing of red. These are all observable events in the field. The turning to a field of interactions is not new. In fact it is as old as Aristotle (De Anima, II. 418-426; Smith, 1971, 1974). Perhaps because he was not encumbered with mind-body dualism that developed in the Hellenistic period after his time (Kantor, 1963; Smith, 1974, 1989, 1993a), he was able to move beyond his biological interests to a new level of organization, that of organism-object interactions that we now call psychology. If we lack biological conditions for seeing red, such as retinal cones with the right sensitivity or the necessary brain cells in the occipital cortex we don’t see red. That does not mean that those cells excrete red but that they are. necessary for seeing red just as the surface quality of the object and the medium of contact are necessary conditions.

In “blind sight” and similar studies (Milner, 1971; Weiskrantz et al., 1974) in which the occipital cortex is destroyed the individual can point to objects accurately but reports being unable to see them. Similarly, with the corpus-callosum cut such patients can correctly match or point to objects in the blinded side but declare that they are not visible. Humphrey (1983) and Pribham (1980) cite these studies as demonstrating a divided consciousness. A field view, in contrast, suggests that these studies demonstrate that the brain is a vital coordinating organ for the body; and when it is impaired or disconnected some interactions may be also disconnected. The fact that we don’t see a large hole in our vision, the blind spot, where the optic nerve occupies about 6 degrees of our visual field is often explained as a brain process of “filling in”. Dennett (1991) probably has it almost right when he proposes that the brain is not filling in but ignoring the gap. Similarly, he tells us we don’t notice the gap between the saccadic movements of about five fixations a second of our eyes “because we’re not designed to notice them” (p. 355). The brain, he holds, is not filling in but ignoring. The reason I said Dennett may be “almost” right is that he retains the autonomous brain. We might better say that organisms do not perceive the blind spot or jumps in visual fixes of the eyes because they don’t have the neural equipment to do so. It is not a matter of a brain either filling in or ignoring but what we can or cannot interact with depending on our biological equipment.

How do we recognize our friend’s face? Crick and Koch (1995) attempt to answer this by proposing that neurons code for the face and project to other neurons that code for voice, name, etc. This is what gives meaning to the face, they claim. But it remains unclear how any of these “neural codes” are perceived as face, voice, and name. They are still electro-chemical events. Even if one found images or colors, something else would have to look at them, and this leads to an infinite regress. And how do the images or percepts get projected back to the person so that the representation appears not in the head but out there attached to the person? And what, if anything, does the word “consciousness” add?

If we turn to events in the field we get very different results and avoid these mentalistic dilemmas of the psychological brain construct. We start by leaving the face attached to the person and not imposing any constructs about brain representations. We note that the face as an object is one that we have had previous contacts with and that we have developed discriminations between that face and other faces and in conjunction with other characteristics of the person. Here it might be useful on the organism side of the interaction to investigate neurological changes involved in that specific discrimination, but it would be a mistake to look for the face in neurons. The full field of events is involved. For example, If the medium of contact is inadequate, such as dim lighting, we might not recognize the face. Even the setting in which we encounter the face can be important.

Let’s recount the field events I have mentioned: a stimulus object, in this case a face, a history of interactions with that object, a medium of contact, an organism with the necessary biological organization, a medium of contact, and a setting. These are all identifiable, and the role of each can be studied as they contribute to the total event. The psychological event, then, in this event-based approach is not in a psychological brain. Nor is it in unilinear stimulus and response inputs and outputs as some behaviorists once maintained. Rather, it is comprised by the entire multiplex field. The friend’s face means to me “my friend” and that meaning is not, as some consciousness theorists maintain, a consciousness that is additional to the events. Rather, it is the field of events. This does not put the neuroscientist out of a job. There is plenty of work to do in investigating the biological side of the field, but by starting with events and interpreting their findings in terms of those same events they won’t be trying to explain the entirety of a psychological event with only one piece of it.

Similarly, memories or recollections are not things stored in us but are reperformances or re-enactments to a more or less accurate degree of an original action. Again, we could look for neurological events that facilitate remembering, but we must also look for the substitute stimulus and other events in the interaction.

Attending is also said to be a state or component of consciousness. But attending can stand alone. It doesn’t need the support of the vague construct of consciousness. When we attend to one object rather than to another we begin our interactions with it. It is not a matter of something coming into a putative consciousness. Objects have various characteristics, and some of those characteristics, such as those of size, motion, color, clarity, etc., increase the probability that we will attend to them. Advertisers know these well and make intensive use of them. On the organism side of the interaction we can identify those things that are of importance to an individual or are special to that person’s interactional history that increase the probability that he or she will attend to them. For example, a naturalist sees all sorts of things in the woods that I would not attend to. In addition to object and organism, the setting is also important. If my gasoline gauge shows near empty I am more likely to attend to signs for service stations. As we attend we actualize one stimulus object rather than another and perceive the meaning of that object. The meaning is comprised of interdependent events in the field, not something additional tacked on. The service station means a place to replenish my fuel tank and continue my journey, and it means that because of my past history with similar objects and conditions. My perception is the meaning and it prepares me for further action such as turning into a service station.

In contrast to Humphrey (1983) who holds that sensations and desires are mental conditions that are not behavior and that these mental conditions determine behavior, the interbehavioral field emphasis on events finds that sensing and desiring are identifiable concrete events-call them acts, interactions, behaviors, or interbehaviors. Sensing (or its equivalent to the interbehaviorist, perceiving (Smith, 1993-b) and attending are preparatory or precurrent acts for a consummatory act. We attend to a chair, perceive that it is suitable for sitting and then complete the interaction 6-Y sitting on it. The interaction is conditioned by our past history with chairs, light as a medium that is sufficient for us to see the chair, and setting factors such as body fatigue or social appropriateness for sitting, such as that of a classroom. Affective responses such as moods and desires also condition our interactions. And some actions lead to other actions as in the case in which we plan an action and then carry it out. The planning itself is not a mental event that causes behavior but is an interaction with some object or condition that serves as a stimulus for a more overt response. Much of this involves interacting with ourselves, and this has long been known in psychology as response-produced stimulation. These are all descriptions of observable events, not an invisible “conscious mind” directing behavior. One smells a rose, to use Humphrey’s example, not because a conscious mind containing something called “wants” causes the body to do so but because one attends to it rather than to something else, perceives its potential to be fragrant as related to similar past contacts, has the necessary olfactory equipment for the smelling, is in a setting where such smelling is acceptable (not rushing to work, for example) and chooses to smell rather than engage in some other activity. To say that there is consciousness or awareness gives us no further understanding.1 Verplanck’s (1992) approach in response to the claim that operant conditioning is only a matter of “awareness” is instructive. He was able to demonstrate empirically that verbal behaviors follow discriminative and reinforcing stimuli in the same orderly fashion as nonverbal behaviors and also control and direct other behaviors by serving as discriminative stimuli. Explanation involving such “verbal magic” as “awareness” or “consciousness” was totally unnecessary.

It is possibly attending and perceiving that are at the core of what consciousness theorists are often responding to when they grope for a meaning of consciousness or awareness. For example, in the child’s game of hide the thimble, Dennett (1991) refers to “conscious experience” when the child finally sees the thimble that was in open view. This is clearly a case of attending. An interbehavioral field approach to attending and perceiving accounts for what we do or don’t attend to and the meanings of those things to which we do attend. This can include ourselves as objects in what has been called consciousness of self or self-concept. Pribham ‘s need to ask his patients questions in order to identify neural damage is, as he indicates, a matter of attending; what he avers as conscious contents would seem to correspond to perce1vmg. Perceiving may be analytic as when we respond to only one component of an organization, such as the stamen of a flower; or it may be synthetic as when we respond to relationships or wholes of things, such as the flower as a thing of beauty. Perceiving can constitute a near infinitude of qualities such as pale brown, beauty, painfulness, awesomeness, fearfulness, melodiousness, etc., depending on the nature of the stimulus object, the biological capabilities of the organism, the medium of contact, the interactional history with that or similar stimulus objects and their stimulus functions2-all concrete objects or events (Kantor & Smith, 1975; Smith, 1993-b). The practice of beginning with observed events stands in stark contrast to the employment of the psychological brain construct.

Closely related to attending and perceiving is another category of events that also deserves attention. We have probably all had the experience of driving along the road or of walking in familiar territory while thinking about some matter and have made a correct turn but cannot recall having done so. Sometimes we do go right past our turn and, in that case, clearly have not attended to it; but when we did tum, we must have attended to it and perceived it as the correct place to turn and yet have no recollection. Dennett (1991) refers to such “unconscious driving” as “a case of rolling consciousness with swift memory loss” (p. 137). What “rolling conscious­ ness” might be is unclear, but the rapid forgetting is a plausible hypothesis. Kantor proposes (1924-26)) that in such cases the attending and perceiving reaction systems are habitual and closely bound to the consummatory response. Little cognitive or affective activity occurs. We might, however, wish to better understand such variations in how closely the precurrent events are bound to the consummatory response. It might be fruitful to pursue studies in attending and perceiving to discover what conditions govern these relationships and it might also be fruitful to examine biological participants so long as we recognize that they are, in fact, participants and not determiners or producers of the event.

We could continue by examining the field events in feeling and thinking and other psychological events. In all cases we would start with an attempt to identify the events rather than resorting to a verbal construct out of our nonscientific culture, and we would try to see how the relevant components are related. As we move to more detailed questions about field factors, we will have to employ a variety of research methodologies; but once we recognize what are constructs and what are events our investigations can take a more fruitful course and we can ask questions that at least have a potential to be answered.

Subjectivity

One of the claims of a number of the consciousness theorists is that conscious- ness is a highly subjective phenomenon. Jaynes (1976) expresses this eloquently:

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unknowable reveries! And the privacy of it all!…A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we do …an introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all. (p. 63)

Similarly, Chalmers (1995) suggests that we

…think of the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of intense pain, the sparkle of happiness or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought. All are part of what I am calling consciousness. It is these phenomena that pose the real mystery of the mind.

What Jaynes and Chalmers call “ineffable” and “insubstantial” is nothing of the kind. The events they allude to are concrete interactions that came under objective analysis first by Aristotle and had been systematically analyzed by Kantor (1924-26) by the 1920s. And of course, experimental studies of recall, perceiving, and attending are as old as experimental psychology. The subjectivity of these events and others does not remove them from empirical study of that subjectivity or necessitate invoking the vague construct of consciousness which Jaynes tellingly refers to as “nothing at all”. The assumption that physical events become subjective events as

Chalmers (1995) believes is a thoroughgoing confusion of constructs with events. The most powerful method for studying subjectivity is Q method and was devised by William Stephenson (1953) for precisely that. He has explicitly replaced consciousness with subjectivity (1968). Subjectivity is an event that is determined operantly by self-reference. The procedure consists of subjects-in the literal sense of that word-sorting statements from a concourse from which the investigator extracts mathematical factors and then names them. These are subjective to the person but objective to others. The sorting process comprises a psychological field in which the subject is interacting with statements that serve as substitute stimulus objects for the original events. The subject’s present setting conditions and past history including instructions for the sorting are also parts of the psychological field event. The extracted factors represent subjective events of the interactional field. In Q methodology the subject gets full reign and yet the results are rigorous. It replaces vague constructs with objective measures of subjectivity and correlates people rather than tests. Hundreds of these studies in such widely varied disciplines as economics, psychology, sociology, political science, nursing, journalism, musicology, and many others have yielded valuable information by going not to a vague construct of consciousness but to the concrete, objective events of subjectivity.

Conclusions

By moving away from the inner-outer distinctions to a field of interacting events that comprise feeling, dreaming, imagining, thinking, believing, knowing, perceiving, etc., we obviate the age-old mind-body dichotomy and its endless conundrums. We also obviate mechanistic as well as mentalistic constructs. By moving away from a biological level of organization to a broader one involving the interdependent and interacting events in a field we also obviate the psychological brain construct and its dilemmas as well. At the same time we give full acknowledgement and attention to the role of the brain as a biological organ as one of the facilitating conditions in the field. There is no place and no need for empty organism or psychological brain, for mind in a body or a mindless body, for S – R mechanisms or mysterious emergent powers. All of this results from the simple and straightforward procedure of starting with events and keeping our descriptive and interpretive constructs consistent with those events. By this procedure interpretations become scientific constructs rather than mythical constructs.

By turning to a field of relationships we retain all the richness and diversity and subjectivity that consciousness theorists such as Jaynes and Chalmers have pro­ claimed. At the same time we find a better way to understand the actual events that the construct of consciousness so poorly refers to.

Footnotes

1 In choosing, an individual’s behavior equipment comes into prominent play with a substitute stimulus, often verbal, for the consequences of the act. Meanings as part of the interactional history contribute precurrent actions that influence the consummatory act-that of making the choices. Settings also play a role. For a detailed account of choosing see Kantor, 1924-26.

2  Any stimulus object can have any number of stimulus functions depending one one’s history with it and the nature of the object. A book may be something to read, to sell, to use as a paper weight, or to revere as sacred. The distinction between a stimulus object as a physical entity and its functional properties provides a way of accounting for meaning.

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