[MD] Pirsig's revenge

[craigerb at comcast.net]

Galen Strawson identified himself as a realist materialist pan-psychic, 
who holds that everything is experiential. 
Craig 
Here is the hand-out from his talk: 


Radical self-awareness                                 Galen Strawson 
old claim: the subject cannot in the present moment of awareness take itself as it is in the present moment of awareness as the object of its awareness—any more than the eye can see itself 
present-moment self-awareness: ‘SA’ for short 
‘thetic’: in the focus of attention, in attention; vs non-thetic 
counterclaim: present-moment self-awareness possible both non-thetically and thetically 
real materialism: real materialists wholly realist about experiential-qualitative character/’what-it’s- likeness’ of experience/consciousness (which is wholly physical phenomenon); real materialism 
adductive not reductive 
use ‘awareness’, ‘experience’, ‘consciousness’ interchangeably 
Ryle: subject is ‘systematically elusive’ to itself (1949: 186). 
[1] the subject of awareness can be aware of itself as it is in the present moment of awareness 
[2] the subject of awareness is always aware of itself as it is in the present moment of awareness (whenever it’s aware in any way at all) 
[1] Present-Moment Self-awareness is possible = P{SA} thesis 
[2] Present-Moment Self-awareness is universal = U{SA} thesis 
Husserl: ‘to be a subject is to be in the mode of being aware of oneself (1921—8: 151) ancient view: rejects [1] and afortiori [2] both non-thetic and thetic 
two principles 
[P1] awareness of a property of x is ipso facto awareness of x 
[P2] awareness is (necessarily) a property of a subject of awareness 
[P1] and [P2] entail 
[3] any awareness, Al ,of any awareness, A2, entails awareness of the subject of A2 
add 
[4] all awareness involves awareness of awareness 
only defensible version of [4] is 
[5] all awareness involves awareness of itself = AOI thesis 
otherwise there is a infinite regress (Aristotle, Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, Reid, Brentano, Husserl) 
[5] = AOI thesis amounts in effect to [2] = the U{SA} thesis, the claim that the subject of awareness is always present-moment-aware of itself (not formally valid, but the idea is clear) 
question: even if [5] is true, perhaps 
[6] all awareness is or involves present-moment awareness of itself 
is false, because there’s always a time-lag? 

well, not possible if [5] is true, because then all streams of awareness would have to last for ever (otherwise last moment wouldn’t involve awareness of itself) 
Descartes: ‘we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware at the very moment when it is in us’ (1641: 2.171) ... ‘the initial thought by means of which we become aware of something does not differ from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware of it, any more than this second thought differs from the third thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware that we were aware’ (1641: 2.382) 
Arnauld: ‘thought or perception is essentially reflective on itself, or, as it is said more aptly in Latin, est sui conscia [is conscious of itself]’ (1683: 71) 
Reid: ‘I cannot imagine there is anything more in perceiving that I perceive a star than in perceiving a star simply; otherwise there might be perceptions of perceptions in infinitum’ (1748: 317). 
Rei d (with disparaging intent): consciousness is ‘self-intimating’ in some constitutive way, or ‘self- luminous,’ or ‘phosphorescent’ (1949: 158-9; see also 162-3, 178) 
Why is [5] = AOI thesis true? two options 
• [01] [5] is true because it’s a necessary consequence of the intrinsic nature of awareness; and this intrinsic nature can none the less be specified independently of [5] in such a way that we can see why [5] is true 
• [02] The fact that the AOI thesis i.e. [5] is true is constitutive of the intrinsic nature of awareness in such a way that that intrinsic nature can’t be specified independently of the fact that [5] is true 
Locke: ‘thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks’ (1689: 2.1.19); uses ‘thinking’ in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all experiential goings on) 
Louis Sass: the most fundamental sense of selfhood involves the experience of self not as an object of awareness but, in some crucial respects, as an unseen point of origin for action, experience, and thought.... What William James called.. ... the ‘central nucleus of the Self’ is not, in fact, experienced as an entity in the focus of our awareness, but, rather, as a kind of medium of awareness, source of activity, or general directedness towards the world (1998: 562) 
Bernard Lonergan: objects are present by being attended to, but subjects are present [to themselves] as subjects, not by being attended to, but by attending. As the parade of objects marches by, spectators do not have to slip into the parade to be present to themselves (1967: 226). 
Arthur Deikman: we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it ... knowing by being that which is known is ... different from perceptual knowledge. (1996: 355) 
Ryle: ‘my today’s self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I try to take’ (1949: 187) 
Ryle: any mental performance ‘can be the concern of a higher-order performance’ but it ‘cannot be the concern of itself’ (1949: 188-9). When one thinks an I-thought, this performance ‘is not dealt with in the operation which it itself is. Even if the person is, for special speculative purposes, momentarily concentrating on the Problem of the Self, he has failed and knows that he has failed to catch more than the flying coat-tails of that which he was pursuing. His quarry was the hunter 
(1949: 187) 
example: this very thought is puzzling: example suggests that a certain kind of seemingly immediate self-presence of mind is possible even in an intentional, designedly self-reflexive, and wholly 

cognitive act perhaps it’s only when one tries to inspect the phenomenon, or apprehend that one has succeeded, that one is jerked back into higher-order thought about initial thought 
central case of thetic present-moment self-awareness: coming to awareness of oneself as a mental presence—or perhaps simply as mental presence — in a certain alert but essentially unpointed, global way ... matter of letting go in a certain way (Carrington Clinically Standardized Meditation) 
content of this awareness? 
seems to be good candidate for what is sometimes called pure consciousness experience: 
consciousness that is consciousness of the consciousness that it itself is and that includes consciousness that it is consciousness of the obtaining of the consciousness that it itself is 
content expressed in impersonal mode: yes, but the claim is that the occurrence of this content constitutes the subject’s being aware of itself-in-the-present-moment, and in fact, of itself- considered-as-itself-in-the-present-moment... 
considered as itself: this expression usually thought to imply explicit conceptualization, but needn’t (compare: experience something as square, red); point is not that subject not capable of conceptualization, rather that conceptualization lapses in this kind of self-awareness 
Thetic P{SA} 
[7] the subject of awareness can be fully thetically aware of itself as it is in the present moment of 
awareness - 
proposal about ‘express’: one can be expressly aware but none the less non-thetically aware of something (express but not in [the focus of] attention) 
‘foreground’: x can be in foreground without being thetically apprehended / in focus of attention 
can present-moment self-awareness really be truly thetic? 
(1) well, certainly seems right to say that it can be fully express, no less express than any awareness of anything is when one’s awareness of it is thetic 
(2) ‘thetic’ doesn’t/shouldn’t imply posing or positing or positioning of oneself for inspection in a manner that inevitably involves subject’s being distanced for inspection in such a way that subject really be said to be aware of itself as it is at that moment 
the ‘now-subject’ 
cognition: need a properly wide notion of what cognition is .. need to wean our understanding of ‘thetic’ away from too narrow a conception of what cognition is 
should we give up ‘thetic’ and retreat to supposedly weaker Express P{SA}? 
[8] subject of awareness can be fully expressly aware of itself in the present moment of awareness 
  No 
objection: thetic awareness is essentially a mediated form of awareness 
so [1] there is inevitably a time lag 
[2] one inevitably deals with a representation of the phenomenon one is aware of, a representation which   the phenomenon itself 
reply: need to reconsider general notion of cognition (‘cognitive’ = ‘pertaining to ... knowing’)... note e.g. that standard distinction between emotion and cognition is illegitimate because our emotions, however fallible, are one of our main sources of knowledge of how things are 

‘the having is the knowing’ 
acknowledge the reality of knowledge by acquaintance as knowledge/cognition in the fullest sense e.g. how I know the nature of the pain that I feel now… such knowledge by direct acquaintance 
is, one might say, perfect (knowledge of a priori truths can be no less perfect)... there is crucial aspect of reality—one’s conscious experience, the experiential-qualitative character or what-it’s- likeness of one’s conscious experience—that one knows as it is in itself, simply because ‘the having is the knowing’ (and no neural time lag) 
objection: example of knowledge or cognition by direct acquaintance isn’t enough to illustrate what’s supposed to be going on in Thetic PSA: 
true [1] notion of direct acquaintance seems clear in case of sense/feeling aspects of experience 
but [2] we take it that the acquaintance is in these cases non-thetic 
so [3] can we hope to carry the understanding of direct acquaintance given by non-thetic sense/feeling cases into the case that is centrally in question, the case of Thetic PSA? 
reply.: can perhaps take an intermediate step: 
true, [1] my having-is-the-knowing direct acquaintance with my headache is usually non-thetic 
but [2] 1 can also take it as thetic object of attention without disrupting the having-is-the-knowing direct 
acquaintance. I bring the pain to attention, then somehow disappear as observer, leaving only the pain (so too for sensation of blue when looking at the sky) 
if so [3] we already have a model of thetic direct acquaintance 
and [4] why suppose some huge further gulf must appear when turn from case of pain (sensation of blue) to case of the subject? 
Thetic PSA claim 
doesn’t in speaking of awareness make any claim about knowledge of the subject as it is in itself, still less complete knowledge of the subject as it is in itself 
subject as active principle lying behind all experience: this picture remains beguiling/attractive 
bad reason for this: the metaphysics of subject and predicate forces itself onus almost irresistibly, demanding that we distinguish between the subject of awareness and its various states of awareness in a way I think incorrect 
respectable reason: good sceptical instincts invite us to acknowledge that we could be present- moment-aware of something and yet not know its essential nature — 
perhaps all awareness of anything, other than the what-it’s-likeness of experience, is, necessarily and inevitably, mediated by a representation of that thing —, 
Kantian conclusion is triggered: ‘nothing which emerges from any affecting relation can count as knowledge or awareness of the affecting thing as it is in itself’ (P. F. Strawson 1966: 238) 
Kant: famously takes the subject itself to be for this reason unknowable by itself as it is in itself— knowable only as it appears to itself (if only because it can only be encountered in the spatiotemporal—in particular temporal—form of sensibility).. ... present suggestion is precisely that this isn’t so—that it’s possible to be aware of the subject of awareness in an immediate but none the less thetic way that is strictly parallel in respect of immediacy to the immediate (im-mediate) awareness we have of experiential what-it’s-likeness. Usually, representation/ mediation gets in the way, leaving us with ‘mere appearance’; but not in this case 
(Fichte’s principal objection to Kant, which he expressed by saying that the subject can apprehend itself as subject in ‘intellectual intuition’, is on this view correct, even if Fichte has quite different reasons for it) 
two senses of ‘the subject’s awareness of itself considered specifically as subject’ 
stronger: ‘as subject’ — subject’s awareness of itself involves its bringing itself under the concept 
SUBJECT 
weaker: ‘as subject’ requires only that what subject is in fact concerned with is itself in so far as it is a subject; allows that it may not in being so concerned be deploying anything recognizable as a concept of itself as subject 
‘EEE’ thinking: stresses the essentially environmentally embedded and embodied aspects of our existence 
Forman: awareness or experience or consciousness ‘should not be defined in terms of perceptions, content, or its other functions’ (1998: 197, my emphasis). 
this view is not in tension with anything in the theory of evolution, properly understood 
natural selection: can only work on what it finds.. ... evolution by natural selection of finely developed specialized forms of consciousness (visual, olfactory, etc.) no more surprising than evolution of various finely developed and specialized types of bodily organization 
evolved forms of consciousness have come to be what they are because they have certain kinds of content that give them survival value, kinds of content which are (therefore) essentially other than whatever content is involved in pure consciousness experience 
doesn’t follow that ‘pure consciousness experience’ is some sort of illusion 
on the contrary: evolution offers explanation of how anything other than pure consciousness ever came to exist 
some references 
Arnauld, A. (1683/1990) On True and False Ideas translated with an introduction by Stephen Gaukroger 
(Manchester: Manchester University Press). 
Deikman, A. J (1996) ‘“I” = Awareness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 3: 350-356. 
Forman, R. (1998) ‘What Does Mysticism Have to Teach Us About Consciousness?, in Journal of 
Consciousness Studies, 5: 185-201. 
Husserl, E. (1921-8/1973) Zur Phanomenologie der lntersubjectivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Tell, 
1921-8 ( the Hague : Martinus Nijhoff). 
Lonergan, B. (1967) Collection, edited by F. Crowe ( New York : Herder and Herder). 
Reid, T. (1764/2000) An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. D. Brookes ( Edinburgh University Press). 
Ryle, G.(1949) The Concept of Mind ( New York : Barnes and Noble). 
Sass, L. (1998) ‘Schizophrenia, Self-consciousness and the Modern Mind’, J . Consc. Studies 5 pp. 543-65. 
Strawson, P. F (1966) The Bounds of Sense ( London : Methuen ).