This is a truism, but frequently we forgot how true it is: We don’t know what we don’t know. This is much different from the less problematic condition of knowing what we don’t know.
I know that I don’t know Japanese, aside from a few words. I know that I don’t know any math beyond calculus, and very little of that. I know that I don’t know how to ride a snowboard. I’m confident in stating these sorts of knowledge about my non-knowledge because they’re so obvious to me.
But there’s plenty of things that I don’t know that I don’t know. I can’t provide examples of these, because when I feel that I know something, even if that isn’t true, my feeling of knowing prevents me from knowing that I don’t know.
As I continued my reading in The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, I started putting question marks in the margins of the Consciousness chapter. My skepticism started with these passages.
Because the subject of consciousness is mired in controversy, we already need to deal with an objection to our way of delineating consciousness, Some philosophers have denied that awareness can be experientially distinguished from the objects of awareness. They say that awareness is transparent, by which they mean that you see right through it to its objects, like seeing through a clear window pane to what lies outside.
For example, when you see a sunset, they claim that you’re aware only of the colors of the sky, which are perceptible qualities of the object, but not of any qualities of your seeing or visual awareness… In general, according to this viewpoint, awareness and attention make no contribution to how experience feels or seems apart from the objects and properties they represent. We think this viewpoint is wrong.
…Awareness doesn’t show up apart from the objects of awareness, yet it’s clearly distinguishable from them.
They believe that it is possible to have a “nonobjectifying kind of meta-awareness…that doesn’t present awareness as an object.” How the heck is it possible to clearly distinguish awareness from the objects of awareness if awareness isn’t made into an object? Meaning, how would someone know that they’re aware of awareness without making awareness into an object that is known by… what? Another form of awareness?
I just can’t understand this whole be aware that you’re aware thing. It seems to me that awareness is indeed transparent, that the only entities we can be aware of are the contents of awareness, not awareness itself. A finger can’t touch itself. An eye can’t see itself. Yet the book states:
From this “witnessing” perspective, there is a clear difference between experiential qualities of awareness, such as stability, tranquility, and alertness, versus experienced qualities of the objects such as color.
I don’t see that clear difference. Stability, tranquility, and alertness aren’t qualities of some sort of pure awareness. They arise in the course of our awareness perceiving contents of awareness both within and without ourselves.
If I’m counting my breaths, and start thinking of what to have for dinner when I get to five, I know that my awareness is distracted not from an experience of pure awareness, but from the content of my awareness suddenly shifting from breathing to yellow curry.
At any rate, I agreed with the next section in the Consciousness chapter, where the authors make the rather obvious claim that everything we know relies on consciousness. They call this the “horizon,” in the sense of a physical horizon where everything beyond it isn’t visible to us.
Consciousness is the horizon for the world’s disclosure. The world appears and is present to us from within the horizon of consciousness. Consciousness is the horizon of anything we can perceive, think about, and investigate, including when we are doing science. We can observe, imagine, and investigate things only within the horizon of consciousness, and anything that we determine to be real or factual gets this determination from within the horizon of consciousness.
I also heartily agreed with the following section, The Primacy of Embodiment. I highlighted every word of this section, my highest reading compliment. I’ll share as much of the section as my typing fingers can tolerate. [Turned out, all of it.]
Earlier we said that your brain doesn’t show up anywhere directly in your experience. We can now turn this point around. There is an undeniable close dependency of states of consciousness on the brain, but this dependency is inscrutable from within the horizon of first-person awareness. Being awake and perceiving things around you, being asleep and dreaming, “just sitting” in open awareness and mere nondistraction: these modes of awareness depend on the brain, but experiencing them from within reveals nothing of this dependence. More generally, horizontal consciousness does not directly reveal from within all that it depends on.
Of course, some philosophical and spiritual traditions deny this. They assert that it’s evident that the inner nature of consciousness, sometimes called “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” depends on nothing other than itself, and hence constitutes the fundamental ground of being. But if this metaphysics is thought to follow from the experience of pure awareness, the inference is invalid. No matter how basic and self-subsistent awareness may seem to be from the inside, it doesn’t follow that it really is that way.
How something appears doesn’t necessarily reveal how it is, even in the case of consciousness. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t genuine experiences of “pure awareness,” states in which awareness is experienced as having an invariant phenomenal quality distinct from its variable objects. But it does mean that such experiences, by themselves or taken just on their own terms, don’t reveal their origins or sources, or all that they depend on.
We can take this point further. Consciousness, in the sense of your immediate awareness, must have sources outside itself. Anything you can think, including “this finger in pointing to an aware space” or “this is a dream,” is meaningful thanks to concepts you possess and know how to use, and whose meanings don’t originate with you. Anything you do, including even “just sitting” and “nonthinking” in meditation, has meaning, and is possible at all, only given a background of social and cultural practices that extend far beyond you, and that predate and will outlive you.
Even meta-awareness, the ability to mentally attend to and monitor your awareness, originates developmentally from your having internalized an outside perspective on yourself when you were an infant interacting with others. Finally, any attempt to deny that your immediate awareness has outside sources is incoherent, because this denial cannot be thought or stated except through the conceptual and linguistic resources provided to you by your social heritage and your cultural and biological evolution. Even if you were the last surviving person of a universal plague, your mind and your capacity for meta-awareness would be inherently social.
These points describe what we will call the primacy of embodiment. There is no way to step outside embodiment, our living and inherently social and enculturated bodies. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “The body is the vehicle of being in the world.” The body is the medium of the world’s disclosure via consciousness.
So if you think you know that consciousness is separate from the brain and body, think again. Because you’ve failed to realize that you don’t know what you don’t know.
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