CONSCIOUSNESS OUTSIDE THE HEAD

ABSTRACT:Brain-centered theories of consciousness look to face insuperable difficulties. While a certain quantity of philosophers now doubt that the hard point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled of consciousness will ever be solv others call for radically novel approaches to conscious experience. In this article I resurrect a largely forgotten approach to consciousness known as neorealism. According to neorealism, consciousness is simply a part, or cross-section, of the environment. Neorealism implies that all conscious experiences, veridical or otherwise, exist outside of the brain and are wholly independent of being perceived or not; nonveridical perceptions of the environment above an arbitrarily short period of time are suppos to be objective constituents of the environment above a more extended time scale. I argue here that neorealism fares at least as well as brain-centered theories of consciousness upon a number of fundamental issues. upon one fundamental issue-the nature of the relation between veridical and nonveridical perceptions-neorealism outperforms its competitors.

Key words: neorealism, direct realism, consciousness, cross-section, environment

Asked to remember what my grandmother gazes like (she lives thousands of miles from me) I can summon forth an image of her in my mind-an image that shares at least a certain quantity of of the perceptible features of my grandmother, of that kind as the shape of her hands or the color of her organ of visions Not all of her features are not absent (the mental image is a great deal of vaguer), but at least a certain quantity of are. Yet no process in my head could have these features. If consciousness is a brain proces (Place, 1956) by what mode could my conscious experience of my grandmother have these features-such as the color of her eyes-that no brain proces could have?

The answer is, I believe, obvious. If consciousness is a brain proces then conscious experience cannot have the features that in fact it has (Shaffer, 1963) for these features are features of the environment (such as the colors and shapes of surrounding objects) and not of brain processe That conscious experience contains environmental properties has a further, inescapable event for if consciousness presents us with actual features of surrounding thing perceiveds then consciousness must be located where these true features and objects are themselves located: in the environment. If my experience of my grandmother at hands perceptible features that my grandmother actually has, then my experience of my grandmother must be located where my grandmother herself is located: outside of my head.

Of course, if consciousness did not actually at hand us with properties of external thing perceiveds but only with representations thereof, or internal activities related to (but distinct from) these properties, individual could perhaps maintain that consciousness is inside the head. However, I will argue in this article that conscious experience not absents us not with covert surrogates of properties of the environment on the contrary with these properties themselves. I will also argue that any other view of consciousness leads to intolerable, self-refuting effects The conclusion is as obvious as it is inescapable: Consciousness is outside the head (and, more generally, outside the body) Consciousness is in the environment.

The notion that consciousness resides in the environment itself was central to an approach to psychology conceived at the beginning of the last hundred and known as the novel Realism or neorealism (Holt et al., 1910 1912)1 The neorealists believed that a person's conscious experience at any instant was the part of the environment acting upon this person at this instant-and nothing other We shall see that in order to provide a plausible account of consciousness, this part, or cross-section, of the environment must be conceptualized in a rather abstract and complicated way; in any fact according to neorealism (e.g., Holt 1914) consciousness is identical with not the entire environment on the contrary only with a part of it.

Many veridical perceptions include parts of one's material substance (e.g., hands and limbs) as well as environmental things Neorealism assumes that parts of the material substance enter consciousness in the same way that any part of the environment can go into consciousness. Hence, the body has no special status in the neorealist theory of conscious experience. In contrast, greatest in quantity theories other than neorealism assume that consciousness hangs on the existence of, and in some way reside in, complex biological combination of parts to form a wholes such as bodies or brains. According to neorealism, however, consciousness does not hang on and does not reside in biological combination of parts to form a wholes such as bodies or brains. Consciousness can be, and frequently is, located entirely outside anyone's material part and is never located in anyone's brain. What is veritable is that sometimes brains are located in consciousness. When looking at the brain of a rabbit, for example, properties of this brain (the rabbit's) are not away in my consciousness. But the properties of the rabbit's brain that appear in my consciousness are not in my brain. They are outside my brain, in the environment.