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Consciousness

An individual is somewhere in space-time, and not somewhere else. Except for God, of course, who was invented to instantiate all contradictions in blessed harmony. He\'s everywhere and everywhen, though at the same time, as it were, not in time or space[3]. But the upshot of this is that every individual has a point of view, a perspective, and apprehends the world, so far as it can apprehend the world, from somewhere and not nowhere[4] (Nagel 1986). If taken in isolation, the feature of being somewhere in particular affects all kinds of individuals, not just humans. But only those individuals that can view something can presumably have a point of view. Thus Searle again:

Subjectivity has the further consequence that all of my conscious forms of intentionality that give me information about the world independent of myself are always from a special point of view. The world itself has no point of view, but my access to the world through my conscious states is always perspectival. (ibid. 95).[5]

In itself, however, that could be true of any other living thing. Nor is it a requirement to be alive: an artificial eye has a point of view. More generally, as shown in the excellent discussion of this subject in (Proust 1997), aspectuality can be seen as a consequence of mere differences of informational channels, and doesn\'t therefore require any level of consciousness.

Perspective might itself be of two kinds. This can be seen by asking: Does a still camera have a genuine point of view? One reason to deny this is that for a still camera there is nothing that corresponds to the difference between locality in time, and locality in space. For a living individual, these pose slightly different problems. For there are different ways in which we might care about the effects of our actions in distant space, and in different times. Time is asymmetrical in this sense (among others): we care more, or quite differently, about what happens in the future than about what happened in the past. But although the things we care about may, of course, be unevenly distributed, space has no uniformly privileged direction. So temporal perspectivity appears seems to constitute a more serious species of subjectivity than the spatial kind.

Now perspectivity is sometimes equated with subjectivity in general, as suggested in the last quotation from Searle above. Yet subjectivity is also associated with the self, and the temporal form of perspectivity actually causes problems for the view that my self is my subjectivity. This is because changes in perspective, especially in temporal perspective, change the relative value of different prospects. For example, as (Ainslie 1992) has pointed out, we seem to discount the future at a hyperbolic rate, so that the closer prospect can surpass the more distant in apparent value, rather as a low building can loom higher than a tall one when one is up close to the former. Where such changes occur, which perspective is the right one, that is, truly mine? Are there as many individual selves as there are perspectives? In a recent article, Galen Strawson answers in the affirmative: each of us is many brief, material, successive selves, he says, strung like pearls on a string (Strawson 1997). Before him, Derek Parfit (1971, 1984), is famous for advocating a similar view.

Suppose I get my friends solemnly to promise to put me gently to death when I become gaga, because I would rather die than be gaga. What if, once I become gaga, my priorities change? Now I don\'t want to die: I would rather live and be gaga. Do my friends still \"owe\" me euthanasia, against my present wishes? Actually, the answer is always No, but for a different reason. If I\'m a different self from what I was when they made their promise, then you can\'t be bound by him (i.e. me-then) to do anything to or for me (i.e. me-now). But if I\'m the same person, then I can now relieve you of your obligation to me if I change my mind. The facts about perspective, then, appear to be neutral in practice between the Parfitean and a traditional concept of the self, but they seem to be significantly different in theory.[6]

Note, however, that in articulating the problem of the asymmetry of time we have to introduce an additional factor: what\'s involved is not just being at a certain place and time, but envisaging what is seen from that point of view as affording possibilities for agency. Make that our second form or aspect of subjectivity.

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