Mediated Consciousness

All consciousness is mediated. Or, more simply, all awareness has an intermediate and a throughline without which it could not be aware at all. Against this, we typically suppose that something may be immediately apparent to us, that some raw “givens” may appear without any tertium quid, or third thing. On this account, roughly equivalent to the bivalent, or two-fold, naive realism of Aristotle, some things outside of our awareness may appear as inert, absolute, undistorted forms which are impressed on the wax of the mind. This idea, which the philosopher Wilfred Sellars has called the “myth of the given,” has few canonical examples. For Sellars, at least, the following have tended to be called inert, raw givens:

1. sense contents
2. material objects
3. universals
4. propositions
5. real connections
6. first principles
7. even givenness itself

Thankfully, Sellars himself has shown that each of these is not given but is, to the contrary, mediated (or carried through) by something other than itself.

Let us begin with sense contents. We would like to think that magnitude and intensity, Locke’s primary qualities, or perhaps “yellow” and “hot” (the secondary qualities) are immediate. Sometimes, with Brian Massumi, we say that affective or Santayana’s tertiary qualities are inert and raw—”pain, fear, joy, malice, feebleness, expectancy.” As Heidegger says, we cannot find ourselves in the world but in a mood (or an affective register) whose structure, before subjectivity or objectivity, is the raw condition of any possible experience. Therefore, it must be inertly given. Indeed, there is a “problem of empathy” in phenomenology—I can never feel what you feel, as you feel it. As Wittgenstein put it, “I cannot see your toothache.”

Against all of this Sellars says that any experience (or what he calls a “cognitive state”) can lead to other experiences if it allows us to infer from that experience. That is to say, the experience of an object as yellow only counts as an experience I can tell you about if I have grounds to call the object yellow, at the least. And, if I have those grounds, I have inferred from the experience itself through those grounds to the naming. This has extraordinary consequences.

Let us take a much harder example before getting to those consequences, though—the “immediate” mystical experience of God, the so-called “saturated phenomenon.” Either two options obtain: first, I can communicate the experience as an encounter with God that felt immediate or, second, I cannot name or communicate it in any way whatsoever. If the latter, this may either be because I cannot find the words or I cannot remember. If I cannot find the words, then I am communicating at least something about it, so for our purposes we can annex it to the case in which we can in fact communicate. If I cannot remember, then it is difficult to say on what grounds I have had the experience at all—I cannot remember it! This latter case may result in one of two options. First, a romantic mystic might say that my memory is flawed; the experience may be inscribed in my body somehow and appear in effluent pangs of familiarity despite our inability to communicate. In this case, as we shall see, memory and consciousness are now mediated by the body. The experience itself was not immediate to consciousness—it may have been immediate to the body, but consciousness is not the body. Second, a skeptical mystic may say that the flash of insight was immediate and that consciousness is forever structured thereafter by it, even if we cannot communicate it. This is tantamount to saying that there is a being no greater than which can be conceived (just as there is an experience no more mediate of which than can be conceived), a formula that may emptily apply to anything whatsoever. Indeed, there may be such immediate-but-incommunicable-yet-forever-indelible experiences just as there may be El Dorado’s and Atlantas’s deep in those caverns of the ocean yet undiscovered. Weigh such castles in the sky pound for pound with the mind, and we may find that it too has such fantastical creatures. If we ever discover them, they will be mediated by our experience of discovery. Eo ipso, this argument is a vain hobby horse—an empty postulate.

Getting back into reality and away from such vanities, experiences must allow inferences. Inferences, of course, always occur between propositions (If A, then B…). Sense data, of course, are not propositions. If we formulated them as such for communication, then the sense data would be mediated by that formulation. And, as just shown, if we cannot communicate them, then they do not count as conscious experiences at all. Any inference from a sense datum or sense contents must either be a vain hobby horse or a formulated proposition—if the former, it is nothing; if the latter, it is mediated. QED.

Material objects cannot be immediate because they must first be sensed. Can we name a material object we have not first sensed? No. Therefore, material objects are a sub-type of sense data which again are either nothing or mediated by propositions.

Universals were thought to be immediate by some Aristotelians, though not to Aristotle himself. Indeed. Universals, of course, are beings of the intellect (“intellectus rei”) and, as the Scholastics formulated, “there is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses.” Ipso facto universals are mediated by sensation, and sensations are mediated by propositions.

So far sensoria, objects, and universals have been found mediated by propositions. Are propositions themselves mediated? Indeed they are, always by other propositions. The best argument for this conclusion follows from the works of CS Peirce:

Imagine an inverted triangle slowly lowered apex-first into water. The apex represents the external object. Each horizontal cross-section made by the water represents a cognition of that object. The width of the cross-section represents the “liveliness” or degree of consciousness of the cognition. As the triangle descends, later cross-sections are wider and hence more vivid; earlier ones become arbitrarily faint as you approach the apex. Now ask: where is the first cross-section? Pick any horizontal cross-section you like. Suppose it is a distance a above the apex. There was already a cross-section at a/2, and before that at a/4, then a/8, and so forth. You can approach the apex indefinitely, but the apex itself is a point, not a line. It has zero width and therefore does not represent a cognition at all. Peirce explicitly says that the point represents the object “quite out of consciousness.”

Astute readers may recognize, with Peirce, the similarity of this Paradox to that of Achilles:

Though Peirce speaks of cognition (which I have equated to experience), our formula that experiences must be mediated by propositions so as to be communicable allows easy translation of the whole into a propositional form. We may say, as crude materialists, that the first point is a “first premise” about the triangle, a first proposition formulable only after which any further proposition can be given. Of course, with Wittgenstein, even this first empirical premise will depend on prior propositions until we reach the basic propositions of grammar—there is no private language capable of articulating these propositions otherwise. Again, I cannot tell you that the flower is yellow without a prior proposition as to what counts as yellow, and so on ad infinitum.

But might there by a primary, basic premise, a transcendental first premise that is the fundamental ground of any possible thought? After all, mustn’t we have learned a “first” truth? Two options, again: ether we did and it is a hobby horse we can never recover, or we didn’t and consciousness hereof is mediated by memory. So, did we? Peirce argues abductively from gut instinct that we don’t—as Kant argued of dogmatic metaphysics, we have no way to settle the matter (yet), and we likely never will. As the triangle shows, we needn’t have any first premises for any cognition or experience. But what about in terms of cognitive development? Surely as children we learned some propositions absolutely first, before any others, and independent of anything else. Nope! According to the latest neuroscience (as well as Jean Piaget) linguistic explicability begins with a series of neural activation pathways across the brain, mediated by a combination of developmental schema, bodily habits, and senses. We learn embodied experience through (mediated!) senseoria well before we learn propositions. There are no first premises learned in the development of childhood cognition. So, again, so-called “first premises” are mediated.

Fine, but what about transcendental premises like Kant’s stipulation of the pure forms of sensibility? The latest neuroscience confirms Kant was largely right. So, are these not real connections in human cognition before which no experience or cognition is possible? Surely, but we must distinguish between consciousness or awareness of those connections and those connections themselves. As experienced, these connections, like Heidegger’s moods, are reducible to sensoria explicable through propositions, which are necessarily mediated. Likewise, the fact of these connections as realities does not itself license experience or consciousness. Though I may be stabbed, the feeling of the pain is mediated by sensoria in contact with the knife. Though I may before this experience the stabbing in time, my consciousness of time will still be in time and yet again thereby be mediated by it. Though we may ascribe some kind of identity here, this is not yet identity in consciousness, since consciousness again is mediated in, of, and by the very structures through which that identity is postulated.

All such mediations have, in some way, not yet dealt with a final mediator—the body, especially as a site of givenness itself. We may divide this question with Arthur Schopenhauer, who considers body and will (which we may, for the purposes of this argument, equate to consciousness, cognition, and experience) to be (comparable to, albeit much different from, Spinoza) inflections of each other. Will is the body represented to itself, and body is the will objectified. Therefore, the body may yet be a transcendental premise—consciousness may be immediate to and by it, as Massumi shows by way of the Libet experiments.

Here we must tread into Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology. Let us distinguish between the body for-itself, hypothetically speaking, and the body for-us, attempting to describe it. For itself, the body experiences a quasi-immediate relation to its environment. As a system, the body must distinguish between inner and outer and must, therefore, suppose some contact with the outer as outer that is mediated by nothing other than its being outer. Even this, though, has been disproven through the biological systems theory of Maturana and Varela. Indeed, “the nervous system does not ‘pick up information’ from the environment”—it is already mediated by that environment, the one in which it has evolved. As N. Kathryn Hayles arguing from maturana and Varela’s forebearer Jakob von Uexküll argues, the result is an adaptive mediation of every organism to its niche. The result, per Uexükull, is a unique umwelt mediated by evolutionary history. Like developmental cognition, the body does not “have” a general, unmediated inner/outer experience or consciousness for-itself. This experience remains quasi-immediate since, for us, it is mediated by its evolutionary history and, for itself, it maintains a variety of body schemata, or orientation systems, that organize its perceptions and sensoria as to what counts as outer and inner in different circumstances. As Gilles Deleuze similarly writes, the “inside is an operation of the outside.”

Givenness in the body is thus also doubly mediated: for-us, by evolutionary history and, for-itself, according to the circumstantial schemata shaped by that history. These latter aver from a general, quasi-Aristotelian inner/outer immediacy; the inner, even of itself, does not experience except by and through an infolding of the outer.

But what of the will or, as David Chalmers would rather say, consciousness? If we say that will’s explication of the outer as self-identical suggests our own immediate self-identity, will roughly recapitulate Fichte’s insistence that “A=A” (objects’ own outer self-identity) depends on “I=I” (my own inner self-identity). Of course, as Hegel has shown, even this I=I is mediated by the whole of human life (especially, as Wittgenstein later shows, by language—there is no private language and, therefore, is no private “Cartesian theater” with which we may represent ourselves to ourselves without the public, outer world’s mediation). Yet, this is precisely what Chalmers wants, and we can reconstruct this as follows:

1. I am currently having an experience with phenomenal quality, or quale, Q.
2. In a direct phenomenal belief, my concept of Q is partly constituted by that very quality Q.
3. I apply that phenomenal concept to the very experience that supplies Q.
4. So there is no independent identification step that could mismatch concept and object: the same experience anchors both sides.
5. Hence such a direct phenomenal belief has a special epistemic security. Chalmers at one point calls these beliefs incorrigible: because the relevant quality constitutes both the concept and the experience to which it is applied, the belief cannot misclassify the experience in the ordinary way.

But if Q=Q and I=I constitutes it, then Q is mediated through me and I through it. There is no immediacy anywhere. Even consciousness itself as a transcendental quality or premise cannot yet be immediate to itself since, like the body’s evolutionary history and being-for-itself, it is structured by a series of modules—there is no “pure consciousness” that is not always-already structured, at least, by time-consciousness’s own memories, attentiveness, and expectancy, no “pure consciousness” that is not weighted by the history of the human species whether abstractly in the form of language use, concretely in cultural habitudes, etc. Even after granting causal mediation, the supposed epistemic immediacy fails because epistemic ‘access’ requires a structure of discrimination and reidentification which the bare quale cannot itself supply. Consciousness cannot be immediate to itself:

• If “direct access to Q” means merely Q occurs in me, then it is not yet epistemic access at all.
• If it means I can attend to Q, discriminate it, recognize it, apply a phenomenal concept to it, or return to it, then it already involves mediation through capacities that transcend the bare occurrence of Q.

So: can anyone still call something “immediate”? Absolutely. But after these arguments, they cannot responsibly let the word do any work whatsoever merely by appealing to its felt directness. They have to choose between mere occurrence, in which case “immediate” tells us virtually nothing about knowledge or awareness, and access/awareness, in which case they owe an explanation of how access can possess no discriminatory, temporal, bodily, conceptual, inferential, or relational structure whatsoever. Both of these are impossible.

Again I say: all consciousness is mediated, and there is nothing any of us can do about it. “But no one can tell me what my experience is!” Sure we can, and we’ve been doing it to you since the day you were born. The human race wouldn’t exist otherwise—you are not a beetle in a box. You are a man among men forever mediated by them. Act like it.