Wittgenstein and Freud

Philosophers, scientists and psychologists have puzzled over the mind for centuries. This is surprising. How can what defines us be such a mystery to us? How is it that we have a better picture of what goes on inside an atom than what goes on inside our heads? We have made progress in relation to the brain, but much less in relation to the mind. According to Descartes, the mind is an immaterial entity annexed to the body. This sounds plausible, but the reference to immateriality (and the claim that it persists after death) jars with our materialist sensitivities, so most people are likely to prefer Locke’s position, which sees the mind as a collection of perceptions and ideas unified by consciousness. This leaves the problem of the link between consciousness and the body. Neuroscientists claim that this is one of the greatest mysteries science has yet to solve. Presumably, once that has been done, it will be game over. But will it?

The philosophy-led emphasis on consciousness suggests that our lives consist entirely of events within our inner worlds, which already sounds a bit less like common sense. In fact, once we see ourselves as essentially minds that have conscious experiences, we end up imprisoned in the world of consciousness. We experience impressions of objects, but we can never get beyond these impressions and engage with objects directly. Strictly speaking, we know nothing about what they are like in themselves. In fact, we cannot even be sure that the external world exists. By the same logic, we can never know that there are other conscious beings – all we ever encounter are our own impressions or mental representations, and we cannot really infer that there are conscious beings behind them, since this is a hypothesis we will never have any means of testing. In fact, what do I know of ourselves – what are we? What is the entity or being that has these conscious experiences? The self that has these experiences must be outside the world of consciousness, so, like everything else, there is no way of knowing anything about it.

These may seem like abstruse philosophical quibbles. Perhaps we can simply brush them aside, secure in the knowledge that we inhabit a world of physical objects, interact with other people and are human beings living in the twenty-first century. But these strange doubts should act as a warning sign – perhaps the stream of consciousness approach is not as obviously correct as it seems. In fact, this picture does not really work. If you try to think it through, you run into all sorts of difficulties. What seems like common sense generates more and more problems.

The contents of consciousness are defined by the fact that we are aware of them. Ok. Please write down a full description of the current contents of your consciousness. This ought to be really easy and yet is impossible. It is as if we can only capture fragments of our consciousness, never the whole thing and never exactly. Stream of consciousness writers have tried to capture the apparently mysterious fluidity of our inner experience, but this is a literary style rather than an exact representation of what goes on in our minds. So, why is this all so hard?

When you start to explore the stream of consciousness picture, one of the first things that becomes clear is that the mind cannot just consist of things that we are actively aware of. This is not because we immediately encounter the Freudian Unconscious (that’s a separate issue). Rather it is because there are lots of things “available to consciousness” that we are not continuously aware of. We have memories, plans, and intentions, for example, and these don’t disappear from our minds the moment we stop thinking about them. So, even if consciousness is important, the mind must consist of a “live” part and a more passive part. But how do the passive contents become active? And what does this involve? Sometimes it seems to happen spontaneously, at other times we seem to search for and call up mental representations. What entity does this? It cannot be the mind that searches the mind. So, now we have: representations we are aware of; innumerable mental representations available to us but not the focus of our attention; and a mysterious something that sometimes has mental representations thrust upon it and sometimes calls them up and does things with them. Curious and curiouser.

Let’s dive into a specific type of mental representation – perceptions – and let’s make things easy by starting with visual perception, since seeing something is the model for having a conscious experience and the prototype for all mental representation is a visual image or picture. Look at something that is squarely in your field of vision. Is your visual mental representation well-defined? Without moving, focus on a detailed aspect of what you are seeing. Now you will be able to give a more detailed description of one aspect of what you can see than the one you would have originally been able to give. So has your mental representation changed? Suppose you saw a tree and, when looking more carefully, noticed that it had a broken branch on the right-hand side, was that detail captured in the original mental representation? If it was, you must have been aware of it, for mental representations are by definition what you are aware of, but you weren’t aware until you looked more carefully. But the original mental representation cannot have been blurry or somehow genericised, since you did not have the experience of seeing something blurry or genericised! You just looked at something and then looked more closely.

What about when we see something, don’t recognise it and then do? The only way to capture this in mental-representation speak would be to say that the initial mental representation was blurred and the subsequent mental representation well-defined. But this doesn’t work here either. No one picture corresponds to what we experienced. We may be able to say something about our initial impression, but we are likely to accept lots of different pictures as representing it. We wouldn’t say: “this picture is exactly the mental representation I was aware of, and it definitely wasn’t any of the very similar ones”. So, we had a visual mental representation but not a specific one! In desperation, we may be inclined to revert to the idea that conscious experiences are incredibly fleeting. But all this does is throw a large, convenient dust sheet  over a model that pretty clearly does not work.

Let’s look at another of our mental capabilities, the ability to remember past events. Again, we may think that this is straightforward and simply involves having a mental image or a succession of mental images. But this is not actually true. If I remember that we had a row the last time we met, I may have no visual image whatsoever of our meeting – all I remember is that we argued. So, what mental representation is in my head? A generic image of two people arguing or an image of the word “argument”?

Maybe things start coming back to me, bit by bit. I remember the angry look you gave me and your painful words. Eventually, I may be able to give an account of the flow of our conversation and to provide lots of other details about our meeting. Does this prove that my mind contains a mass of mental representations that capture the exact words each of us said, the details of the clothes we were wearing and the exact state of cleanliness of the table we were sitting at? Why would anyone say that? Well, because we never know what new details someone may remember. True. But the fact that no possibility is excluded does not prove that in my mind (or indeed in my brain) there is an infinitely detailed recording that provides a basis for every possible statement I might make about our meeting. We think of the mind as an entity with impossible powers but only because we think about it in terms of an incoherent picture. 

As a final example, let’s look at intentions – the human ability to make and express plans. Suppose I tell you that I intend to go to the bank tomorrow. What is it in my consciousness that constitutes my intention? At this point, the tendency to say that it consists in a mental image is probably wearing a bit thin – one doesn’t really want to have to deal with questions like: what is the weather like in the mental image of my intention to go to the bank and is the name of the bank visible? Maybe we can fall back on the idea of my being in a mental state of intending to go to the bank. But what exactly does that mental state contain?

You express surprise that I am planning to go on a picnic, and I smile and point out that I am intending to go to a financial institution, not a river bank. Was this disambiguation built into my mental state? Well, there is no doubt that intending to deposit a cheque in a bank is very different from intending to go for a walk in the country! But what about all the other questions you might ask me, some of which I may give definite answers to (no, I am certainly not intending to travel to London to go to the bank), some I may give broad answers to (a local bank but I am not sure which one) or complex answers (maybe one of banks in the high street, but not X because the service there is terrible). How can all this be built into a mental state or, indeed, into the state of anything with fixed properties? And yet we certainly wouldn’t want to say that my intention changed every time I answered a question about it – unless of course the questions did make me change my mind (I wasn’t intending to go to our old bank, but now you mention it, a nostalgic visit could be quite fun). The mental states model of the mind is just as incoherent as the mental representations model.

So, what is the mind? Well, it is not something and it is not nothing either. It is a way of talking about a distinctive set of capabilities that human beings have – the ability to think, the ability to form opinions, the ability to make plans, the ability to reflect on one’s experience etc., etc. As the Wittgensteinian expert Professor Peter Hacker has noted, the helpful question is not: “What is the mind?”, but “What has to be true of a creature for us to say that it has a mind? This makes clear that we are looking for an entity (immaterial or material), but talking about what certain types of creature can do. It is people who see objects, remember things and have intentions. These are not things that happen in their minds nor, indeed, are they things that their minds (or, for that matter, their brains) do. 

Once we recognise that the mind is a way of talking about some of our capabilities, we no longer need to worry about how the mind can influence material things or how the mind relates to the body. We talk of human beings possessing bodies as well as minds, but again this is just a way of talking about capabilities we have, viz. the ability to see, hear, smell, etc, to move about, to experience bodily pain etc. Just as it is not our minds that have great thoughts, believe in progress and intend to do things, it is not our bodies that see the sun in the sky, smell the freshly-turned earth and feel our chests swelling. It is people who do all these things, manifesting the capabilities that make us the kind of animal we are.

So, what about consciousness? Strangely, for something that is supposed to constitute our essence, the concept of consciousness (in its distinctive philosophical sense) did not exist before Descartes. Even today, although it may seem common sense once you embrace it, it is not easy to get into. If you ask someone who has not yet been tainted by philosophy whether they possess consciousness, they are likely to be puzzled. To help them, you might suggest that they must surely be conscious of the fact that they are talking to you. They will of course agree, since it is impossible to take part in a conversation without being aware that you are doing so. If you then ask them whether they can see and hear etc, whether they are aware of their body and whether they have memories and feelings etc, they will, of course, say yes, you can proudly inform them that they do indeed have lots of conscious experiences and that that is what their life consists of.

So what have you achieved? You have taught them a new way of talking, based on the grammatical point that if you can see, you must be aware of what you are seeing, that if you think, you must be aware of what you think, that if you have a pain in the neck, you must be aware of having a pain in the neck. They can now play the stream-of-consciousness game and can think of their life as taking place in an inner world that no one else can enter or know anything about. Hopefully, however, when their partner tells them that they are being selfish, they will realise that other people can know what they are thinking, and they will rejoin the normal world where people do things, make mistakes and love each other. They can go back to using the word “consciousness” in cases of medical emergency, where it matters whether someone has lost consciousness and where the question “are you conscious?” may actually be of some use. 

Footnote: 

If you want to explore these and related issues in more detail, Peter Hacker’s book Solving, Resolving and Dissolving Philosophical Problems is well worth a read. The fact that so many confusions highlighted by Ludwig Wittgenstein more than seventy years ago persist today is staggering, particularly since their impact is not confined to philosophy but extends to psychology, neuroscience and more widely into what is taken to be the common sense way of understanding the mind.