'But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.’
There
is nothing more galling than a statement like 'no one can deny X' to
someone who is a vehement denialist of X. I will now demonstrate the
falsity of Eddington's assertion that no one can deny the mind is the
first and most direct thing in our experience:
I deny that mind is the first and most
direct thing in our experience.
I should probably expand on that.
I should probably expand on that.
I assert, contrary to Eddington, that sense impressions are the first
and most direct things in our experience. From these sense impressions, we
deduce by a process of non-verbal inference both an external world that
generates these sense impressions and an ‘I’ that receives them. These two
things are cogenerated simultaneously as the world and ‘I’ are disentangled and
cannot be separated from one another as things in our experience. Mind and the
external world are equal in primacy and directness in our experience.
I will now go beyond the mere fact of denial to rationalise
my denial.
I find that very often the ‘I’ that is
thinking is a mere passenger on a more fundamental ‘I’ that is acting on the
basis of sense impressions without the intervention of mind. I ride a bicycle,
for instance, without thinking about what I am doing; I can catch a ball – so
long as I do not think about it. As I sit here typing, I do not think about
where my fingers are going; if I do, they stutter and fail to go in the right
places. I have driven a manual car at some speed on a very complicated path,
slowing at certain pre-determined places to throw newspapers in pre-determined
directions, without the slightest conscious thought: my mind was entirely
consumed in discussing the nature of consciousness with a passenger, and it was
another more fundamental ‘I’, the ‘I’ of being and doing, that carried out
those complicated actions.
I feel that practice and experience go into
improving this more fundamental ‘I’ on which the conscious ‘I’ is but a passenger.
My thoughts before I get up to talk seem the same halting, bumbling things they
were when I was a dreadful public speaker; but the ‘I’ that does, rather than
thinks, now does a much better job of carrying out the task.
I find that
‘mind’ is not associated with being or doing, but with change: with the
necessity of doing something different. My sense of consciousness does not flow
smoothly; it is strong when I am receiving new sense impressions and need to do
something different about them; when I am receiving familiar sense impressions
and need only do things I have done before with them, it is much weaker.
When I was young, and much more in my life
was novel, I was uncommonly bad at reacting on sense impressions. I could not
ride a bicycle; I could not catch a ball. At the same time, my sense of
consciousness was considerably stronger than it is now – both mind and the
external world were more direct and vivid to me. I was less being, and more
becoming. My consciousness did not fade all at once, but neither was it a
simple linear process of dulling: it happened in many discrete steps, the first
few of which were terrifying, before I became inured to the increasing sense of
unreality of myself and the world. The majority of this happened in the few
years just before puberty, with additional steps at longer and longer intervals
ever since.
When I observe the world around me, I see
that I am not the only thing in it that behaves like I do: I am surrounded by
animals that react on sense impressions and that are certainly not conscious,
that certainly have no mind; by other, ‘higher’ animals that react on sense
impressions and may or may not have ‘mind’. I am surrounded by other people who are
generally better at reacting to sense impressions than I am; and who,
statistically, are rather worse at conscious reasoning than I am. So when I
have to chose between the relative importance and primacy of my inferred mind
and the inferred external world, it is obvious to me that the inferred external
world is the logical starting point for all my more remote inferences.
