Challenge Accepted

Not that long ago I was reading Sir Arthur Eddington's 'The Nature of the Physical World' (which I can heartily recommend) and came across the following claim :

'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 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.