The Mind-Consciousness Conflation

When the Mind enthrones itself.

”Cogito ergo sum”–that is, "I think, therefore I am"– is the famous sentence that French philosopher René Descartes coined in his work "Meditations.” In essence, it states that thinking is proof of our existence. Even though we might behold false beliefs and deceiving thoughts, the simple fact that we think is evidence for the existence of the thinking subject.

As appealing as this might have sounded to Descartes, this also led to so much confusion, especially in Western philosophy. Because it led to the, more or less unaware, semantic conflation of words indicating very different qualitative experiential phenomena. Phenomena that we perceive in us, instead of out of us.

Words like ‘mind’, ‘consciousness,’ ’feelings,’ or ’emotions’ are much too often thrown into the same pot and are taken almost synonymously. They are often referred to as being the same thing. Suddenly a feeling becomes a thought, consciousness is labeled as a ‘feeling,’ or a thought is assumed to be the cause of a conscious experience. Especially, the conflation between the words ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ have become so ubiquitous that we tend to equate them to the very same thing.

But are mind and consciousness only two words indicating the same phenomenal experience? Is consciousness a ‘mental phenomenon’? Do feelings and emotions create conscious experiences, or comes the conscious subject first?

If we try to detach for a moment from our exteriorizing rational mind (preferably, without losing it!) and learn also to look inward, by a first-person approach with an introspective movement, an obvious fact comes to our attention: thoughts come and go, but the subject witnessing those thoughts is always the same. The mind, in all its restlessness, produces continually a myriad of thoughts, a succession of mental images, or, to put it in Cartesian terms, an endless series of cogitations, that may distract us or lead us to focus our attention on something but are always changing. On the other hand, there is something underlying and immutable in us, and that never changes (or at least, doesn’t seem to do so during the waking state.) There is a never-changing consciousness in the subject that perceives and becomes aware of the ever-changing mind and, thereby, can’t be the mind. You don’t need any scientific research to ‘know’ that. It is a self-evident experiential fact. One thing are the different fleeting thoughts of the mind, another thing is the unchanging witness that apprehends those thoughts.

Unfortunately, much too often, also well-trained intellectuals such as neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists speak of mind and consciousness as interchangeable concepts. It is the assumption that conflates all experiences and labels them as ‘mental events’. This has led to the construction of theoretical castles which, with time passing by, encountered paradoxes, internal inconsistencies, or, worse, did not fit with the empiric assessments of modern neuroscience, leaving scientists wondering what went wrong.

This led neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio to propose a new theory of ‘embodied consciousness,’ that, not thoughts, but feelings are the source of consciousness. They claim that feelings are produced by ‘interoception’–that is, the sensation that allows us to infer from bodily feelings our interior state. In other words, the theory conjectures that consciousness begins with feelings, not thinking, because of this interoceptive mechanism that has its basis in the neural activity of the brain and extends to all bodily sensations.

Again, go beyond interoception, and take the first-person introspective approach. It is easy to see how this ‘feeling first’ idea doesn’t hold for the same reason that the ‘mind first’ idea couldn’t hold. Feelings can’t be the source of consciousness because they require consciousness to be felt in the first place. It doesn’t make sense to speak of feelings without a conscious subject. And if we mean Damasio’s neural interospective mechanism to be responsible for the emergence of a sentient subject, this automatically takes us back to the starting point of the hard problem of consciousness: Why should whatever neural mechanism produce sentience?

If, instead, we accept the first-person approach applying it to the modern speculations of the ‘philosophy of mind’ (notice how the melting pot is already evident in the word choice: it is synonymous with ‘philosophy of consciousness’), we can readily see how most of the contemporary theories about the origin of consciousness are based on a misleading third-person-only approach that refuses (again, more or less unconsciously) the introspective insight. This will never work, not even in principle.

At any rate, the point I’m trying to make here isn’t so much about the nomenclature we have to adopt or about the unaware but decisive philosophical subtleties we assume to be true without further thought, applying and extending it to all existence. It is, first and foremost, about knowing ourselves. Science is a third-person approach to reality. However, there are aspects of reality we can only investigate through a first-person approach. It is not enough, and even not recommendable, to apply one day the former type of knowledge and the other day the latter one. We must learn to use them both at the same time. Summing the parts isn’t enough. Synthesizing them as complements into a unified view towards a new post-material science that transcends them both is the way to go.