In sum, the PCE [pure consciousness event] may be defined as a wakeful but contentless (non-intentional) experience. Though one remains awake and alert, emerging with the clear sense of having had ‘an unbroken continuity of experience’, one neither thinks, nor perceives nor acts. W.T. Stace (1960):
Suppose then that we obliterate from consciousness all objects physical or mental. When the self is not engaged in apprehending objects it becomes aware of itself. The self itself emerges. The self, however, when stripped of all psychological contents or objects, is not another thing, or substance, distinct from its contents. It is the bare unity of the manifold of consciousness from which the manifold itself has been obliterated (p. 86).
Now what implications can we draw from the pure consciousness event about the nature of human consciousness?
1. We have a pattern here that is seen across cultures and eras. This, in combination with the reports offered in
The Problem of Pure Consciousness, suggests that the phenomenon is not an artifact of any one culture but is something closer to an experience that is reasonably common and available in a variety of cultural contexts.
16
2. Thomas Clark and other defenders of functionalism have suggested that consciousness is
identical to certain of our information-bearing and behaviour- controlling functions, even going so far as to define it thus (Clark, 1995, p. 241). Others have suggested that consciousness is an artifact or an epiphenomenon of perception, action and thought, and that it arises
only as a concomitant of these phenomena. Our accounts tend to
disconfirm this view, which is generally argued on
a priori grounds. Rather they suggest that consciousness
does persist even when one has
no perception, thought or evaluation. This suggests that consciousness should not be defined as merely an epiphenomenon of perception, an evaluative mechanism, or an arbiter of perceptual functions, but rather as something that exists
independently of them.
3. Some have suggested that if we can understand how we can tie together perceptions and thoughts — the so called binding problem — we will
ipso facto understand consciousness.
17 Now, how we bind together perceptions
is a very interesting question for cognitive psychology, neurobiology and philosophy of mind. But even if we understand how we do tie together perceptions, we will not
necessarily understand the phenomenon of consciousness
per se thereby, for according to these mystical accounts, it is more fundamental than a mere binding function.
18 These reports suggest that binding is something done
by or
for consciousness, not something that creates consciousness.
19
4. Our evidence suggests that we should conceptually and linguistically differentiate
merely being aware or awake from its functional activities. Accordingly, I propose to use the terms as follows: (i) ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ for that facet of consciousness which is aware within itself and which may persist even without intentional content; (ii) ‘awareness of’ and 1consciousness of’ to refer to that feature of experience which is cognizant when we are
intentionally aware of something; and (iii) ‘pure awareness’ and ‘pure consciousness’ to refer to awareness without intentional content.
20
5. Reports of pure consciousness suggest that, despite the absence of mental content, the subjects were somehow aware
that they remained aware throughout the period of the PCE . Apparently they sensed a continuity of awareness through past and present. If they did, even though there was no content, then they must have somehow
directly recalled that they had been aware despite the absence of remembered content.
21 This implies human awareness
has the ability to tie itself together and to know intuitively that it has persisted.
22
We may want to say that being conscious seems to entail this sort of direct self-recollection, a presence to oneself that is distinct from the kind of presence we have to perceptions and other intentional content. In this sense, the pure consciousness event tends to affirm Bernard Lonergan’s distinction between our conscious presence to intentional objects and our consciousness of consciousness itself:
There is the presence of the object to the subject, of the spectacle to the spectator; there is also the presence of the subject to himself, and this is not the presence of another object dividing his attention, of another spectacle distracting the spectator; it is presence in, as it were, another dimension, presence concomitant and correlative and opposite to the presence of the object. Objects are present by being attended to but subjects are present as subjects, not by being attended to, but by attending. As the parade of objects marches by, spectators do not have to slip into the parade to be present to themselves; they have to be present to themselves for anything to be present to them (Lonergan, 1967, p. 226, quoted in McCarthy, 1990, p. 234).
In sum, the PCE militates towards a distinction between consciousness or awareness
per se and its usual binding, relational and culturally-trained processes. It suggests that consciousness is more than its embodied activities.
See?
