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William James and the “Theatre” of Consciousness

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Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 6))

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Abstract

This essay examines the relationship of philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) to the history of the hard problem of consciousness and to contemporary neuroscience. From the outset, James’s psychological writings fused Darwinian evolutionary theory, physics, and phenomenology in order to address the relation of our felt sense of possessing an autonomous, conscious “self” to a broader environment and social community. For James, the “hard problem” of how the physiological brain gives rise to will, habit, and attention – the essential components of volition – also involved a social component. This essay first traces how James’s earliest writings describe consciousness as a selective agency that works in consort with natural selection to contribute to human evolutionary advancement. Second, it demonstrates how James grafted Darwinian evolutionary thought onto the new physics in ways that anticipate contemporary neuroscientific attempts to resolve the hard problem by identifying the structures in the brain responsible for our phenomenological experience. Finally, it addresses the broader sociological aspects of the hard problem in James’s later writings. Through the lens of James’s writings on the transmission theory and compounding of consciousness we can understand the hard problem as encompassing the biosocial: the experience of individual and collective minds in the process of shaping complex networks of social interaction.

To clear up the immediate relation of minds and brains is the big problem.

–William James

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Notebook 19.” bMSAm1092.9 (4513). William James Papers (MSAm1092.9–1092.12). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  2. 2.

    Skrupskelis 1995, p. 75.

  3. 3.

    Hawkins 2011.

  4. 4.

    James 1922, p. 34.

  5. 5.

    Chalmers 2010. Throughout this essay I will use the term, the “mind sciences” to refer collectively to philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and psychologists and physicists invested in exploring the relationship of consciousness to that of brain physiology.

  6. 6.

    Thompson 2007; Revonsuo 2009; Fingelkurts et al. 2010.

  7. 7.

    Cotkin 1990; Bordogna 2008.

  8. 8.

    Feinstein 1999; Leary 2002.

  9. 9.

    Taylor 1996, p. 73.

  10. 10.

    Crippen 2010.

  11. 11.

    James 1879/1983, pp. 51–52.

  12. 12.

    James 1981, p. 51.

  13. 13.

    James, of course, anticipates Gerald Edelman’s theory of “neural Darwinism.” However, Edelman parts ways with James by insisting that consciousness itself has no impact on neuronal firing. See Edelman 2004, p. 84. See also, Schwartz and Begley The Mind and the Brain (2003), which cites James on the adaptive “plasticity” of the brain in his chapter on “Habit” in Principles.

  14. 14.

    See Revonsuo 2009, Fingelkurts et al. 2010, and Barnard 1997.

  15. 15.

    James 1879/1983, pp. 229–230.

  16. 16.

    These ideas are expanded in his chapter on “Habit” in The Principles of Psychology. In 1887, the chapter appeared as an essay in Popular Science Monthly.

  17. 17.

    Bjork 1983, pp. 81–83.

  18. 18.

    Marshall 1982, p. 80. See also, Marshall 1974.

  19. 19.

    qtd. in Marshall 1982.

  20. 20.

    James 1990, p. 21.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 21.

  22. 22.

    James 1981, p. 379.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 379.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p. 379.

  25. 25.

    McGinn’s 2011 book on the philosophy of physics makes a similar argument about consciousness as a form of matter. As the new physics probed ever deeper into the hidden structures of material reality, “More and more types of physical reality had to be recognized, such as radio waves and X-rays, and the sheer versatility of matter became increasingly evident.” Such discoveries gave rise to new “species of energy,” such as “kinetic energy, chemical energy, gravitational energy, electro-magnetic energy, nuclear energy” p. 176

  26. 26.

    James 1986, p. 369.

  27. 27.

    Hawkins 2005, 2011.

  28. 28.

    Coon 2002, p. 129.

  29. 29.

    Fuchs 2002, pp. 79–84; Taylor 1992, 1996, p. 182, 2002, 2003.

  30. 30.

    Albanese 2007.

  31. 31.

    Marshall 1982; Heidelberger 2004.

  32. 32.

    Marshall 1982; Heidelberger 2004.

  33. 33.

    Heidelberger 2004, pp. 103–104.

  34. 34.

    James 1992, p. 1104.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., pp. 1109–1110; Kelly et al. 2007, p. 29.

  36. 36.

    James 1992, p. 1111.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    As James himself acknowledged, philosophers Immanuel Kant and F.C.S. Schiller made similar arguments. Kant, for example, maintained that the body restricts the intellectual function of the brain, which only comes into full flower after death. Schiller similarly argued that matter restricts “the consciousness which it encases.” Ibid., p. 1119, n9.

  39. 39.

    Kelly et al. 2007, p. 606.

  40. 40.

    James 1986, p. 357; for accounts of the experiences leading up to James’s report, see Richardson 2007, pp. 478–479; for Hodgson’s reputed vow, see Simon 1998, pp. 319–320.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., p. 358, emphasis in original.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., p. 359.

  43. 43.

    Nuñez 2010, p. 11.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., p. 274.

  45. 45.

    Filk and Müller 2008, p. 63; See Stapp 1995/1997, 2007.

  46. 46.

    Filk and Müller 2008, p. 63.

  47. 47.

    Kern 1983, p. 41.

  48. 48.

    Edelman 2004, p. 133.

  49. 49.

    Trehub 2007, p. 310.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 329.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    James 1977, p. 130.

  53. 53.

    James 1904, p. xv.

  54. 54.

    Thompson 2007, p. 39.

  55. 55.

    James 1977, pp. 115–116.

  56. 56.

    James 1977, p. 73, 1909, 1910.

  57. 57.

    Thompson 2007, p. 67.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 82.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., p. 87.

  60. 60.

    Chalmers 2010, p. 5.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., p. 6.

  63. 63.

    Revonsuo 2009, p. 3; Fingelkurts et al. 2010; Kelly et al. 2007.

  64. 64.

    Pauli 1994, p. 260; Fingelkurts et al. 2010.

  65. 65.

    See McGinn on consciousness as a form of matter: He writes, “An electromagnetic field is a type of material reality, and so is consciousness. Alternatively, consciousness is one form of energy, along with kinetic energy or electrical energy. If this hypothesis is true, then consciousness is material after all – though not in the Cartesian sense. The general conception I am working with is that matter/energy is the underlying substance of the universe, and it may ultimately be unitary, but it can take widely different forms – with consciousness as just one of them” 2011, p.178

  66. 66.

    Taylor 2010, p. 411; Wallace 2007, p. 105.

  67. 67.

    Varela 1997; Taylor 2010, pp. 421–422.

  68. 68.

    Edelman 2004, p. 76; Trehub 2007; Fingelkurts et al. 2010, 2011, 2012.

  69. 69.

    Freeman 2007, p. 1022.

  70. 70.

    Ibid.

  71. 71.

    Shear 1997.

  72. 72.

    Between 1899 and 1904 James published anti-imperialist essays against U.S. occupation of the Philippines. His anti-lynching essays appear in 1903, on the heels of James’s many reviews of books dealing with crowd psychology and mental hygiene. James 1987.

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Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Andrew and Alexander Fingelkurts for commenting on an earlier draft of this essay.

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  1. Department of English, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Stephanie L. Hawkins

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Correspondence to Stephanie L. Hawkins .

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  1. Department of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    C.U.M. Smith

  2. Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan, USA

    Harry Whitaker

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Hawkins, S.L. (2014). William James and the “Theatre” of Consciousness. In: Smith, C., Whitaker, H. (eds) Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_11

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