CONSCIOUSNESS

40 1. Philosophy
1. Philosophy
1.1 The concept of consciousness
1 How William James Accidentally Created Behaviorism Bernard J. Baars
(The Neurosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA)
William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890) is regarded as the greatest summary of
empirical knowledge about consciousness of the 19th century. James covered perception and
cognition, language and the fringe, and much more. He defined psychology as ‘the science
of mental life,’ meaning ‘conscious mental life.’ The 19th century was a Golden Age of Consciousness
Science, with discoveries about hypnosis and conversion disorders, the brain and
emotions, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, imagery, feelings, multiple personality disorder, the
limits of consciousness and immediate memory, and more. James’s book was greeted almost
immediately as a masterpiece, and three years later, he produced his Briefer Version (1893),
which became the most widely used introduction to psychology in American colleges until
about 1920. It established James as a founder of empirical psychology. James placed consciousness
at the center of psychological science. And yet, paradoxically, he triggered seven
decades of scientific rejection of human consciousness. His paper of 1904 called ‘Does consciousness
exist’? was published in Psychological Review, under the editorship of John B.
Watson. James’ 1904 paper reflected his ambivalence about a science of mind and free will.
James suffered from repeated near-suicidal depression, which often focused on free will. By
1904 James was looking to psychic phenomena and the soul as a solution to his crisis of
meaning and spiritual comfort. The 1904 paper sought to eliminate mind-body paradoxes by
decomposing ‘consciousness as an entity’ into a series of conscious moments; but James never
denied that mental life consisted of such subjective moments. It was John B. Watson who
decided to cut the mind-body knot, proclaiming his radical behavioristic manifesto two years
after James died in 1910. To make psychology into a ‘respectable’ science Watson argued for
a complete purge of consciousness, volition and self. Watson’s radical behaviorism erased
almost the entire psychological vocabulary. He was strongly encouraged by Bertrand Russell
in England, and by a parallel purge in Russian physiology, beginning with Sechenov and I.P.
Pavlov, in Germany by Helmholtz and positivism, and by a radical reductionistic movement
in biology. In a political context Watson, Pavlov (and later Skinner) promised utopian manipulations
of the human condition, simply by analyzing and controlling human beings by reflexes
and operant training. Reflex-reductionism became the orthodox wisdom in the newly made
academic sciences of psychology and physiology, in spite of a total absence of proof. Even
today ‘reflexes’ and ‘conditioning’ are still viewed as ‘atoms’ of behavior. But behaviorism
gave a consistent physicalistic basis to the new and insecure academic fields of psychology,
sociology, political science, and analytic philosophy. The behavioristic purge was pursued for
almost a century. The result was a kind of psychic wound in the Western intellectual tradition,
a Dark Age comparable to the purge of classical learning by the medieval Church. While
literature and Continental philosophy built upon James’ work, the new academic sciences
rejected some 25 centuries of humanistic scholarship, going back to ancient Greece, and in
Asia, to Vedanta, Buddhism and Taoism. PL1
2 Zen’s Civil War over the Definability of Consciousness: Medieval Asian Roots of
Contemporary Conceptions of Consciousness Cody Bahir
(Asian and Comparative Studies, California Institute of Integral Studies, Burlingame, CA)
Is the notion of consciousness a quantifiable entity or is it merely an arbitrary construct we
as humans have formulated in an attempt to grapple with the experience of self awareness?
This question lies at the heart of many philosophical discussions concerning the nature of
what we call “consciousness”. Though the debate between these two positions has reemerged
into the limelight of a number of intellectual and scientific disciplines, the friction generated
from this conflict was the main source of the great schism that occurred between the two
competing schools of Zen in the 8th Century C.E. According to traditional Zen history, the