Choice and Consciousness : Part 3

The Foundations of Personality
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 7 of 21)

The organizing energy of some is low; they never seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living; they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the metaphor) they weld life's happenings, their memories, their emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I, harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end and striving bravely towards it. Or there is over-unification and fanaticism, with narrow aim and little sympathy for other aims. Sketched in this very broad way we see masses of people, rather than individuals, and we are not finely adjusted to our subject.

Psychologists rarely concern themselves to any extent with these matters; they deal mainly with their outgrowths, - emotions, instinct, intelligence and will. We are at once beset with difficulties which are resolved mainly by ignoring them. In such a book as this we are not concerned with the fundamental nature of these divisions of the mental life, we must omit such questions as the relation of instinct to racial habit, or the evolution of instinct from habit, if that is really its origin. Again I must repeat that we shall deal with these as organic, as arising in the sensitized individual as a result of environmental forces, as manifestations of a life which is as yet - and perhaps always will be - mysterious to us. We shall best consider these manifestations of mental activity as an interplay of the reactions of stimulation, inhibition, choice, organizing energy, and not as separate and totally different matters. We shall see that probably emotion is one aspect of reaction to the world, while instinct is merely another aspect; that intelligence is a cerebral shift of instinct, and that will is no unity but the energy of instincts and purposes.

Before we go farther we must squarely face a problem of human thought. Man, since he started reflecting about himself, has been puzzled about his consciousness. How can a person be aware of himself, and what identifies and links together each phase of consciousness? There is an enormous range of thought on this subject: from those who identified consciousness as the only reality and considered what the average person holds as realities - things and people - as only phases of consciousness, to those who, like Huxley, regard consciousness as an "epi-pbenomenon," a sort of overture to brain activity and having nothing whatever to do with action, nothing to do with choice and plan, so that, as Lloyd Morgan points out, "An unconscious Shakespeare writes plays acted by an unconscious troupe of actors to an unconscious audience." The first extreme view, that of Berkeley and the idealists, nullifies all other realities save that of the individual thinker and reduces one to the absurdities of Solipsism where a man writes books to convince persons conjured up by himself and having no existence outside of himself; the other view nullifies that which seems to each of us the very essence of himself.

I shall take a very simple view of consciousness, simply because I shall deliberately dodge the great difficulties. Consciousness is the result of the activities of a group of more or less permanently excited areas of the brain - areas having to do with positions of the head, eyes and shoulders; areas having to do with vision, hearing and smell; areas having to do with speech, - these constituting extremely mobile, extremely active parts of the organism. From these consciousness may irradiate to the activities of almost every part of the organism, in different degrees. We are often extremely conscious of the activities of the hands, in less degree of the legs; we may become wrapped up almost completely in a sensation emanating from the sex organs, and under fear or excitement the heart may pound so that we feel and are conscious of it as ordinarily we can never be.

The state of consciousness called interest may shift our feeling of self to any part of our body (as in pain, when a part usually out of consciousness swings into it, or when the hand of a lover grips our own so that the great reality of our life at the moment seems to be the consciousness of the hand) or it may fasten us to an outside object until our world narrows to that object, nothing else having any conscious value. This latter phenomenon is very striking in children; they become fascinated by something they hear or see and project themselves, as it were, into that object; they become the "soapiness of soap, or the wetness of water" (to use Chesterton's phrase), and when they listen to a story they hold nothing in reserve. Consciousness may busy itself with its past phases, with the preceding thought, emotion, sensation - how, I do not know - or it may occupy itself mainly with the world of things which are hereby declared to have a reality in our theory. In the first instances we have introspection and subjectiveness, and in the second we have extroversion and objectivity.

Since consciousness is most intense when the new or unfamiliar is seen, heard, felt or attempted, we may assume it has a chief function in acquainting the individual with the new and unfamiliar and in the establishment of habitual reactions, We are extraordinarily conscious of a queer, unexplainable thing on the horizon, we bring into the limelight (or IT brings into the limelight) all our possible reactions, - fear, flight, anger, fight, circumvention, curiosity and the movements of investigation; we are thrown into the maelstrom of choice. Choice and consciousness, doubt and consciousness, are directly related; it is only when conduct becomes established as habit, with choosing relegated to the background, that consciousness, in so far as the act is concerned, becomes diminished.

A moderate constant sensation tends to disappear from consciousness, as when we keep our hand in warm water. It then takes a certain increase of the stimulus to keep the sensation from lapsing out of consciousness. This lapsing out of consciousness of the steady stimulus, in its ramifications, is responsible for a good deal of the activity of man, since sensation is a goal of effort. Under emotion we become aware of two sets of things, - the reaction of our body in its sum total of pleasure or the reverse, and second the object that sets up this reaction. Consciousness fastens itself on the body and on the world, and the bodily reaction becomes a guide for future action. Extreme bodily reactions are painful and may result in the abolishing of consciousness.

The physiologists speak of this phenomenon under the heading of the Weber-Fechner law, after the two physiologists who gave it prominence. James pokes a good deal of fun at the "law," which is expressed mathematically. Perhaps the mathematics should have been eliminated as too "scientific" for our present attainment, but it does remain true that it is not the ACTUAL stimulus increase that is important in sensation or perception, but the RELATIVE stimulus increase. This is behind all of "getting used to things"; it removes the pain from humiliation and also the novelty from joy. It is the reason behind all of the searching for novelty and excitement.