It requires some courage to speak on consciousness to an American audience, for
the phenomena any study of consciousness must rely on are too questionable for them.
Strictly speaking they only consist of a sum of verbal reactions whose relation
to the underlying observations as reported by the informant is highly complicated
and whose reliability in any case remains uncertain.
Theoretically, all contents of consciousness have a certain chance of manifesting
themselves somehow in overt nonverbal behavior. But American psychologists in general
do not trust very much in the value of behavior as representing what goes on in
the mind of a subject. So many try to get along without any knowledge about consciousness
except for sensory discrimination which can be represented without uttering a single
word, simply by running to the left or to the right in a choice ex-periment. As
for the rest. they consider a human being to be a "black box" that after
suffering certain impacts from the outside at a certain spot of its surface reacts
on its surroundings at another spot. They seem to feel safe only in studying the
familiar S-R relation.
But Europeans who cannot abandon their old love also have their difficulties
with it. The phenomena of consciousness are, we might say, quite reluctant about
being brought into a consistent system. To give an instance: from physical as well
as physiological knowledge it follows undeniably that processes underlying those
phenomena must go on in the cerebrum, that means, within the skull of the sub-ject.
But on the other hand, no subject can be found who is ready to admit having found
the effects of stimulation of any sense organ within his skull. In extreme cases
- as in auditory or visual sensation - they are not even localized at his own body,
as e.g., in the region of the mediating sense organs, but far from it - as a color
(yet as an afterimage) at the opposite wall, or as a noise even beyond the room,
somewhere outside.
From a previous era, when some of you were still occupied with conscious phe-nomena,
you will remember the way in which H. v. HELMHOLTZ and J. v. KRIES attempted to
solve this dilemma. They introduced a hypothetical process by which they believed
sensations were transferred from their original place within the skull to that place
in the surroundings of the body where they were actually fo-und by the observer.
I refer to the assumption designated as the projection-hypothesis in the sense of
an exteriorization of elementary sensations - which, by the way does not, in principle,
differ very much from the projection hypothesis used in the psychoanalytic sense,
that refers to feelings, emotions. and intentions, as projected from the subject
into other persons.
The dilemma intrinsic to this assumption, which at first seemed to be insoluble,
consists in the following:
1) The process of exteriorization must, for its greater part, take place outside
the organism and therefore cannot be a physiological process.
2) On the other hand, physical processes of such a kind are not known and it is
most unlikely that they will ever be found.
But S-R psychologists also had their difficulties. S-R relations have not always
proved to be as simple and unambiguous as was first supposed when WATSON and his
friends began preaching the gospel of objective psychology nearly sixty years ago.
There are many different responses that can be called forth by one and the same
stimulus. And on the other hand, there are many stimuli that can be followed by
one and the same response. Auxiliary concepts such as 'covert behavior' - i.e. a
behavior that is not objectively observable and therefore must not be an object
of behavioristic psychology - could not be dispensed with, and these were soon follo-wed
by TOLMAN's 'intervening variables' and by the 'hypothetical constructs' of MacCORQUODALE
and others.
From the very first it seemed to me most probable that at least a great many
of those intervening events or factors which had to be postulated in order to develop
a consistent theory of overt behavior could be immediately ascertained as observable
contents of consciousness. In this way it appeared likely that the wide gap between
stimulus and response could at least partially be filled by observation and we could
hope that by these means some light would fall into the darkness of the behavioristic
black box after all.
There were two more facts that encouraged some of us to take up again the inquiry
into consciousness. First a methodological fact: The role of speech or verbal behavior
as a means of communicating subjective phenomena can be reduced to the extent that
must be tolerated in every science. The method is simple. Instead of taking some
other person as the subject of examination, the psychologist himself has to assume
the role of the subject, while assigning the role of experimenter to his assistant.
When doing so, the information of the psychologist is first hand information, just
as that of the physicist when observing the hand of a voltmeter. True, no second
observer can look at his phenomena as such. But this methodological deficiency can
be overcome by repeating the observation by another person under exactly the same
conditions. While obviously the observation of single sensations (such as the reddish
hue of a color) cannot be "repeated'' in this fashion, this repetition and
verification by another observer is quite possible with regard to organization,
structures, and structural characteristics, as Oskar GRAEFE has shown. And even
reliable measurement has been shown to be within the realm of consciousness by STEVENS,
EKMAN, and others.
Besides this methodological justification there is another achievement by fun-damental
reflection on consciousness, which has produced a new situation. Forty years ago,
in 1929, Wolfgang KÖHLER succeeded in demonstrating that the projection hypothesis
need not be necessary, if we assume that not only (1) the image of the objects but
also (2) the image of the subjective bodily ego and (3) the image of the relations
between the object and the subject, are correlated with cerebral processes of a
corresponding dynamic structure and distribution. This is, indeed, the only assumption
about conscious phenomena that is consistent with itself, and with the scientific
world concept, as it is generally accepted.
The non-identity of 'distant stimuli' or, expressed more logically, of the source
of stimulation with the conscious phenomenon must also be assumed for the observer's
own body exactly as for other perceived objects. As soon as this is recognized,
the whole dilemma of sensory processes and the localization of objects and their
qualities turns out to be a mere fallacy. For 'inside' in this connection refers
to the organism which as such is no conscious phenomenon but rather a complicated
source of 'proximal' stimuli - while 'outside' refers to the bodily self, which
is in no way identical with the organism but is itself an 'image' or percept, i.e.,
a complex of sensations emergent upon the total excitation originating from the
diverse proprioceptors of the organism together with the images of parts of his
own body as seen by the subject himself. (See Fig. 1, from METZGER, Psychologie,
4th ed. 1968, p. 283.) Seen in this way, the apparent relations between perceived
objects and the subject exactly correspond to the objective relations between the
"distant stimuli'' and the organism. Instead of being localized within the
ego, seen objects appear to be opposite or vis-a-vis the ego, just as complexes
of distant stimuli are opposite or vis-a-vis the organism. (This means, by the way,
that secondary processes of 'objectivation of an original purely subjective experience,
as they are developed in neo-Kantian literature, e.g. by Ernst CASSIRER, need not
be assumed.) I know these statements are highly redundant. But I have learned from
experience that without a relatively high degree of redundancy these matters will
never be understood. So I shall go on describing some consequences of what I said
above.
Relationship between physical world including physiological organism (= Macrocosm)
and phenomenal-perceptual world including experienced bodily Ego (= Microcosm)
1 = biophysical environment of organism
1' = physical object, reflecting light rays
2 = physiological organism, as part of the physical world
3 = apparent (perceived) environment of bodily Ego
3' = apparent (distal) object or percept, representing the physical object
4 = bodily Ego. as part of the phenomenal-perceptual world, representing the organism
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