The earliest notions of an unconscious are a priori ideas which do not originate from any experience we can name from our individual conscious lives. Such thinking is found in Plato's doctrines of the theory of forms and knowledge as recollection. Aristotle who was critical of the theory of forms instead came up with potentiality, what we are able to do but haven't made manifest.
But it is with Rene Descartes that consciousness becomes something in and of itself which isn't necessary to explain the physical world and which we argue about a deal. The possibility of someone being physically identical to us and behaving like us but not being conscious would have been a very strange thought in ancient days. But now we are surrounded by machines which can perform tasks which were once exclusive to us. Thinking about the the unconscious can get us back to a connection between consciousness and the physical world, as whatever is unconscious cannot be observed directly. Maybe someday artificial intelligence will be so advanced that consciousness itself can only be inferred as well.
A great many philosophers since Descartes have identified consciousness with the ability to use language. The assumption is that we only have access to our own consciousness, which unchecked we attribute to everything else in the world. It is only by inference that we establish the existence of other minds. It is how the world resists our will that we know matter, which isn't conscious. Language is how we express our thinking through symbols. If someone else acts how we expect ourselves, being conscious to act, then they are conscious.
While I do think that language is necessary for consciousness, Descartes went further and argued essentially that any sort of perceptual awareness was consciousness or self-consciousness. Even animals which act as if they feel pain, which requires no language to understand, actually don't feel pain and just act as if they do. This was a very restrictive and human-centric understanding of consciousness to include any feeling whatsoever.
This kind of reasoning becomes mechanical. Manipulating symbols, inferring from a set of rules algorithmically. The assumption is that if something acts consciously and is physically indistinguishable from what is conscious, then it is conscious. Any other criterion reflects only our own thinking. Descartes said in the Meditations that even the most fantastical things can only be put together from something objectively existing. "Even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new." Even HP Lovecraft's most bizarre monsters are composed of tentacles and eyeballs, which can be found individually without difficulty.
This kind of reasoning is what computers can do today, well enough to fool a good number of us that they are conscious (Turing Test). Aristotle defined human beings as the rational animal as if the ability to reason made us unique. With computers and the formalization of logic, what is unique about humans in today's society is what we share with animals (our species-life). A strange state of affairs indeed.
What Descartes didn't have was the intentional unconscious. Descartes had an inkling of the unconscious, which really was a second state of consciousness to explain mental ideas but not caused by the mind as we know it.
"And as to the other reason, which is that these ideas must proceed from objects outside me, since they do not depend on my will, I do not find it any the more convincing. For just as these impulses of which I have spoken are found in me, notwithstanding that they do not always concur with my will, so perhaps there is in me some faculty fitted to produce these ideas without the assistance of any external things, even though it is not yet known by me; just as, apparently, they have hithero always been found in me during sleep without the aid of external objects." Meditations on First Philosophy
This unconscious for him is a causal mechanism which is like mind, except that we are not aware of its cause. This unconscious is really the preconscious, the potential to become conscious, because these thoughts can enter into consciousness without much difficulty, and are only strange in that we don't remember where exactly they came from.
Gottfried Leibniz, an admirer of Descartes, brought us the first conception of the unconscious.
14 "The passing state...is nothing other than what is called perception, which must be carefully distinguished from apperception or consciousness, as will appear presently. And herein lies the great mistake of the Cartesians, that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived. It is this also which makes them believe that minds alone are monads, and that neither brutes nor other entelechies have souls." -Monadology
For the mature notion of the unconscious, the German speaking philosophers of the 19th century had to eliminate the vestiges of idealist/dualist thinking, inherited from Leibniz and reaching its apex in Georg Hegel. The revolutionaries would follow a line of criticism against Kant's thing-in-itself and thing-as-appearance and the German idealists who offered stronger idealisms as a solution. I'll write about that in a different post.
A great many philosophers since Descartes have identified consciousness with the ability to use language. The assumption is that we only have access to our own consciousness, which unchecked we attribute to everything else in the world. It is only by inference that we establish the existence of other minds. It is how the world resists our will that we know matter, which isn't conscious. Language is how we express our thinking through symbols. If someone else acts how we expect ourselves, being conscious to act, then they are conscious.
While I do think that language is necessary for consciousness, Descartes went further and argued essentially that any sort of perceptual awareness was consciousness or self-consciousness. Even animals which act as if they feel pain, which requires no language to understand, actually don't feel pain and just act as if they do. This was a very restrictive and human-centric understanding of consciousness to include any feeling whatsoever.
This kind of reasoning becomes mechanical. Manipulating symbols, inferring from a set of rules algorithmically. The assumption is that if something acts consciously and is physically indistinguishable from what is conscious, then it is conscious. Any other criterion reflects only our own thinking. Descartes said in the Meditations that even the most fantastical things can only be put together from something objectively existing. "Even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new." Even HP Lovecraft's most bizarre monsters are composed of tentacles and eyeballs, which can be found individually without difficulty.
This kind of reasoning is what computers can do today, well enough to fool a good number of us that they are conscious (Turing Test). Aristotle defined human beings as the rational animal as if the ability to reason made us unique. With computers and the formalization of logic, what is unique about humans in today's society is what we share with animals (our species-life). A strange state of affairs indeed.
What Descartes didn't have was the intentional unconscious. Descartes had an inkling of the unconscious, which really was a second state of consciousness to explain mental ideas but not caused by the mind as we know it.
"And as to the other reason, which is that these ideas must proceed from objects outside me, since they do not depend on my will, I do not find it any the more convincing. For just as these impulses of which I have spoken are found in me, notwithstanding that they do not always concur with my will, so perhaps there is in me some faculty fitted to produce these ideas without the assistance of any external things, even though it is not yet known by me; just as, apparently, they have hithero always been found in me during sleep without the aid of external objects." Meditations on First Philosophy
This unconscious for him is a causal mechanism which is like mind, except that we are not aware of its cause. This unconscious is really the preconscious, the potential to become conscious, because these thoughts can enter into consciousness without much difficulty, and are only strange in that we don't remember where exactly they came from.
Gottfried Leibniz, an admirer of Descartes, brought us the first conception of the unconscious.
14 "The passing state...is nothing other than what is called perception, which must be carefully distinguished from apperception or consciousness, as will appear presently. And herein lies the great mistake of the Cartesians, that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived. It is this also which makes them believe that minds alone are monads, and that neither brutes nor other entelechies have souls." -Monadology
For Leibniz, we must have an idea of everything that exists in the universe, because we are affected by them whether or not we are conscious. If the external world exists independently of consciousness (object permanence) then it should be that our minds are affected by external things even when we are not aware of them. There is a difference between unconscious perception and conscious perception of things.
The key is that the perceptions are not strong enough to be brought to clarity or distinction, not stored by memory or continually seized by the mind. Perception comes from Latin percipere which means to seize. Consciousness is properly apperception, an appetite for perception. Appetite comes from Latin appetitus to desire for or seek after. The difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is a sort of continual intensity on a single thing. [For more on Leibniz's Monadology]
20 "For we experience within ourselves a state, in which we remember nothing and have no distinguishable perception; and when we fall into a swoon, or when we are overcome by deep dreamless sleep."
The key is that the perceptions are not strong enough to be brought to clarity or distinction, not stored by memory or continually seized by the mind. Perception comes from Latin percipere which means to seize. Consciousness is properly apperception, an appetite for perception. Appetite comes from Latin appetitus to desire for or seek after. The difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is a sort of continual intensity on a single thing. [For more on Leibniz's Monadology]
20 "For we experience within ourselves a state, in which we remember nothing and have no distinguishable perception; and when we fall into a swoon, or when we are overcome by deep dreamless sleep."
These states Leibniz describe can be empirically investigated. In the 19th Gustav Fechner and Ernst Weber and others came up with psychophysics which explores the relationship between physical stimuli, like touch, and sensations, like pain. For thousands of years philosophers have debated the relationship between mind and body. Prior to psychophysics Spinoza and Schopenhauer, both very influential to the 19th century German thinkers, argued for mind and body being two aspects of the same world, and not some causal relationship, a debate which continues today. But they didn't really have a measurable quantitive mechanism to the relationship between the two. Psychophysics likewise avoided the debate between whether and how body and mind interact and instead looked to when exactly the mind becomes aware of physical activity. Much like Leibniz's difference between consciousness and unconsciousness, as degrees of awareness. Psychophysics aims to establish the quantitative relationship between the two without reducing one to the other. What difference in physical stimuli is noticable? This is what psychophysics explores.
Looking to psychophysics, there must be a way in which physical stimuli affect us even when we are not consciously aware of them. To explain phenomena like dreams, slips of the tongue, hysteria, neurosis, phobias, fetishes etc.
This gets us to a link between conscious sensation and physical stimuli, but what about stimuli that is beneath the threshold of consciousness? How can we measure that?
The truth is that the unconscious as a causal factor as well as a psychological reality must be inferred. We cannot experience or measure the unconscious directly, but neither can we experience or measure directly the thoughts of others. We infer that others are conscious, even if not in daily life because we are familiar with our own consciousness and apply that to others readily. But the unconscious by its nature is not something we even want to apply even to ourselves. We want to be in control of ourselves. But it is a qualitative "mechanism" which could explain our ability to understand each other, not as physical phenomena but in terms of something we do share. The unconscious as the missing link between the body and consciousness.
This gets us to a link between conscious sensation and physical stimuli, but what about stimuli that is beneath the threshold of consciousness? How can we measure that?
The truth is that the unconscious as a causal factor as well as a psychological reality must be inferred. We cannot experience or measure the unconscious directly, but neither can we experience or measure directly the thoughts of others. We infer that others are conscious, even if not in daily life because we are familiar with our own consciousness and apply that to others readily. But the unconscious by its nature is not something we even want to apply even to ourselves. We want to be in control of ourselves. But it is a qualitative "mechanism" which could explain our ability to understand each other, not as physical phenomena but in terms of something we do share. The unconscious as the missing link between the body and consciousness.
For the mature notion of the unconscious, the German speaking philosophers of the 19th century had to eliminate the vestiges of idealist/dualist thinking, inherited from Leibniz and reaching its apex in Georg Hegel. The revolutionaries would follow a line of criticism against Kant's thing-in-itself and thing-as-appearance and the German idealists who offered stronger idealisms as a solution. I'll write about that in a different post.
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