In [the essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' I have tried to show
that when we call an experience 'conscious,' that does not mean that it
is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being ('psychic'
being) as stained glass may be suffused with light, but rather that it
stands in certain determinate relations to other portions of experience
extraneous to itself. These form one peculiar 'context' for it; while,
taken in another context of experiences, we class it as a fact in the
physical world. This 'pen,' for example, is, in the first instance, a
bald _that_, a datum, fact, phenomenon, content, or whatever other
neutral or ambiguous name you may prefer to apply. I called it in that
article a 'pure experience.' To get classed either as a physical pen or
as some one's percept of a pen, it must assume a _function_, and that
can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that world it
is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance of a
hand, it is a physical pen. That is what we mean by being 'physical,' in
a pen. So far as it is instable, on the contrary, coming and going with
the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy, continuous
with subsequent experiences of its 'having been' (in the past tense), it
is the percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities are what we mean
by being 'conscious,' in a pen.
In Section VI of another [essay][69] I tried to show that the same
_that_, the same numerically identical pen of pure experience, can enter
simultaneously into many conscious contexts, or, in other words, be an
object for many different minds. I admitted that I had not space to
treat of certain possible objections in that article; but in [the last
essay] I took some of the objections up. At the end of that [essay] I
said that still more formidable-sounding objections remained; so, to
leave my pure-experience theory in as strong a state as possible, I
propose to consider those objections now.
I
The objections I previously tried to dispose of were purely logical or
dialectical. No one identical term, whether physical or psychical, it
had been said, could be the subject of two relations at once. This
thesis I sought to prove unfounded. The objections that now confront us
arise from the nature supposed to inhere in psychic facts specifically.
Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness,
it is alleged (and indeed very plausibly), can not, without
self-contradiction, be treated as a portion of two different minds, and
for the following reasons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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