Developing thoughts on consciousness : objectivity and subjectivity

The following has been pinched from my e-mails to Radu after giving a talk on consciousness yesterday.

My view says that normative criteria are at the heart of human consciousness; these anchor consciousness in some sphere of 'objectivity' which standard functionalist accounts don't do justice to as far as I can tell. When we act rationally, we act according to what we see as OBJECTIVE grounds, the rightness of which is in some sense public and publicly justifiable; similarly when we get angry at others, we often believe that there is an OBJECTIVE ground for the anger - that that person OUGHT not have done that. Such 'oughts' and 'justifications' are inherently public and normative; they aim at 'objectivity' in some sense. This 'oughtness' seems to be lacking in functionalist accounts of rationality.

Think of life in Bilkent: we believe that certain STANDARDS should be upheld (regarding governance, infrastructure, norms, etc). We are continually judging our experience by such standards, and motivating our lives by such standards. This activity is at the heart of human consciousness in my view.I don't think a human could be conscious without notions of standards, without 'oughts'. Consciousness is inherently intersubjective. Our language presupposes this, as does culture - so I'd say intersubjective meaning, intersubjective objects of thought, and intersubjective 'selves' (viewing the self as one among many in a public space) are all foundational in consciousness. My view is that 'objectivity' in 'intersubjective space' is at the root of consciousness.

One can have all sorts of sophisticated cognition and metacognition without this but without it one would not be conscious.

My view is that this kind of 'rational world' emerged with consciousness and constitutes another 'ontological realm' beyond the functionalist/ biological realm. Another way of putting it: OBJECTIVITY and SUBJECTIVITY both co-evolved with consciousness; OJBECTS came into being, as did OUGHTS and NORMS and PRINCIPLES etc that intersubjectively ground behaviour in an 'objective sphere'.

For the notion of ontological realms see my talk here.

We are used to thinking that 'subjectivity' is something the comes with consciousness. But here is another way of thinking about it:

Both OBJECTIVITY and SUBJECTIVITY co-evolved with consciousness; subjectivity implies objectivity after all.

Public OJBECTS came into being, as did OUGHTS and NORMS and PRINCIPLES etc. that intersubjectively ground behaviour in an 'objective sphere'.

This accounts for the emergence around the age of 4 of 'theories of mind' in as far as both 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' arise at this time. It's not just that the child knows that he/she has a mind, and that their mind is one of many; it is also that there are objective things that different minds can have different perspectives on: both subjectivity and objectivity arise at this time.

I would predict that around the same time children acquire notions of 'objective' standards for what is 'good' or 'bad', 'acceptable' or 'unacceptable' - all those normative 'oughts' that - like objects - are located in a shared intersubjective, public space (albeit, non-material) that can be appealed to in a TRANSCENDENT way (e.g. that's not FAIR, where fairness is understood as something 'objective'; because in an emergent ontological sense it IS objective).

Jung's collective unconscious

Jung applies Kant's idea of transcendent a priori categories of thought to his concept of archetypes it looks like.

"[the universal motifs of myths] have their origin in the archetype, which in itself is an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at anytime."

"The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal...a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only."

"It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype as such is not capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid."

"[The personal unconscious] comprises contents which are integral components of the individual personality and therefore could just as well be conscious; the second group forms, as it were, an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrata of the psyche per se."

"The deeper 'Layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness."

Above quotes from the glossary of Memories, Dreams, Reflections - C.G. Jung

Jung on consciousness

"When one reflects upon what consciousness really is, on eis profoundly impressed by the extreme wonder of the fact that an eventwhich takes place outside in the cosmos simultaneously produces an internal image, that it takes place, so to speak, inside as well, which is to say: becomes conscious." Carl Jung, Basel seminar, privately printed, 1934, p. 1)