Fragment of a theory of consciousness

...by elaborating the reciprocity of socialization and technical advancement. In order to establish the social, early man could not continue as before - he had to begin to deny himself, to regulate his behaviour. Nietzsche discusses this in On the Genealogy of Morals, and we will focus here on the idea that man had to become an animal capable of making promises. How could this be brought about? Memory had to be burned onto man. And this memory needed to be a certain sort of memory, a memory turned towards the future. To keep a promise, one must remember that one has made a promise, and use this memory to guide one's behaviour with a view to keeping that promise. To create this memory, man had to be given an originary 'punishment he would never forget'. With such training, the desire to do whatever one wants is overridden by the visceral fear of suffering. Nietzsche calls this a mnemotechnics. Crucially, this mnemotechnics also produces a memory for the technical. To explain: the function of memory in keeping a promise is also the function of memory with advanced tool use. In order to construct something in a process involving more than one or two simple operations, it is necessary to remember the aims of the intermediate steps. For example, I am preparing a stone in order to sharpen the blade of the knife with which I will cut the bamboo needed for the roof of my house. Without memory here, I would forget the point of my activity at each stage. So we have a projective memory, which allows man to undertake projects.

We ought to focus on this projective element for a moment. We see that the memory we have been talking about also has a constructive, imaginative aspect. We imagine a future in which we do not keep a promise and are punished, or in which we have built a house where there was none before. We begin to take our experiences apart to create new, possible experiences using this imaginative memory. What began as the taming of man's animal nature has developed into something much more significant: the birth of the mind. From its origin in early morality, this facility has become the motor of man's project-building, his artistic capacity, and interestingly, his status as the animal whose desire is structured as lack. Lack, because our projective power creates a cleavage between what exists and what could exist - the scenario or outcome which our projectively imaginative memory fabricates (once man began to sketch futures in his mind, the present reality started to appear as lacking something; I think Sartre's Pierre-who-was-not-there provides a good example of this). But I have neglected the most important change that took place at the dawn of humanity - man got the impression that he is free. Our ability to retrospectively imagine different alternatives to a choice we made leads us to think that we actually could have acted differently. Our ability to imagine various futures amongst which to choose (I could be a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman etc when I grow up) tricks us into thinking we have some kind of freedom to choose.

A brief comparison with Bergson could be instructive here. In Matter and Memory, he claims that those images which appear to consciousness are the images in relation to which we are free. The rest "pass through". What I have outlined above is not unrelated. Every perception we embellish with memories, which enrich the perceived, and furnish us with various possible courses of action in relation to that object. In contrast with Bergson however, I would argue that it is not our freedom which makes the image conscious, but our ability to produce alternatives to what is given to us. These are only my first, tentative thoughts, the thrust of which is this: conscious experience is produced by simultaneous, conflicting mental/neural events, the paradigmatic case being where one is provided by experience and the other by our imaginative memory. For example, we are aware of pain because it conflicts with our memories of the 'feeling' of our painless body (which is also why we get used to pain); in the moral case, it is our impulse to transgress which finds itself opposed by the conscience burned into our memory. On the other hand, one can walk to school or work without noticing anything on the way because there are no conflictual memories, because the same trudge has been done every day for years. Or, to be a little more ambitious, we might contend that our own brain function cannot become conscious because there could be nothing opposed to the experience of our own brain - the source of any conflictual mental/neural event is always already part of that with which it is supposed to conflict...