Now I have always taken it as more or less given that the whole point of consciousness, in so far as it has a point at all, is that there is just one of them. It is a sort of funnel through which all the important stuff going on in the brain gets forced through, a wheeze for bringing a bit of order to an otherwise rather messy cerebral world. So there is only one consciousness and there is only one thing going on in it at any one time. One might be looking at several things at once, or at least one might think that one was, but one really can only have one thought at a time, in part because most thought - at least most of my thought - is verbal and silent verbal thought seems to be fairly closely coupled to spoken verbal thought and one only has one mouth, one vocal apparatus. One can only say one thing at a time. At least, if one tries to think one thing while saying another, one is quite apt to get into a muddle.
But yesterday, reading a book that Hurlbert wrote with Schwitzgebel (reference 2), I come across Fran. Fran, who did have mental health problems, but who could also do various interesting things which I cannot.
So, a bank cashier, she could count her pile of bank notes while having a conversation with the neighbouring cashier and while listening in to some other conversation going on further away. With the neighbouring cashier being rather irritated because the conversation messed up her counting.
She had three televisions in her sitting room and was happy watching all three at once.
Getting more techy, when looking at the sort of visual trick illustrated above, she was quite happy holding both interpretations in consciousness at once, unlike the rest of us who have to alternate. And she was quite surprised when she found that her colleagues were more like the rest of us than she was, at least in this respect.
Furthermore, she often had several pictures in her mind at the same time, where again, most of us can only manage one at a time. And sometimes, odd although not relevant here, she sometimes held the one picture in her mind for long periods of time, seemingly hours, rather than the seconds of the rest of us. Also odd, she did not distinguish foreground objects from the background in a picture – whether from her mind or from the real world – in usual way, claiming to be looking at the whole thing the whole time.
Interestingly, all these interesting abilities faded as her mental health problems faded.
One gloss would be, to use a popular phrase, that Fran had a split mind. Another would be that she was better at multi-tasking than the rest of us. We all multi-task – when, for example, carrying a full cup of hot tea up the stairs while reading the newspaper – but most of us can only manage one task requiring conscious attention at a time. Perhaps Fran had an enlarged working memory to help her cope with all this.
In sum, I am still working on what all this might mean for the position with which I started this post.
PS: there is also the complication that for some tasks for which we have done serious training, perhaps hitting a golf ball a long way, it seems to go best if we can turn consciousness off in some way and let the unconscious get on with it. The unconscious needs all the resources available for first-class task execution and does not want the interruptions or the resource grabbing associated with conscious execution. We are not told how Fran would get on with this sort of thing, but one suspects that it would not be well.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.
Reference 2: ‘Describing Inner Experience’ – Russell Hurlbert and Eric Schwitzgebel – 2007.
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