Consciousness

• seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
  or ego, but only another thought of a special kind.
  This Thought identifies and owns some parts of the
  stream of consciousness while disowning others.
  It pulls together thoughts it finds ‘warm’ and calls
  them ‘mine’. The next moment another Thought
  takes up the expiring Thought and appropriates it.
  It binds the individual past facts with each other and
  with itself. In this way, the passing Thought seems to
  be the Thinker. The unity we experience is not some-
  thing separate from the Thoughts. Indeed, it does
  not exist until the Thought is there.
  James uses the metaphor of a herd and herdsman.
  Common sense rules that there has to be a herds-
  man who holds the herd together. But for James
  there is no permanent herdsman, only a passing
  series of owners, each of which inherits not only the
  cattle but the title to their ownership. Each Thought
  is born an owner and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realised as its self to
  the next owner. In this way is the apparent unity created.

PRACTICE 16.2

AM I THE SAME ‘ME’ AS A MOMENT AGO?

As many times as you can, every day, ask yourself the familiar question

‘Am I conscious now?’, and then keep watching. As ‘now’ slips away, and

things change around you, try to keep steadily watching, and wondering

who is watching. Is there continuity of self as you remain aware? Can you

see what that continuity is like? Or is there none?

The question is ‘Am I the same “me” as I was a moment ago?’

What is really required is not asking (or answering) the question in words,

but looking directly into how it seems.

Is James then a bundle theorist? He rejects any substantial ego, so we might

assume so. And presumably he ought to step happily into the teletransporter

because when the replica stepped out at the other side, a new Thought would

immediately appropriate the memories and warm thoughts sustained by the rep-

licated brain and so induce the same sense of unity and continuity as before. Yet

James placed his own theory somewhere between the extremes, and criticised

Hume for allowing no thread of resemblance or core of sameness to tie together

the stream of consciousness. For James, the task was to explain both the diver-

sity and the unity of experience, and he felt he had accomplished this with his

‘remembering and appropriating Thought incessantly renewed’ (p. 363).

Does his theory help us understand the nature of consciousness? Up to a point –

and James himself tells us where that point lies. In the end, he cannot explain how

FIGURE 16.7 • According to William James, the
continuity of self is an illusion.
We think we are a continuous
owner of our thoughts, when in
fact a passing series of owners
inherits the collection of thoughts
and its ownership from the
previous one.