Exploring Consciousness: Old Habits and New Horizons 61the perspective of consciousness itself. Were we to do so, we would likely
realize—much as James (1890) did—that consciousness is always in flux,
such that the dichotomy between waking and sleeping is entirely too crude
(Atlas, 2017; Gackenbach & LaBerge, 1988), and the notion of ‘normal
waking awareness’ is fallacious. What suffers most of all is the recognition
that each person’s experience of psychological phenomena, or, qualia is
utterly unique. When the language of psychology serves the purpose of
perpetuating a herd mentality and deflecting attention away from the
individual’s own experience and investigation, the richness of
psychological diversity present in any given classroom is squandered and
an opportunity to learn more about the hard problem of consciousness is
lost.
The Big Four
Contemporary psychology textbooks approach the study of
consciousness in strikingly similar ways. With the exception of Griggs
(2017), each chapter reviewed herein presents consciousness vis-à-vis four
major sub-categories. They are: 1) the psychology of wakefulness and
sleep; 2) the study of attention; 3) theories as to why we dream; and, 4) a
survey of drugs and their so-called effects on consciousness, including
tolerance and addiction. Though the order in which these themes are
displayed varies from text to text, as does the nuanced language used to
describe each category, the general impression each chapter creates is
virtually identical.
As has been previously alluded to, the vast majority of the content in
these chapters is written from a biological and/or sociological perspective,
bolstered by statistics, and largely ignores first-person experience. To
reiterate, this particular, uniform approach to teaching and studying
consciousness is not completely irrelevant. On the contrary, the Big Four,
as we are calling them, are valuable corollaries of consciousness and ought
to be included in a survey of consciousness studies. But, by attending to
these themes exclusively, little to no attention is paid to the study of