I've been trying to look back into my own mind a moment ago - trying, as it were, to open the fridge door fast enough to see into the darkness (or light) that was there before I opened the door.
I ask this difficult question - what was I conscious of a moment ago? - when walking about, when doing the washing up, and when meditating. Time to meditate again.
I sit still in my garden meditation hut, my eyes resting on the floor, the damp garden spread out in front of me. I look back with an open mind, still here now but asking the question. What was I conscious of a moment ago?
What about my own body? I can feel my bottom on the wooden stool. I can feel my hands held together in my lap. And there's that slight ache in my left knee. That ache has been going on for some time. I know it has. I can look back into the continuous dull, slight pain and feel that it has. And there's more. With an exasperated shock I recognise there's a siren sounding - out there in the road. It's obvious. Why didn't I realise it instantly? That noise has been going on for about three or four loud swoops - nah nah, nah nah. I was conscious of it then wasn't I? Was I?
No. Or at least, I am not sure. It took me several tries at the question to hit upon that sound and when I did it was loud and obvious. But what if I hadn't been searching? Would I have been conscious of the noise at the time and then forgotten it? Or would I never have become conscious of it at all? Would that vivid sound have disappeared without trace into nothingness? It did seem vivid. It did feel as though I had been consciously listening to those three or four howls. Had I?
Was I conscious of the sound a moment ago, or not?
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Surely there must be an answer, mustn't there? I'm reminded of Dan Dennett's challenging contrast between Orwellian and Stalinesque revisions.
According to Dennett, it's natural to think that there must be a true answer to the question "What was I conscious of at some particular time?". So we naturally assume that it must either be true that I was conscious of only the floor, or true that I was conscious of the siren (and my hands and the ache) as well. We cannot imagine that there might be no answer at all.
To show why we might be wrong, he invents two ways of describing what happened when I suddenly became aware of the siren. In one version, I was really only conscious of the floor, but when I asked the question, it worked something like Orwell's Ministry of Truth and rewrote the past, pulling out a previously unconscious memory and making it seem as though I'd been conscious of the siren all along. In the other version I was really conscious of the siren all along but if I hadn't asked the question the memory would have faded away and I might later have been like a witness at one of Stalin's famous show trials, firmly declaring that I never heard the siren at all. So which is right? Was I really conscious of the siren or not?
There is no answer, says Dennett. There is simply no way in which one could ever tell. Looking inside the brain won't tell you, for the signals were being processed in the relevant bits of brain whichever way you describe it, and asking the person won't tell you because she doesn't know either. So it's a difference that makes no difference. And what should we do with a difference that makes no difference? Forget it; accept that there is no answer to the question "What was I conscious of a moment ago?". Can that really be right?
Can there really be no answer to the apparently simple question - What was I conscious of a moment ago?
