Materialism › Philosophical
Locke’s Reflexive Consciousness and the Making of the Person
Consciousness as Self-Aware Perception That Makes the Person
John Locke defines consciousness as ‘the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind’, an immediate self-awareness built into every perception rather than a separate faculty or second act. He locates personal identity in sameness of consciousness, not in sameness of body or soul, which makes the person a unit of moral accountability. He stays agnostic about whether the thing that thinks is matter or an immaterial soul.
John Locke
What consciousness is
Consciousness is a self-intimating feature internal to every perception of an idea: to perceive is to perceive that one perceives. It is neither a substance, nor a faculty, nor a separate higher-order thought.
Mind and body
Locke holds that we cannot tell whether God has joined an immaterial thinking substance to the body or given suitably organized matter the power to think. He judged an immaterial soul more probable, but his account of consciousness and personal identity does not depend on it.
Mechanism
Reflexive awareness intrinsic to thinking, combined with ‘appropriation’: present consciousness extends to past experiences and owns them, chiefly through memory, and this sameness of consciousness constitutes the person.
Core claims
- Thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks, so a wholly unnoticed thought is scarcely intelligible as thought.
- Personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness, not sameness of body or immaterial substance.
- In the prince-and-cobbler case, if the prince’s consciousness entered the cobbler’s body, the person would be the prince while the man would be the cobbler.
- Colors, sounds, and tastes are ideas produced by powers in bodies, whereas solidity, extension, figure, motion, and number resemble features of bodies.
Criticisms
Butler charged that defining identity by remembered consciousness is circular, and Reid’s ‘brave officer’ case suggests such identity is not transitive across memory gaps. Evidence for unconscious perception, cognition, and motivation undermines Locke’s equation of thinking with consciousness.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- Locke allows that God could give suitably organized matter the power to think, but he holds that we cannot know whether thinking belongs to matter or to an immaterial soul.
- Survival beyond death: Possible
- Locke thought an immaterial soul more probable, and on his view a person survives wherever the same consciousness continues, whatever substance carries it.
- Virtual immortality: Conditional
- Since the person follows sameness of consciousness rather than substance, a new substrate would preserve the person only if the same consciousness, owning its past, continued in it.
Related theories
- Descartes’s Substance Dualism (Critique)
- Hume’s Bundle Theory of Perceptions (Influence)
- Kriegel’s Cross-Order Self-Representation (Overlap)
- Armstrong’s Higher-Order Perception Theory (Contrast)
Sources
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke (1689)
- The Analogy of Religion, J. Butler (1736)
- Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, T. Reid (1785)
- Locke on Consciousness, A. M. Coventry and U. Kriegel (2008)
- Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment, G. Strawson (2011)
- The Early Modern Subject, U. Thiel (2011)
- Consciousness in Locke, S. Weinberg (2016)
- Locke on Consciousness, Personal Identity and the Idea of Duration, G. Yaffe (2011)
- Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David J. Chalmers (1995)