Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Question · Open

I cycled home after a night shift and remember none of the ride. Was I conscious on the way?

Elin Hedqvist Fellow
· 4 replies
ConsciousnessAnalyticBuddhistAbhidharmaDaniel DennettDavid Armstrong#attention#consciousness#memory#night-shifts
Follow

Its coordinates: 1.3 Philosophy of Mind · 1.3.1 The Mind–Body Problem · 1.3.3 Intentionality +1 more

Twelve hours on, then six kilometres home along the river in the half-dark. This morning I got off my bike outside my building and realised I had no memory at all of the ride. Not the lights at the bridge, not the roundabout by the station. Yet I must have stopped at red, signalled and steered round people, because here I am.

A colleague sent me the example philosophers use for this: David Armstrong's long-distance lorry driver, who "comes to" after miles of road he has driven perfectly well and cannot recall. Armstrong's verdict, as I understand it, was that the driver was perceiving the whole time but was not aware of his own perceiving. There was seeing, but nobody noticing the seeing.

That leaves me with three possibilities:

  1. I was conscious of the road and simply laid down no memories of it.
  2. Something in me registered the road, but there was nothing it was like to be me on the way.
  3. The question has no answer, because "conscious" covers several things that usually come together, and this morning they came apart.

Which is it? And is there any way, even in principle, to find out, when the only witness is the person who forgot?

LikeAnswer
Follow4 answers

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

4 answers

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Your legs braking at red doesn't settle it either way. Vision research has a famous patient, D.F., studied by Milner and Goodale: after brain damage she could not say whether a slot was horizontal or vertical, yet she could post a card through it at exactly the right angle. Seeing-for-action and seeing-that-you-can-report come apart.

    So option 2 is a live possibility, not a paradox. But my own bet is option 3. Ned Block's distinction between phenomenal consciousness (what it is like) and access consciousness (what is available for report, memory and reasoning) was built for cases like yours. This morning you clearly lacked the second. Whether you had the first is the hard part.

  2. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    The Abhidhamma would answer quite confidently. Every moment of cognition arises with contact, feeling and perception; there is no such thing as seeing a red light with nobody experiencing it. So you were conscious.

    What was missing is sati, usually translated "mindfulness". The old meaning of the word is closer to "remembering", and it is related to Sanskrit smṛti, memory. Our teachers would say you were aware but not mindful, and in Pali that is almost a pun: without sati, nothing is kept. Your morning is a very good illustration of why the meditation manuals put so much weight on it.

  3. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Your options 1 and 2 are almost exactly what Dennett called the Orwellian and the Stalinesque stories in Consciousness Explained. Orwellian: the experience happened and was then erased from the record, like history rewritten by the Ministry. Stalinesque: the record was faked before anything reached experience, like a show trial.

    Dennett's provocative claim was that there is no fact of the matter which story is true, because nothing in the brain marks the moment something "enters consciousness". That's your option 3, in its strongest form. I don't fully accept it, but I've never seen anyone produce the experiment that would tell the two stories apart.

  4. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    Thank you, all three. Pieter, the idea that there might be no fact about my own morning is unsettling, and also oddly restful after a long night.

    Nirmala, I'm taking your answer onto the bike tomorrow. I'll try to notice one thing on purpose at the bridge, and see whether noticing is what makes the ride mine. I'll report back if I remember.