Does Consciousness Flow

Does Consciousness Flow?

And Why It Matters

Jack Petranker

I. The Stream of Consciousness

Viewed in first-person terms, consciousness is often described as a stream, unbroken from moment to moment. This description goes back at least to the famous discussion by William James in the ninth chapter of his Principles of Psychology (1890 [hereafter “PP”]):

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ and ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. (PP, p.239)

Now, the image of a stream suggests that consciousness flows, just as the water in a stream flows. And as we shall see, James at times spoke in just this way. But if consciousness does flow, the consequences for research into consciousness are enormous. What flows cannot be pinned down or specified; cannot be understood in its flow from outside the flow. Yet scientific study proceeds precisely through specification, through identification and categorization. If consciousness flows, we must find a method for inquiry into consciousness that can trace that flow; a style of inquiry that is itself flowing. If consciousness flows, the kind of knowledge appropriate to understanding consciousness will be different in kind from the kind of knowledge available for things and entities whose nature we can legitimately regard as fixed. What this means in practice is a topic I can only hint at here. My aim in this presentation is more restricted: to clarify what the “flow” of consciousness consists in.

II. What is the ‘When’ of the Stream?

How do we know that consciousness is a stream? When do we experience this to be the case? The answer that comes naturally to mind is that the stream-like nature of consciousness is apparent in every moment. But is that really so? Suppose I am on a raft on an actual, physical stream, floating slowly downstream. As the raft moves, I am actually sitting still—not moving at all. Leaving issues of turbulence to one side, the sense of movement comes only as I refer to landmarks on the shore, which I gradually leave behind me. The same experience of no-movement holds true if I am floating on my back on the stream, or even if I am swimming in the current.

Look at the photograph of a stream reproduced on the previous page. In the frozen moment that the photograph captures, there is no movement at all: The stream does not stream. Something similar seems to be true for the present moment of consciousness. The image of consciousness as a stream makes sense only if I refer backward or forward in time. And indeed, James notes as much. The continuity of the stream depends entirely on the “warmth and intimacy and immediacy” with which I remember my own previous experiences. (PP, p. 239) We see consciousness as a stream when we view it in retrospect. The ‘when’ of the stream of consciousness is situated in the past.

If this seems strange, consider some other examples of streams. Suppose I am traveling on a highway in a car. We find it natural enough to say that I am part of a steady stream of traffic. But that is not how we actually experience things. Driving in my car, I sit still, surrounded by other cars that advance or recede relative to my position, aware of a landscape scrolling out of view behind me. The idea of a stream is an interpretation that we impose on these perceptual phenomena. Again, suppose I am on the sidewalk on a busy street, waiting for a break in the stream of traffic so that I cross over to the other side. Here the impression of a stream is immediate and direct. But it depends completely on taking a perspective from outside the stream. A parallel for consciousness might be reviewing a daily journal that chronicled my past activities. Looking backward in this way, I readily identify one event succeeding another; I recognize a steady stream. But while I am experiencing events, I simply experience them. Without the story of my own continuity to support it, I do not directly experience the so-called ‘stream’.

III. A Frozen Stream of Events

The stream of consciousness thus resolves into a stream of events, a stream that we can identify only in retrospect. This retrospective aspect of the stream is easily overlooked, but it has significant consequences. It turns out that the stream that constitutes consciousness is a stream frozen in the past, an icy, rigid stream.

I do not claim that this is the whole of what James meant when he spoke of the stream of consciousness; in fact, it is probably the least important part of what he meant. But it is this aspect of the stream that has come down into conventional understanding. The stream of consciousness becomes a stream of events unfolding in time. The Jamesian stream of consciousness becomes a Joycean stream of consciousness: one perception, memory, thought, or feeling blending imperceptibly into the next. The Jamesian admonition that consciousness is not a ‘train’ or ‘chain’ is here modulated into the far less suggestive insight that one conscious event is not sharply cut off from the next; that the two tend to melt into each other at the edges.

James himself often understood the stream of consciousness in a far more dynamic sense. But at times he also seems to have meant just this: the stream as a frozen sequence of events that merge imperceptibly into one another with no sharp breaks, of ‘objects’ (PP, p. 254) that in some cases are more indeterminate than those we usually take note of. It is this context that we should understand a second metaphor James used for consciousness: the stalk of bamboo.

IV. From Frozen Stream to Bamboo Joints

When James introduces the metaphor of a stream of consciousness, he immediately adds that in terms of conscious contents, it does make sense to speak of a ‘chain’ or ‘train of events:

[T]hings are discrete and discontinuous; they do pass before us in a train or chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each other in twain. But their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time and the space in which they lie. . . . The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo. (PP, p. 239)

This image of joints in bamboo restates the image of a frozen stream. In the stream of consciousness, one event follows another. Looking back on them, we can separate these events; in fact, we do so automatically. For example, a moment ago I was thinking of how to write a transition; now I am thinking about how I am going to conclude this idea and move on to the next. These two thoughts represent segments of bamboo, and at least analytically, I can readily point to the joints between them.

Of course, this is a drastically oversimplified picture. As I write, I am thinking steadily of which word will come next. But there are many other kinds of movement. In writing, my ideas themselves reshape themselves, so that I end up saying things in a completely different way. Events of an entirely different order interpose themselves as well; for instance, I find myself wondering when it will be time for lunch. But to the extent the analogy is valid, it raises a new question. The bamboo of conscious events, divided into segments, grows with tremendous speed. But as each new event, each new segment, takes form, there is also the underlying continuity. The bamboo shoots up in segments, but in substance it remains a single stalk of bamboo. This substance James calls the flow of consciousness. But if consciousness remains the same despite its changing content, in what does this sameness lie?

V. The Stream of Language: James Makes the Wrong Move

James’ answer to this question is that the sameness of consciousness, its substance, is inseparable from its flow. But he goes on to analyze this flow in terms of language, and thus goes astray:

[Take] the thought, 'I am the same I that I was yesterday.’ If at the fourth moment of time [i.e., the fourth word] we annihilate the thinker and examine how the last pulsation of his consciousness was made, we find that it was an awareness of the whole content with ‘same’ most prominent, and the other parts of the thing known relatively less distinct. With each prolongation of the scheme in the time-direction, the summit of the curve of section would come further towards the end of the sentence. If we make a solid wooden frame with the sentence written on its front, and the time-scale on one of its sides, if we spread flatly a sheet of India rubber over its top . . . and slide a smooth ball under the rubber . . . the bulging of the membrane . . .at successive moments will symbolize the changing of the thought's content . . . . (PP, p. 283)

The images shown on the next page (one of which relates directly to the quote just given) occur a few pages apart from one another in the chapter from Principles of Psychology on the stream of consciousness, and are closely related. Since the first (Fig. 29) is actually labeled “The Stream of Consciousness,” it seems reasonable to understand it as James’ attempt to state what the stream of consciousness actually consists of. His model turns out to be language—the ‘flow’ of a particular sentence. When I utter a sentence, its content (in the first figure, “The pack of
cards is on the table”) constitutes the substance of the stream. Each word participates in that substance. As James puts it (PP, pp. 259-60), the words, considered as moments of the thought, “melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in a unitary undivided way.” The chart below makes the same point, but graphs the flow of the thought (the substance of consciousness) in three dimensions.

This analysis seems to me flawed in a fundamental way. A sentence is not a thought, let alone a moment of consciousness. It is a record of a thought, a trace left behind. When I say “I am the same I, that I was yesterday,” I am reporting a thought that was already complete before I opened my mouth to speak. In this example, then, James traps himself in the ‘pastness’ of the stream to which I referred above. Attempting to arrive at the flow that gives consciousness its special sort of substance, he ends up at the past-centered content of consciousness.

VI. From Substance to Flow: Beyond the Pail

I have dwelt on this example because it is so characteristic of how we get confused when we look at consciousness. We think we are in touch with its workings, when actually we are focused on its content; we think we are investigating its flow, when actually we are caught up in past-centered identities that succeed one another. We think we are being James at his dynamic best, but in fact we are being Joyce.

As I have suggested, James himself at times got caught in this very confusion, but not always. The notion of flow in a more dynamic sense keeps coming back in James, even if he does not always stay true to its implications. This is perhaps most clearly visible in a Jamesian elaboration on the metaphor of consciousness as a stream, having to do with pails and pots:

The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it.

In this image, James introduces a new and powerful perspective. Before, flow and substance (content) were uneasily joined together: consciousness was a ‘something’ whose substance was ‘somehow’ flowing. Now, however, flow and substance begin to be distinguished from each other, or else the ‘flowing substantiality’ of consciousness is set clearly apart from the kind of substance possessed by ordinary entities. For consider: If we came to the stream with our usual sense of substance in operation, there would be no basis for distinguishing between the water in the pail and the “free water that flows round it.” Yet James wants to insist that this distinction is crucial, and that psychology goes awry the moment it overlooks it.

The image of the pail is meant to tell us that a focus on substance in the ordinary sense will not give insight into the workings of consciousness. To the extent that the earlier image of joints in bamboo suggests otherwise, James has moved beyond it. In describing consciousness in terms of a bamboo stalk (or a linear stream patterned on the model of language), James despite himself falls into the trap of understanding consciousness in terms of its content. Now he is ready to move beyond this focus. In fact, he is about to make the claim that we arrive at what is most vital in consciousness when we turn away from substance and content entirely. He does so through another famous image: