No Hard Problem in William James’s Psychology

Writer Tracy Witham argues that William James flipped the paradigm in which the hard problem arises because James viewed consciousness through a problem he believed it solved by selecting for adaptive responses to specific environmental situations (James, 1890). Essentially, James believed that a brain complex enough to support a proliferation of options for responding to environmental situations is more likely to obscure than to identify the best option to use, unless that brain also has a selection mechanism for choosing adaptive over less, non-, and maladaptive options. But the question remains, Witham says, whether consciousness is, at least, a good prima facie fit, to address what can be called “the selection problem.”

Consciousness and the Selection Problem

The hypothesis that underlies James's view, she says, is that consciousness increases an organism's fitness by “bringing … pressure to bear in favor of those of its performances which make for the most permanent interests of the brain's owner …” (James, 1890, p. 140).

Specifically, the role James gave to consciousness must be understood only in the context of the formation of de facto ends which he believed form when preferred sensations are recalled in their absence (James, 1890, p. 78). This context is crucial, because it is consciousness that confers the preferences for some sensations over others and thereby serves as the source of the ends. But to understand why James gave consciousness that role, Witham says we need to understand his two-word phrase, "cerebral reflex," (James, 1890, p. 80), which implies a stimulus-and-response schema is the basis for the ends-and-means couplings that form cerebral reflexes. However, there is a problem with the implication. For this to work, ends must stand in for stimuli, arising in interactions between organisms and their environments.

Cerebral Reflex and Adaptive Role

The problem is solved, Witham says, if consciousness just is what it seems to be: the means by which we reflect on our interactions with our environments to sense whether the interactions are favorable or not. So, what consciousness seems to be fits James's hypothesis perfectly, that its role is to "bring … pressure to bear [in favor of] those of our performances" that are adaptive.

Reflective experience, in short, makes it possible to identify experiences of our environmental interactions that contain adaptive behaviors and retain them as cerebral reflexes for future use. But then, as the means to solve the selection problem, consciousness becomes an adaptive adaptation in the sense of being an adaptation selecting for adaptive behaviors. And it does so by being, indeed, what it seems to be: an adaptive adaptation that is a marvelous source of solutions, not a confounding source of problems.

The critical question, however, is whether a zombie-like black box of sufficient complexity could perform environmentally driven, fitness enhancing, evolutionarily successful activities, and if so, why then the radical advent of something so startlingly novel in the universe: inner experience? In other words, while the question of why consciousness was favored and selected by evolution is important, it is not the question of what consciousness actually is, which of course is the hard problem.