by John Cowley

Created on: September 10, 2008

Modern studies of consciousness actually date back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the comparatively new science of psychology started to emerge from its roots in philosophy and physiology. According to Kihlstrom (1999) the structuralist school of psychology began with Wundt and Tichner who attempted to analyse conscious mental states in terms of their constituent sensations, images and feelings. This preferred method of introspection assumed that people had accurate introspective awareness of their own mental states. Although William James opposed the doctrines of structuralism in general he used a version of introspection in his own research. In his Principles of Psychology', James referred to psychology as the science of mental life. In the Briefer Course', he adopted a definition of psychology first attributed to Ladd (Kihlstrom, 1999), "the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such".

It was clearly understood by James and others that there was more to mental life than was readily available to introspection. Although the idea that unconscious processes are important elements in mental life is attributed to Freud, it was an old idea dating back to Leibniz the eighteenth century German philosopher (Kihlstrom, 1999) who suggested that every moment is filled with an infinity of perceptions most of which go unnoticed and are not available to reflection. Leibniz also suggested that we are never indifferent although we may appear to be so and that the choices we make arise from these insensible stimuli, which cause us to find one direction of action more comfortable than another.

At the close of the eighteenth century the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View' in which he devoted a major section to the concept of ideas that we have without being conscious of them' (Kihlstrom, 1999). Kant found it something of a contradiction that we had ideas that we were not conscious of at the time although we later became aware of them indirectly. This is not such a contradiction when one considers the possibility of quantum level communications as postulated by EMW.

In the nineteenth century, Herbart, referred to the limen' the sensory threshold as a mental battleground where competing perceptions, mostly unconscious ones, competed for representation in consciousness. This idea was obviously an extension of what Leibniz had stated much earlier (Kihlstrom, 1999). Hermann von Helmholtz in his Treatise

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>