Consciousness Is Motor

Abstract

We remember William James for his colorful descriptions of subjective experience, perhaps above all. But in Consciousness Is Motor, Alexander Klein shows that James sculpted his phenomenal descriptions around an armature of empirical details. Klein reconstructs James’s models of consciousness and volition, uncovering results from animal experimentation and clinical observation on which those models were built. James’s early work on consciousness engaged the 1870s automatism controversy. The controversy was triggered, Klein argues, by experiments demonstrating that living, decapitated frogs are capable of goal-directed action. One side regarded goal-directedness as evidence of spinal consciousness; the other espoused epiphenomenalism, reasoning that consciousness must play no role in producing even purposive action since the latter is possible for brainless creatures. James intervened, Klein shows, by arguing that consciousness has a likely evolutionary function—behavior regulation—and so cannot be a mere epiphenomenon. It accomplishes this function by affording a capacity for evaluation, on Klein’s reading. As evidence, James appealed not just to introspection, but also to experimental facts, such as that hemisphere-less vertebrates have a diminished capacity for evaluating different available means to pursue goals. James’s “ideo-motor” model of action demonstrated precisely how an evaluating consciousness could help regulate behavior. Klein excavates key clinical observations James designed the ideo-motor model to accommodate. James’s models of consciousness and action would later feed into his distinctive philosophical outlook, Klein concludes, soon to be known as pragmatism.