Shaping Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness

Pre-reflective self-consciousness—the immediate awareness one has of oneself prior to any act of reflection—cannot be adequately captured by computational or mathematical models of the mind. Theories that treat this basic self-awareness as a relation (e.g., between a subject and an object) fall into a paradox. Following the New Heidelberg School, the paper argues that pre-reflective consciousness is instead a non-relational, intrinsic quality of experience. Such an approach avoids the paradox and better accounts for the self-determination of mental states that are not directed toward anything else.

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to address the problem of pre-reflective self-consciousness in the context of the contemporary computational approaches to the mind. These standpoints try to grasp consciousness in the language of mathematics and geometry, hoping for its more precise description. As a counterbalance to such theories, Sartre’s abiding insight (pre-reflective consciousness) and Henrich’s critique of the modern philosophy of reflection on rationalism and empiricism are receiving an increasing attention. In our opinion, the conceptions that consider pre-reflective self-consciousness as relational fall into a paradox. We provide an argumentation that such approaches are missing the basic problem of pre-reflective consciousness, namely the self-determination of non-relational mental states. Therefore, following the New Heidelberg’s argumentation, we propose another approach which returns to the concept of consciousness as based on irrelational intrinsic quality of experience.