Marcel and Bisiach: The Language of Awareness
August 28, 1997 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195113556.003.0013 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that the universe's history features three great upsurges—matter, life, and consciousness—and that consciousness, being a genuine novelty scarcely predictable from what preceded it, requires its own dedicated science, which the author proposes to call psychology, devoted to its inner workings, distribution, emergence, development, and relation to behavior. |
Abstract
Abstract To casual inspection, the history of the universe would appear to have been marked by three great upsurges. In the beginning, came matter in spaceparticles, planets, galaxies. Physics is the science of this primordial being: it seeks to say what the laws of matter are, and (if possible) how matter came to exist in the first place. After this initial upsurge, nothing essentially novel came on the scene for an unconscionably long time. Then living organisms arrived. Self-replicating macromolecules begat single-cell organisms, which led eventually to big, complex, warm animals like ourselves. Matter became intricately arranged into living forms. Biology is the science of this new arrival, and evolutionary biology the study of how it came about. The third major upsurge was consciousness. Now here was a genuine novelty, scarcely predictable from what preceded it. Consciousness would need a science all of its own, as special as it is, a science that would try to understand its inner workings, why some things have consciousness and some don’t, how it emerged from what came before, how it develops in the individual, how it relates to behavior, and so on. Psychology sounds like a good name for such a science: the systematic study of perhaps the most remarkable of nature’s products.