The flow of anoetic to noetic and autonoetic consciousness: A vision of unknowing (anoetic) and knowing (noetic) consciousness in the remembrance of things past and imagined futures
Marie Vandekerckhove, Jaak Panksepp
Keywords: Semantic and episodic memory, Anoetic consciousness, Noetic consciousness, Autonoetic consciousness, Self, Identity, Brain Development
Abstract: In recent years there has been an expansion of scientific work on consciousness. However, there is an increasing necessity to integrate evolutionary and interdisciplinary perspectives and to bring affective feelings more centrally into the overall discussion. Pursuant especially to the theorizing of Endel Tulving (1985, 2004, 2005), Panksepp (1998a, 2003, 2005) and Vandekerckhove (2009) we will look at the phenomena starting with primary-process consciousness, namely the rudimentary state of autonomic awareness or unknowing (anoetic) consciousness, with a fundamental form of first-person ‘self-experience’ which relies on affective experiential states and raw sensory and perceptual mental existences, to higher forms of knowing (noetic and autonoetic) and self-aware consciousness. Since current scientific approaches are most concerned with the understanding of higher declarative states of consciousness, we will focus on these vastly underestimated primary forms of consciousness which may be foundational for all forms of higher ‘knowing consciousness’.
1. Consciousness as a continuum of stages
Within consciousness studies and the experimental analysis of subjective experience, the relationship between the self, human memory and awareness has been considered in depth by many philosophers and theoreticians. Theories of higher forms of consciousness and awareness, along with actual studies in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neurophilosophy have set the stage. We will focus on the theorizing of Tulving (1985, 2002, 2004, 2005) and Vandekerckhove (2009), on higher levels of awareness as ‘‘noetic” and ‘‘autonoetic” consciousness based on semantic and episodic memory systems and lower levels of primary-process experience, which can be conceptualized as ‘‘anoetic” consciousness relying on implicit procedural, sensory and affective memory and on the conceptualization and empirical foundation of raw affective consciousness of Panksepp (1998a, 2003, 2005, 2007), and primal perceptual consciousness (Merker, 2007) at the very lowest neuro-evolutionary levels.
We will concentrate in particular on anoetic consciousness which presumably preceded higher levels consciousness in brain–mind evolution. Such evolutionary viewpoints bring us closer to the understanding of the cross-species foundations of the self, intertwined with the development of different stages of consciousness in newborn humans, as developing brains begin to make sense of the world in the progression toward psychological maturation (Northoff &Panksepp, 2008; Reddy, 2008; Trevarten & Reddy, 2007; Trevarthen, Aitken, Vandekerckhove, Delafield-Butt, & Nagy, 2006; Vandekerckhove, 2009).
Developmentally, such integrative views help us understand how an enormous number of conscious experiences emerge from the flow of ancient mind–brain dynamics. It is now clear that young animals and humans deprived essentially of all neocortex are still conscious creatures, with primitive affective and sensory, perceptual capacities (Merker, 2007; Panksepp, 2008; Shewmon, Holmes, & Byrne, 1999). William James recognized this penumbra, the ‘‘psychic overtone” or ‘‘fringe” to higher awareness in his Chapter XI on Consciousness of his Principles of Psychology (1890):
‘‘The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even where the pails and the pots are actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.”
This type of anoetic consciousness may include aspects of the ‘‘fringe consciousness” that has been extensively discussed by Mangan (2001) along with the accompanying dozen commentaries. In our view, this ‘‘free water of consciousness”, that has been underestimated empirically, is largely affective (Panksepp, 2003), based on ancient systems that encode basic (primary-process) emotional and motivational survival values, that are encapsulated within the concept of raw affective consciousness (Panksepp, 2008).
In our estimation, this anoetic form of consciousness, has not yet received the attention it deserves in this era of resurgence of work on subtle mind issues that is the focus of this article. We hypothesize that this anoetic-affective foundation may be the primal stuff from which higher forms of noetic and autonoetic consciousness emerged in Mind–Brain evolution (Mind–Brain and Brain–Mind will be used here without hyphenation to reflect that we are discussing a fully unified concept with no residue of dualism).
Since this is a radical idea, to be explored from many distinct but converging perspectives, we will use a recursive style where some key arguments are reformulated in slightly different contexts and along many different trajectories of seemingly infinitely complex layers of Brain–Mind processing. In as complex and hierarchical, developmental, mental landscape as we will try to depict, one needs to view the same concept from many different, albeit harmonious, perspectives.
Based on this foundational view, as children undergo a continuous flow of developmental stages, they emerge from a state of unreflective, here and now anoetic consciousness to increasingly complex forms of self-awareness (Reddy, 2008). We envision these developmental stages to progress from a state of embryonic unconsciousness1 , to a global infantile biological adaptive state of unknowing, pure affective-sensorial and perceptual consciousness—two seemingly distinct forms of ‘‘anoetic” consciousness (affective-sensory and perceptual) toward higher forms of self-consciousness and intersubjective engagements. These higher forms of consciousness continue to rely on increasingly differentiated affective states along with increasingly complex implicit procedural memories that are gradually transformed into enduring forms of knowing consciousness.
Using a terminology developed by Tulving, primal ‘‘anoetic”—purely experiential and unreflective—consciousness, serves as a foundation for the emergence of knowing forms of consciousness that involve first noetic (knowledge-based), then autonoetic (self-awareness based) consciousness imbued with semantic and episodic memories, respectively.
We believe that the anoetic level of non-reflective, primary-process consciousness has been vastly neglected in consciousness studies, and our main aim here is to clarify, conceptually, how this level of analysis may be essential for understanding the higher levels of knowing and awareness—noetic and autonoetic consciousness. Since anoetic consciousness has probably received the least attention in consciousness studies compared to knowing forms of consciousness, our argument about evolutionary progressions and linkages is, by necessity, premised more on issues of conceptual coherence rather than on a rich storehouse of empirical information. The vision we wish to share is one which may help integrate many diverse lines of thought in consciousness studies, and provide a conceptual infrastructure for future studies of anoetic consciousness. Thus, we will here focus on the importance of a proper conceptualization of a primal form of pre-reflexive here-and-now ‘self-experience’ or unreflective core-self-consciousness apparent at an anoetic level.
In the beginning, human infants do not remember events in time and contexts nor do they appear to reflect on the origin of their own knowledge and their experience of themselves as living organisms. They are presumably still living just in the ‘‘free flowing water” of consciousness, as William James put it, while increasingly being captivated by implicit experiential information about themselves and the world. With a growing sense of a personal self and unique identity, harvested from a continuous stream of being and acting, which begins a long and sustained trajectory as children are able to retrieve events and actions in ever longer and ever increasing time lines. All this is critically dependent on the maturation and developmental-epigenetic maturation of the neocortex. However, prior to this, at a time when children are not yet capable of retrieving from memory specific personal events in explicit forms, they do possess affective, sensory and perceptual states of being (Merker, 2007; Panksepp, 1998a), as well as intersubjective abilities (Reddy, 2008), and procedural information on an implicit level, much of it directly dependent on ancient subcortical functions. This cauldron of fundamental brain–mind processes is, as far as we know, the source of primary-process anoetic consciousness.
In order to understand conceptually the evolution of higher forms of consciousness that can reflect on idiographic personal aspects of self and identity, and the extended flow of events in the world, and eventually related states of others, (i.e., the emergence of ‘‘mental time travel”) we must first consider the antecedent forms of mind. Thus, we must first start with the nature of unconsciousness, which we suggest, serves as the foundation for the emergence first of an affective form of anoetic consciousness, followed soon or perhaps coincidentally with a more
perceptual anoetic consciousness. Accordingly, any comprehensive approach to the problem of consciousness must not only consider the problem of different evolutionary and developmental stages of consciousness, but also the nature of mental unconsciousness.
As William James put it: ‘‘Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded” (James, 1902, p. 388).
2. From unconsciousness and unknowing consciousness towards knowing consciousness . . . . ."
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/95b1/87b876eb74b8e9cc9a8bc468bd9845ee3a71.pdf
