"From the standpoint of the cerebral cortex considered as an essential part of the mechanism of higher conscious acts, every afferent stimulus, as we have seen, is to some extent affected by its passage through various subcortical association centers (i.e., it carries a quale of central origin). But this same afferent impulse in its passage through the spinal cord and brain stem may, before reaching the cortex, discharge collateral impulses into the lower centers of reflex coördination, from which incipient (or even actually consummated) motor responses are discharged previous to the cortical reaction. These motor discharges may, through the 'back stroke' action, in turn exert an influence upon the slower cortical reaction. Thus the lower reflex response may in a literal physiological sense act into the cortical stimulus complex and become an integral part of it."[37]
It seems clear, then, that conscious behavior involves a certain process of organization which constitutes a differential. The units entering into this process are "definitely organized systems of neural discharge," the antecedent organization of these several systems being due either to the inherited or to the acquired structure of the nervous system. Given a certain amount of plasticity, the nervous system builds up specific forms of response for certain objects or situations, and these forms of response subsequently become the material from which new organizations or new modes of response are constructed. The achievements of the past, accordingly, become stepping-stones to new achievement. The new organization, moreover, is not determined by a mechanism antecedently provided, but has a peculiar flexibility, so as to meet the demands of a new situation. That is, a new mode of procedure is adopted. Instead of being a purely mechanical reaction, the response that results from the situation is tentative or experimental in character, and "by a process of trial and error, perhaps, the elements necessary to effect the adaptive response may be assembled and the problem solved."
We may add at once that the reorganization which is required to constitute conscious behavior varies a great deal in extent. In an act that is more or less habitual, a comparatively slight modification of the corresponding organized system of neural discharge will suffice to harmonize the conflicting elements, whereas on other occasions a more extensive modification is required. But in any case it appears that there is a certain impropriety in describing conscious behavior in terms of a temporary reflex, since the study of this behavior is concerned with the organization of the discordant elements, not as a result, but primarily as a process. In a reflex act we may suppose that the stimulus which evokes the first stage in the response is like the first in a row of upstanding bricks, which in falling knocks down another. That is, the reflex arc is built up by agencies that are quite independent of the subsequent act. The arc is all set up and ready for use by the time the reflex act appears upon the scene. In the case of conscious activity, on the other hand, we find a very different state of affairs. The arc is not first constructed and then used, but is constructed as the act proceeds; and this progressive organization is, in the end, what is meant by conscious behavior. If the course of a reflex act may be compared with traveling in a railroad train, the progress of a conscious act is more like that of a band of explorers, who hew their path and build their bridges as they go along. The direction of the act is not determined from without but from within; the end is internal to the process.
This process of organization and purposive direction is exemplified in every act of attention. Is that noise, for example, a horse in the street, or is it the rain on the roof? What we find in such a situation is not a paralysis of activity, but a redirection. The incompatibility of responses is purely relative. There is indeed a mutual inhibition of the responses for hoof-beats and rain respectively, in the sense that neither has undisputed possession of the field; but this very inhibition sets free the process of attention, in which the various responses participate and coöperate. There is no static balancing of forces, but rather a process in which the conflict is simply a condition for an activity of a different kind. If I am near a window facing the street, my eye turns thither for a clue; if the appeal to vision be eliminated, the eye becomes unseeing and coöperates with the ear by excluding all that is irrelevant to the matter in hand. In this process the nervous system functions as a unit, with reference to the task of determining the source and character of the sound. This task or problem dominates the situation. A voice in an adjoining room may break in, but only as something to be ignored and shut out; whereas a voice in the street may become all-absorbing as possibly indicating the driver of the hypothetical horse. That is, the reason why the conflict of responses does not end in a deadlock, but in a redirection, is that a certain selectiveness of response comes into play. Out of the mass of more or less inchoate activities a certain response is selected as a rallying-point for the rest, and this selection is of a purposive character. The selection is determined by reference to the task in hand, which is to restore a certain harmony of response. Accordingly, that response is selected which gives promise of forwarding the business of the moment. By virtue of this selective character, one of the constituents of the total activity becomes exalted among its fellows and is entrusted with the function of determining further behavior.
The purpose of the discussion, up to this point, is to put forward this selective or teleological character as the fundamental and differentiating trait of conscious behavior; and our task, accordingly, is to give an account of the nature and modus operandi of this purposive control. This control, it is evident, consists in giving direction to behavior with reference to results that are still in the future. The basis for this anticipation of the future is furnished by the nascent responses which foreshadow further activity, even while they are still under the thraldom of the inhibitions which hold them back. These suppressed activities furnish a sort of diagram or sketch of further possible behavior, and the problem of consciousness is the problem of making the result or outcome of these incipient responses effective in the control of behavior. Future results or consequences must be converted into present stimuli; and the accomplishment of this conversion is the miracle of consciousness. To be conscious is to have a future possible result of present behavior embodied as a present existence functioning as a stimulus to further behavior. Thus the qualities of a perceptual experience may be interpreted, without exception, as anticipations of the results of activities which are as yet in an embryonic stage. The results of the activity that is as yet partly suppressed are already expressed or anticipated in the perception. The present experience may, as James says, "shoot its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which lie the thoughts as yet unborn."[38] A baseball player, for example, who is all "set" to field a ball as a preliminary to a further play, sees the ball, not simply as an approaching object, but as ball-to-be-caught-and-then-thrown-to-first-base. Moreover, the ball, while still on the way, is a ball-that-may-bound-to-the-right-or-to-the-left. The corresponding movements of the player to the right or left, and the act of throwing, although present only as inhibited or incipient acts, are nevertheless embodied in the visual experience. Similarly my couch looks soft and inviting, because the optical stimulation suggests or prompts, not only the act of lying down, but also the kind of relaxation that is made possible by a comfortable bed. So likewise the tiger's jaws and claws look cruel and horrible, because in that perception are reflected the incipient movements of defense and recoil which are going on in the body of the observer. Perception, like our air-castles, or like dreams in the Freudian theory, presents what is at best but a suggestion or program in the guise of accomplished fact.
This projection, however, of our submerged activities into our perceptions requires a more precise statement. According to the foregoing contention, the appearance, for example, of a razor's edge as sharp is the sensory correlate of an incipient response which, if it were to attain full-blown perfection, would be the reaction to a cut. By hypothesis, however, the response is inhibited, and it is this inhibition which calls forth the perception of the object. If the response encountered no obstruction, adaptation would be complete and perception would not occur. Since there is a blocking of the response, nature resorts to a special device in order to overcome the difficulty, and this device consists in furnishing the organism with a new type of stimulus. The razor as perceived does not actually cut just now, but it bodies forth the quality 'will cut,' i.e., the perceived attribute derives its character from what the object will, or may, do at a future time. That is, a perceived object is a stimulus which controls or directs the organism by results which have not yet occurred, but which will, or may, occur in the future. The uniqueness of such a stimulus lies in the fact that a contingent result somehow becomes operative as a present fact; the future is transferred into the present so as to become effective in the guidance of behavior.
This control by a future that is made present is what constitutes consciousness. A living body may respond to an actual cut by a knife on purely mechanical or reflex principles; but to respond to a cut by anticipation, i.e., to behave with reference to a merely possible or future injury, is manifestly an exhibition of intelligence. Not that there need be any conscious reference to the future as future in the act. Merely to see the object as "sharp" is sufficient to give direction to conduct. But "sharp" is equivalent to "will cut"; the quality of sharpness is a translation of future possibility into terms of present fact, and as thus translated the future possibility becomes a factor in the control of behavior. Perception, therefore, is a point where present and future coincide. What the object will do is, in itself, just a contingency, an abstract possibility, but in perception this possibility clothes itself in the garments of present, concrete fact and thus provides the organism with a different environment. The environment provides a new stimulus by undergoing a certain kind of change, i.e., by exercising a peculiar function of control. This control is seeing, and the whole mystery of consciousness is just this rendering of future stimulations or results into terms of present existence. Consciousness, accordingly, is a name for a certain change that takes place in the stimulus; or, more specifically, it is a name for the control of conduct by future results or consequences.
To acquire such a stimulus and to become conscious are one and the same thing. As was indicated previously, the conscious stimulus is correlated with the various inherited and acquired motor tendencies which have been set off and which are struggling for expression, and the uniqueness of the stimulus lies in the fact that the adaptive value of these nascent motor tendencies becomes operative as the determining principle in the organization of the response. The response, for example, to "sharp" or "will cut" is reminiscent of an earlier reaction in which the organism engaged in certain defensive movements as the result of an actual injury. That is, the response to "sharp" is a nascent or incipient form of a response which at the time of its first occurrence was the expression of a maladaptation. The response that is induced when an object is seen as sharp would be biologically bad, if it were completed, and the fact that the object is seen as sharp means that this result is foreshadowed and operates as a stimulus to prevent such maladaptation. Similarly the couch which meets my weary eye becomes a stimulus to repose because the nascent activity which is aroused would be biologically good if completed. In any case the character of the stimulus is determined by the adaptive value which the incipient activity would have if it were carried out. Consciousness, accordingly, is just a future adaptation that has been set to work so as to bring about its own realization. The future thus becomes operative in the present, in much the same way as the prospects for next year's crop may be converted by the farmer into ready money with which to secure the tools for its production.
To justify this conclusion by a detailed and extensive application of this interpretation to every form of quality and relation would carry us beyond the limits of the present undertaking. It is a view, however, which offers possibilities that have not as yet been properly recognized. Certain considerations, besides those already discussed, may be mentioned as giving it an antecedent plausibility. As regards simple sense-qualities, there is abundant reason for believing that Locke's doctrine of "simple ideas" is a violent perversion of the facts. To assume that the last results of analysis are the first things in experience is to give a fatal twist to psychology and to commit us to the fruitless agonies of epistemology. The original "blooming, buzzing confusion" with which experience starts becomes differentiated into specific qualities only to the extent that certain typical and organized forms of response are built up within the body. Sense-qualities, in other words, are functionally not simple but extremely complex; they owe their distinctiveness or individuality to the fact that each of them embodies a specific set of cues or anticipations, with reference to further experiences. The difference between a quality like "sharpness" and a quality like "red" lies in the fact that the former is a translation of a relatively simple possibility, viz., "will cut," whereas the latter embodies a greater variety of anticipations. The perception of red, being the outcome of many comparisons and associations, presupposes a complex physical response which contains multitudinous tendencies to reinstate former responses; and the combined effect of these suppressed tendencies is the perception of a color which offers possibilities of control over behavior in such directions as reminiscences, idle associations, or perhaps scrutiny and investigation. A similar explanation evidently applies to abstract ideas, which neither admit of reduction to "revived sensations" nor compel the adoption of a peculiarly "spiritual" or "psychic" existence in the form of unanalyzable meanings. Here again a complex mode of response must be assumed, having as its correlate an experience describable only in terms of its functioning, which is such as to enable the organism to act intelligently, i.e., with reference to future results, which are sufficiently embodied in the experience to secure appropriate behavior. Again, this point of view offers a satisfactory solution for the time-worn puzzle of relativity. If perception is just the translation of future possible stimulations into present fact, there is assuredly no justification for the notion that perception distorts the facts or that discrepancies among different perceptions prove their "subjectivity." There remains but one test by which the correctness or validity of perception may be judged, viz., whether the perceived object proves to be the kind of stimulus which is reported or anticipated in the present experience.
So far our discussion has emphasized the anticipatory character of the conscious stimulus. Future consequences come into the present as conditions for further behavior. These anticipations are based, indeed, upon previous happenings, but they enter into the present situation as conditions that must be taken into account. But to take them into account means that the conscious situation is essentially incomplete and in process of transformation or reconstruction. This peculiar incompleteness or contingency stands out prominently when the situation rises to the level of uncertainty and perplexity. To borrow the classical illustration of the child and the candle, the child is in a state of uncertainty because the neural activity of the moment comprises two incompatible systems of discharge, the one being a grasping and holding, the other a withdrawal and such further movements as may be induced by contact with fire. Hence the candle has the seductiveness of a prize, but at the same time carries the suggestion of burning the fingers. That is, the perceived object has a unique character of uncertainty, which inheres in it as a present positive quality. We are here confronted with genuine contingency, such as is encountered nowhere else. Other modes of behavior may be uncertain in the sense that the incoming stimulation finds no fixed line of discharge laid down for itself within the organism. In seeking to convert itself into response it may either sweep away the obstructions in its path or work itself out along lines of less resistance, in ways that no man can foretell. There may be moments of equilibrium, moments when it remains to be seen where the dam will break and the current rush through. Such uncertainty, however, is the uncertainty of the bystander who attempts to forecast what will happen next. It is not the uncertainty that figures as an integral part of conscious behavior.