Jacob on Consciousness

“What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.”

“Consciousness... is our mode of analysis of the outside world into objects and actions. ...it at once posed a problem... that we also think of ourselves as objects and we therefore also apply language to ourselves. We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols of it. And all of the difficult paradoxes which go right back to the Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.”

“Our consciousness depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in... categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it. [Difficulties] arise from this remarkable and wholly human gift that allows us first of all to separate ourselves from the outside world. ...[W]e are able to rearrange it in our heads ...And with that goes inevitably a sense of ourselves, sometimes also as an outside person. The Cartesian dualism between mind and body arises directly from this, and so do all the famous paradoxes, both in mathematics and in linguistics...”