The stream of consciousness

Thursday 12 March 2026, with adults from the UK, Romania, China and Canada

It’s been a busy day at my desk without lunch or a coffee break. In the few seconds before I end one call and open this one, I feel the shameful recognition that I can’t be bothered with the session that is about to come. I’m too frazzled and there’s too much to do. I haven’t had time to plan something properly. All I’m bringing is flotsam and jetsam.

These feelings dissolve when I see the friendly faces of those who have arrived on Zoom for the session, some familiar and some new. This group have met online, each Thursday, in some form or another since the pandemic. What began as an experiment in dialoguing online during Covid, has turned into a committed group who meet talk about philosophy for the joy of it. I feel sad that given my job, which is to promote philosophical enquiry and its benefits, meeting like this is such a rare luxury.

I share a story about a psychological experiment that I have recently read about in a newspaper article. The experiment is part of the work of Russell T Hurlburt, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada, who, for 50 years, has been trying to understand the nature of consciousness. It involves research subjects wearing an earpiece that buzzes as various points of the day prompting them to document what they are conscious of at that moment. This process is described by Michael Pollan as ‘dipping a ladle’ into the ‘onrushing stream’ of consciousness. I include an image of a ladle in my slides and periodically stop the discussion and ask the participants to ‘dip their ladle’ and write in the chat what they find. People’s responses are self-conscious and cerebral at first: Leyla shares that she is thinking about a dialogue between Socrates and Plato. After a few contributions, Richard admits he is Googling something I mentioned in my introduction while someone else notices their dog barking at someone at the door. I share a passage from the article from the American philosopher and psychologist William James. I am intrigued by this quote, because in my own work, I have read the philosopher and writer Henry James and I haven’t realised until now, that the two are brothers. And moreover they, each in their own way—one narrative and one empirical—have both articulated and explored the nature of consciousness, developing this idea of consciousness as something that constantly meanders and moves and is extraordinarily difficult to capture.

"As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.” – William James 

I have finally finished a PhD in which watery metaphors organise the chapters around wading, navigating, swimming, immersing, rowing, tacking and drowning. In my thesis I defend the idea that we are swimming in stories that form an essential part of ethics education in virtue of their ability to reveal what is to be alive and awake in a particular time and place. While I don’t explicitly discuss the stream of consciousness in that work, I do defend the idea that narratives grant us access to the mind and lives of others in ethically illuminating ways. I’m keen to discover what this group makes of these kinds of claims. But my approach is not to present my work like a lecture, but instead to engage the group in enquiry. My plan involves little more than to offer the group some ideas they might find appealing, and to see which ones float. Next, I share an observation from William James about forgetting a word. How strange, he observes, that the word is forgotten, yet when someone suggests the missing word, we know for certain that isn’t right. Where is the missing word? It’s not in our accessible conscious experience. We may not find it on our ladle, but we have the firm believe that it is in there somewhere.  Participants recall driving home from work and finding themselves back in the driveway with no memory of the journey. ‘I’m obviously conscious enough to have avoided a car accident, yet in another sense I really wasn’t there.’ shares Vanessa.

I ask the group if they feel they can really ‘dip the ladle’ and examine what they find, how easy is it to examine and articulate our minds? Leyla expresses the idea that in her mind, at least some of the time, there is emotion first, large and inchoate. Words come afterwards and impose sense on things. But in doing so they change the experience. In a related idea, Frances acknowledges that there are some inner thoughts and sensations we don’t need to share because they are private. I observed that when I asked them to dip their ladle this time, no one shared the need to go to the toilet.  Chris says she thinks in words, but others tell her they think in images. For those people to write down their thoughts, it must be difficult she reflects: They have to translate their ideas, and this may involve transforming them. Jose shares an image: the front cover of Philosophy Now magazine. It is a brain depicted as an iceberg, with most of it submerged beneath the surface of the sea. He shares it to demonstrate how articulate images can be. But for me, it also offers up another watery metaphor for consciousness, one in which the subconscious is far greater and inaccessible than the part we can see ourselves and show to others. I share a quote from William’s brother Henry. Henry James’ work is more focussed on psychology than plot, his attention to psychological detail is regarded as a precursor of the kind of modern stream of consciousness prose, we see in writers like Virgina Woolf. I ask the group: ‘Are writers any better at expressing stream of consciousness?’ This doesn’t strike them as problematic. Everyone seems to simply agree that this is so. But I stir things. ‘But surely this passage has been painstakingly edited, just like the Leyla edits her emotions or Frances self-censors. It is also imagined?’ The group begins to wonder if Henry James is any closer to revealing the nature of consciousness then the rest of us. Frances suggests that the stream of consciousness is ‘just a literary convention’ and not a representation of what it is to be awake and alive in the world at all.

We’re almost out of time. I don’t get to share the video I have found of an art piece in which a large pair of reflective glasses reveal to the viewer, all the things that the subject sees. I don’t get to ask: ‘Can we ever see as other people see?’

But there is just enough time to share a final stimulus. When he was feverish and disorientated on his death bed, Henry James dictated some fragmentary thoughts to those around him. These thoughts were preserved by his estate and later printed in an article by Leon Edel that I stumbled upon earlier in the week. The dictations are disjointed. On first read I thought I grasped something about what they meant, but now they are on the slides I can’t understand them at all. Did Henry James dip his ladle in his steam of consciousness in these final moments? In doing do, has he shown us what it is like to be Henry James, dying? Are these strange, scrambled words, any more of less revealing than those he wrote at the height of his powers? The session is almost over; my to do list floods back into view.

The session was fragmentary and fleeting. At one point Steve said to me: ‘I don’t know what kind of answer you are looking for here….’  I answered honestly. ‘I don’t know either’. But for an hour and a half, it has been nice to just float.

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