The Diving Bell of Consciousness

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by the fine-art painter Julien Schnabel, portrays in impressionistic detail the life of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who awakes from a stroke and finds himself in the hospital. Except for vertical eye movements and blinking capacity, Bauby is completely paralyzed. From the first camera frames, Schnabel masterfully submerges the viewer in Bauby’s first-person perspective. We are locked-in Bauby's textured phenomenological viewpoint. Immersed within, we are made to feel the human distance between Bauby and his family and the attending medical staff. Connection to the outside world is tenuous.

Locked-in syndrome, Bauby's neurological condition, is caused by damage to the brain stem, the brain's area responsible for movement and psychomotor activity. Bauby's condition presents a fascinating dimension in consciousness research and neuroethics. According to early consciousness voices, such as the physiologist T.H. Huxley from his 1875 address "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and its History," Bauby would be classified as a non-conscious being. Huxley famously proclaimed that humans, like all animals, are automata and that consciousness is an epiphenomenal outcome of our physiology, namely the biological reflex and nervous systems. In Huxley's terms, consciousness or mental activity is the "steam coming off the locomotive.”

Locked-in syndrome patients have been variously described as "a corpse with living eyes" and as having a "fugitive consciousness." The diving bell is a heavy and restrictive diving suit depicted in Schnabel's film sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Wearing the diving bell, the now paradoxically dual-bodied Bauby seems disembodied, free-floating in an unsurveyed consciousness space. Bauby, sinking to the ocean's floor, at once protected and confined. The self's animating eyes from within an incapacitated reflex system become a living falsification of Huxley's automata theory. His negated locomotive, the consciousness diving suit Bauby wore, blew much steam.

A generation after Huxley, the Behaviorists emerged, who, like Huxley, had a mechanistic view of mental activity. For them, the individual's internal phenomenology is extrinsically determined through agent-environment interaction. Behaviorism's mission was to create an empirical basis for psychology through observable behavior based on stimuli-response reinforcement patterns. How would we imagine B.F. Skinner, the famous Harvard Behaviorist, theorize Bauby's state of consciousness? Bauby was not an acting agent, and Skinner's determinism notoriously undercut the importance of unbridled introspection. Wishing to divest the science of psychology from its religious roots and artistic leaning, Skinner concretized subjective private experience into behavioral outcomes. Thus, in the eyes of the psychologist researcher, everything must be operationalized. How do we then make sense of Bauby's puzzling consciousness position, which largely remained outside the agent-environment complex?

Finally, how would the phenomenal internalist make "sense" of Bauby? This neurophilosophical position postulates that consciousness derives from internal processes and the neural coalitions that generate cognition rather than external mechanistic ones depicted in Huxley's and Skinner's determinism. To the phenomenal internalist, the brain in a vat can generate or simulate consciousness and, by extension, the world around them. In this example, Bauby's diving suit is the brain in its vat, which is capably conscious but incapable of crossing the threshold into relationality.

As the film progresses, a language is cultivated between Bauby and the surrounding clinicians through eye blinking, thus crossing somewhat, for Bauby, the threshold of an isolated consciousness. As consciousness becomes relational, the phenomenologically embedded camera viewpoint slips into a third-person view. The camera freely roams, explores the world, and even returns its gaze to Bauby. Schnabel illustrates the mind's untethering from its diving suit through the imaginative pursuit of connection and expression - a butterfly roaming the expanse. Likewise, Bauby cultivates a written language of connection by writing a memoir. His mind-brain takes a further flutter, moving him beyond the confines of solitary selfhood.

How does one understand consciousness in these terms? Is consciousness a substrate or the bottom ocean floor to unconsciousness as depicted in the diving suit carrying living awareness through the ocean's depths? Does consciousness underlie the epiphenomenal argument of early consciousness stakeholders such as Huxley and Watson and their determinist positions? Does the butterfly move one into a relational consciousness dynamic through connection with others? Does relationality foster a metacognitive consciousness capable of representing one's own and other individuals' internal states? Does this form of consciousness differ from the internal phenomenalists? Or are these distinctions imagined and mere projections from the brain's vat-centric position?

Bauby's consciousness position is enigmatic and requires a deep appreciation of our humanity and expansion of our limiting assumptions. He glides in randomized flits and cannot be claimed by any one consciousness net.