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SOUL DUST
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
SOUL DUST
The Magic of Consciousness
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
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Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey
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press.princeton.edu
Jacket art: Soul Dust 1, 2010, acrylic ink. By Susan Aldworth.
www.susanaldworth.com
Excerpt from Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, translated by robin Milner-Gulland and
Peter Levi (Penguin Books, 1962). Copyright © robin Milner-Gulland and Peter levi,
1962. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Excerpt from “The Dog Beneath the Skin” by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1936, W.
H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from “Aubade” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, copyright © 1977,
with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, publishers.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Humphrey, Nicholas.
Soul dust : the magic of consciousness / Nicholas Humphrey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13862-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Consciousness. I. Title. II.
Title: Magic of consciousness.
BF311.H7795 2011
126—dc22 2010036759
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro
Printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the
sunbeam; though this ill hap wait on her nativity, that she never
comes into the world, but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him
that brought her forth; till time, the midwife rather than the
mother of truth, have washed and salted the infant [and]
declared her legitimate.
—John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643
Contents
Invitation
Prelude
1 Coming-to Explained
Part One
2 Being “Like Something”
3 Sentition
4 Looping the Loop
Part Two
5 So What?
6 Being There
7 The Enchanted World
8 So That Is Who I Am!
9 Being Number One
Part Three
10 Entering the Soul Niche
11 Dangerous Territory
12 Cheating Death
Envoi
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Invitation
I wrote a short book a few years ago—Seeing Red: A Study in
Consciousness—that met with unexpectedly good reviews,
even from my colleagues.
1
Unexpected, because the usual thing, in the field that has
become known as “consciousness studies,” is for academics to
be dismissive of each other’s ideas. The psychologist Walter
Mischel has wryly noted: “Psychologists treat other people’s
theories like toothbrushes—no self-respecting person wants to
use anyone else’s.”
2
Philosophers tend to be charier still.
The review that pleased me best was in the American
Journal of Psychology: “This reviewer made at least three
passes through the book, each pass yielding a new
understanding. The first pass left me with a feeling of: ‘Oh he
doesn’t really mean THAT!’ But the second pass solidified and
verified: ‘Oh yeah he really does mean that.’ And the third, and
most rewarding pass: ‘Oh my god, I think he’s right!’”
3
nonetheless,
almost every discussion of Seeing Red had a sting in the
tail. No one would allow that the problem of consciousness had
actually been solved. Thus Steven Poole, writing in the
Guardian: “But the ‘hard problem’ is still there, packed away
into a corner of his argument. At some evolutionary stage,
sensory feedback signals get ‘privatised’ in the brain and
become ‘about themselves.’ Voilà, reflexivity and hence
consciousness. But between stuff and thoughts there is still an
argumentative crevasse. If there weren’t, this would be an
earth-shattering book. As it is, it is merely deeply interesting.”
4
They were right, of course; I had not solved the problem.
Yet, who wants to have it said, as his epitaph, that his ideas
were “merely deeply interesting”? I felt challenged to have one
more go at writing the earth-shattering book—or, at any rate,
the book that shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle.
This book, Soul Dust, takes off from the last few pages of
Seeing Red. Since I cannot count on readers being familiar with
my earlier work, I have reprised some of the ideas where
needed. Apart from this, however, the arguments here are new.
They are also, I must admit, largely untried by my peers. In this
new book I have deliberately tried to change the game by
following a different set of rules from those that have
traditionally framed the discussion of consciousness. In doing
this, and seeing for myself where it leads, I may say I have at
times been surprised by the moves I have found myself making:
“I can’t really mean that. But yes I really do. In which case,
here we go. . . .” In effect, the story has driven itself on. If the
book reads—almost contrivedly—like a journey of discovery,
that is because this is exactly what it has been in the writing.
My book is intended to be a work of serious science and
philosophy, and I hope it will be judged as such. But it is also
written for the general reader (while being furnished with
copious scholarly notes). As it turns out, I could hardly have
done otherwise than try to write a “popular book.” For it
becomes a central part of my argument that only by connecting
to the interests and anxieties of conscious human beings in
general can we begin to see the evolutionary raison d’être for
the existence of consciousness in the first place. So, as the book
proceeds to discuss the “whys” of consciousness, I come to
focus, naturally, on issues having to do with life, death, and the
meaning of existence—issues that matter so obviously to all
ordinary human beings (even if they sometimes care about
them more than they dare talk about them).
The result is that Soul Dust, which begins with the most
basic questions about the nature of conscious awareness and
sensation, becomes a book about the evolution of spirituality
and how humans have made their home in what I call the “soul
niche.” Though I have no belief whatever in the supernatural, I
make no apology for putting the human soul back where I am
sure it belongs: at the center of consciousness studies.
Still, while the book does end up addressing many familiar
human concerns, you should not expect it to be an easy read.
There has been work to be done on my part, and it will require
some work on yours. I begin the book by setting out my own
account of what consciousness is and what the hard problem
amounts to. This means my commencing with some relatively
dry analysis and then, as the answers begin to emerge, some
far-from-dry but still none-too-easy excursions into speculative
neuroscience. At several points in
part 1
, I offer the reader a chance to skip to the next stage. But I
hope in
part 2
, where I begin to ask what consciousness is for, the earlier
work of establishing what it is starts to pay off. For if, as I
argue, consciousness
is no more or less than a piece of magical “theater,” the
questions about what it is for begin to look very different from
those that philosophers and psychologists have been used to
asking. And with very different questions come very different
answers.
The answers I arrive at are certainly unlike any that science
has yet had to offer. This in itself, I would have to agree, is no
recommendation. Science is surely meant to be cumulative
rather than revolutionary. Yet, when the fact is that previous
research on consciousness has delivered almost nothing in the
way of answers to the big questions people ask about the
mystery of their experience, perhaps we can no longer rely on
the science we are accustomed to.
The material world has given human beings magical souls.
Human souls have returned the favor and put a magical spell
upon the world. To understand these astonishing events, I invite
you to start over.
PRELUDE
1 Coming-to Explained
Chances are it is less than a day since you regained
consciousness. It probably happened soon after the sunlight
returned this morning. What was it like for you, as you came
to? remember? The chink of a milk bottle, the touch of sheets,
the sight of a patch of blue sky. You rubbed your eyes,
stretched your limbs, and before you knew it, waves of
sensation refilled the lake of your being. You re-emerged into
the subjective present. Once more you felt yourself alive.
You were not alone. Something like this happened today to
countless other individuals here on Planet Earth. Our planet, we
are told, is merely a condensate of stardust, not so different
from all the other minor cosmic bodies that litter the universe.
But this one planet has become home to an extraordinary
phenomenon. Here is where sentience evolved. Here is where
conscious selves have come into their own. Here live souls.
In this book I will address the questions of what sentience,
selfhood, and soulfulness amount to. In the course of it I will
propose a solution to the “hard problem of consciousness.” The
hard problem is to explain how an entity made entirely of
physical matter—such as a human being—can experience
conscious feelings. The problem is hard because such feelings
appear to us, who are the subjects of them, to have properties
that could not possibly be conjured out of matter alone. We
say—because we do not know what else to say—that “it’s like
something” to be conscious. Yet, the problem with this
inadequate phrase, “it’s like something,” is that what it is like
seems to us—no, is to us—unlike anything else out there in the
material world.
There are philosophers who think the problem is simply too
hard to admit of a solution. For Colin McGinn, trying to
explain phenomenal consciousness as a product of the brain is
like trying to explain how you can get “numbers from biscuits,
or ethics from rhubarb.”
1
For Jerry Fodor, “We can’t, as things stand now, so much
as imagine the solution of the hard problem. The revisions of
our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will
eventually require are likely to be very deep and very
unsettling. . . . There is hardly anything that we may not have to
cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.”
2
I disagree. I acknowledge, of course, that theorists have not
been doing too well in imagining the solution. I am as
impressed as anyone by what seem to be the insuperable
difficulties. But I suggest we attend to the word “seem.” The
fact that something seems to have mysterious and inexplicable
features does not necessarily mean it really has them.
Figure 1. The Penrose Triangle.
Let me illustrate the difference between seeming
impossible and being impossible with the help of a well-known
example. Suppose you were to come across a solid wooden
object that looked just like the object shown in
figure 1
, Penrose’s “impossible triangle.” Certainly, it would seem
to be a physical impossibility. Yet no one would say that just
because of what the object looks like you should throw away
your physics books and cut loose from everything you know.
You would soon realize, of course, that it must be an illusion.
And sure enough, if you could only change your viewpoint,
you would discover that what you are actually looking at is the
curious object shown on the next page in
figure 2
. This object was cunningly constructed by the psychologist
Richard Gregory, precisely so that, when it is seen from a
certain position, it creates the impression of an impossible
triangle. This object deserves a name. With Gregory’s
permission, I call it the “Gregundrum.”
3
If you were to come across the Gregundrum lying on a
laboratory bench, without knowing its “function,” I am sure
you would never guess that it holds the key to anything
interesting. It is certainly not a pretty thing in its own right.
Who would have thought that such a perfect thing as the
Penrose triangle could have such an ugly explanation? Yet, as
Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson, “When you have
eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth.”
4
Figure 2. The Gregundrum.
I will argue that the truth about consciousness—if and
when we see it from the right perspective—is that it is indeed
the product of a highly improbable bit of biological
engineering: a wonderful artwork of nature that gives rise to all
sorts of mysterious impressions in our minds, yet something
that has a relatively straightforward physical explanation. As
Holmes went on, “We know that he did not come through the
door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could
not have been concealed in the room, as there is no
concealment possible. Whence, then, did he come?” “He came
through the hole in the roof,” Watson cried. Our job as
consciousness researchers is to find the hole in the roof.
I do not say it will be easy. To start with, in an area where
theorists continually talk past each other, there will be issues
about the use of words. To forestall at least some potential
verbal misunderstandings, I have set out in the box a rough
guide to the conceptual territory as I see it. (You should not get
hung up on anything in this list at this stage—I will justify and
explain these definitions further as we go on.)
But it is not just words that may come between us and the
truth; it may be the deep-seated biases that we bring to the table
as subjects of consciousness ourselves. We cannot of course opt
out of our privileged position, but we can at least try to imagine
where we would be without it. To that end, I want to begin our
investigation of the problem by handing it over to someone
else, someone who should have a remoter and more objective
view of what consciousness is doing for us than we ourselves
have.
In general, when I talk about consciousness I mean
“phenomenal consciousness.”
A subject is “phenomenally conscious” (or plain
“conscious”) when and if there is something it’s like to be him
at this moment.
There is “something it’s like to be him” when he experiences
feelings, or what philosophers call qualia.
Qualia—for example, the felt redness of fire, the sweetness
of honey, the pain of a bee sting—are features of sensations.
The subject is “phenomenally conscious” just when he
experiences sensations as having these peculiar features.
To experience sensations “as having” these features is to
form a mental representation to that effect (with the meaning
of “represent” still to be decided).
Thus “consciousness” (or “being conscious”), as a state of
mind, is the cognitive state of entertaining such mental
representations.
Consciousness can change the subject’s life just to the extent
that these representations feed forward to influence what he
thinks and does.
Let us return, then, to this morning. Only now imagine that a
few hundred miles out in space, a visiting scientist from an
advanced civilization in the Andromeda galaxy is orbiting our
planet, on her first trip to investigate life on Earth. (I call her
“her” because I assume the Andromedans long ago dispensed
with the male sex.)
Situating her craft so as to get a good view of the boundary
as night turns to day on the Earth’s surface, she observes how,
all along this boundary, living creatures are emerging from
their nighttime coma. Birds are breaking into song, butterflies
are taking to the wing, monkeys are leaving their beds in the
trees, and human beings are going downstairs to brew their
morning coffee.
She observes this great awakening, and she nods
knowingly. She recognizes, of course, that the central
processors that run these earthlings’ onboard software have
been in sleep mode overnight, so as to save energy and perform
system maintenance. And now, with the sun’s rays bringing
light and warmth, it is time for them to resume their life tasks.
As a scientist, she has much to look forward to. Once she gets
down among these creatures, how interesting it will be for her
to study their brains and behavior and figure out how it all
works. Indeed, she fancies herself as a bit of a philosopher: one
day she will write a book called Coming-to Explained.
Our visitor has every reason to trust the scientific method.
Wherever else in the universe she and her colleagues have
applied it, natural phenomena have given up their secrets. No
doubt, she reckons, there can be nothing so different or difficult
about those living organisms down there on Earth.
But is she right? What about consciousness? Will it ever
dawn on the Andromedan visitor that there is a dimension to
the lives of at least some of the creatures she is studying
that needs special treatment, that when they “come to,” it is as
if a light is coming on inside their heads? Given that she can
see things only from outside, is it possible that she will miss
this altogether, that she will never even suspect that
consciousness exists?
5
I think we should assume the Andromedan does not have the
circuits in her own brain that would make her phenomenally
conscious herself. Otherwise we will not know how to assess
any claims she may make to have discovered the existence of
consciousness in other creatures. (She might just be arguing
from analogy with her own case, in the way you or I might
argue, for example, that it is obvious that a dog feels pain the
way we do.)
The absence of phenomenal consciousness may or may not
affect the way she thinks about philosophical and scientific
issues (this is something we should be better placed to judge by
the end of the book). But I see no reason, as of now, why it
should place any limit on her intelligence (“artificial
intelligence,” as we might want to call it) or her skills at
scientific research. Let us suppose, indeed, that she does have
an exceptionally brilliant analytic mind. And let us allow her
every other scientific advantage anyone might ask for. She can
undertake meticulous behavioral studies of how earthlings
behave in the wild, and then follow up this fieldwork with
whatever laboratory investigations are suggested. She has all
the research instruments she could possibly need: scanners and
imagers and calculators of a sophistication yet undreamed of
here on Earth. She can prod and probe and listen in and cross-
question. She can, if she wants, take the earthlings apart
and examine their machinery (the Andromedan ethics
committees have no objection to alien vivisection). Then, back
home, she will be able to run theoretical simulations on her
computer and build working models in the robot shop.
Then, what will she discover, and what will she not? Let us
consider some possibilities.
She will find, to her surprise, that in order to explain the
behavior of certain species of earthlings, she needs to
postulate the existence of an extraspecial mental state—a
state with peculiar qualitative properties, unlike anything
else, which just because of what it is like is changing how
these creatures live their lives.
Though perhaps she will be unable to deduce the
existence of any such special inner state from what she
observes of public behavior, she will nevertheless realize
that such a state exists when she examines in detail the
flow of information in the earthlings’ brains and figures
out what kind of private mental representations are being
generated.
She will do better still. Beyond simply discovering the
existence of conscious states, she will be able—either
from behavioral observations or from brain scans—to
arrive at a complete description of what it is like to be the
subject of a particular state. Perhaps she will even get to
the point where she can compare one individual’s state
with another’s—so that she can tell, for example, whether
different subjects are experiencing the sensation of red in
the same way.
Or then again, perhaps she will be able to do none of the
above.
Now, as it happens, there are a good many students of
consciousness here on Earth—they may even be in the
majority—who believe the answer can be only the last of these.
In their view our visitor will fail to discover anything about
consciousness by any of the scientific means at her disposal
because of an awkward but undeniable truth: consciousness, for
all its subjective importance, is physically featureless; it does
not show.
The psychologist Jeffrey Gray has written, for example,
“Nothing that we so far know about behaviour, physiology, the
evolution of either behaviour or physiology, or the possibilities
of constructing automata to carry out complex forms of
behaviour, is such that the hypothesis of consciousness would
arise, if it did not occur in addition as a datum in our own
experience; nor, having arisen, does it provide a useful
explanation of the phenomena observed in those domains.”
6
Others have gone further still, arguing for what the
philosopher Owen Flanagan has called “consciousness
inessentialism”—“the view that for any intelligent activity I,
performed in any cognitive domain d, even if we do I with
conscious accompaniments, I can in principle be done without
these conscious accompaniments.”
7
Thus, according to John Searle, “We could have identical
behavior in two different systems, one of which is conscious
and the other totally unconscious.”
8
There could even exist a “philosophical zombie human,”
David Chalmers has suggested, who is physically identical to a
normal human being and who looks and acts in every respect
just like one, yet who is not phenomenally conscious—“all is
dark inside.”
9
Then, if you or I were to meet such a philosophical zombie
in the street, we would not—and could not—know the
difference.
True, each of us is presumably convinced that
consciousness exists in our own case, and therefore we may
want to give the benefit of the doubt to others who so obviously
resemble us. But the Andromedan scientist does not know
about consciousness from her own case. Therefore, if and when
she notes resemblances between herself and any of the
earthling creatures she is studying (those naked bipeds who
seem to have taken over the planet are certainly technologically
ingenious!), she is likely to assume they resemble her in this
respect as well. And if consciousness inessentialism is right,
she will not discover anything in the course of her research to
make her revise her opinion. At the end of the day, she will not
think she has missed anything. So she will return to
Andromeda—and write her book—with a satisfied sense of
mission accomplished: “Coming-to Explained Away.”
I said I wanted to hand over the investigation of the hard
problem to this visitor, because we might expect her to have “a
remoter and more objective view of what consciousness is
doing for us than we ourselves have.” But if this is really how
things stand, it seems the problem will not even cross her
horizon. Fodor wrote, “There is hardly anything that we may
not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through
with us.” He cannot have meant this interpretation, but is the
lesson that if we want to keep up with the best science in the
universe, we ought to cut loose from the concept of
consciousness itself ?
You will realize—if for no other reason than because my own
book does not end here—that I do not think so. My starting
point is that consciousness, however elusive and enigmatic
from a scientific perspective, is a fact of nature. And if
it is not evidently a fact of nature, that can be only because
scientists and philosophers have been looking for evidence in
the wrong places. I believe this because I think the idea that
consciousness has no observable effects is daft (and the notion
of a “philosophical zombie”—a physical duplicate of a
conscious human who completely lacks consciousness—is
dafter still). However, I have to say I do not think it is daft to
suppose that certain aspects of conscious experience could have
no observable effects. So, before we go further, I want to
consider just to what extent conscious experience will—and
will not—be observable to an outsider.
We know, of course, that not everything that goes on in the
mind of a person or an animal has to show up in behavior.
There can obviously be purely private mental states. Indeed,
most ordinary mental states are private, insofar as they occur
without anyone’s—except the subject—knowing about them.
No one but you knows what your thoughts are right now (why
else would anyone give you a penny for them?). No one but me
knows about my dreams last night (and, as it happens, even I do
not know any longer).
Still, we might want to argue that states such as these are
only contingently private. If you were given the penny, you
could tell me what your thoughts are. If I had kept a dream
diary, I could have shared my dream with you. And even
without language, there would probably be ways of
communicating much of the content of these mental states.
But that is thoughts. And with feelings it would seem to be
a different matter. How about basic sensory experiences? They
undoubtedly seem to be more absolutely private. You would be
hard put to it, however much you tried, to reveal the full
content of what it is like to experience the smell of a rose or
the coldness of a snowball. Though you could surely
communicate some part of it, you would not know how to
capture the subjective quality of the sensations, the qualia.
It is by no mean obvious exactly what the problem is. Is it
that there is something about the logical status of qualia, as
intrinsically subjective properties, that makes them
incommunicable in principle? Or is it simply that in practice we
do not have the requisite communication skills? Could it even
be that our minds have been designed to have some kind of fire
wall around sensory experience which puts adaptive limits on
what others can discover about us?
There could be some truth in all these possibilities. But
whatever is causing the problem, we must surely accept that
there is a problem; we must concede that in practice, even if
not in principle, conscious sensations are private in crucial
respects, so that nothing the subject can say or do can reveal
everything about them.
However, I would say this is all we need concede. We
need not—and should not—accept either of two stronger
propositions, namely, (1) while an outside observer is restricted
to studying behavior, she will not even be able to detect that
phenomenal consciousness is present, and (2) even if the
observer were allowed complete access to the subject’s brain,
she would not be able to discover the full content.
Let us look at these two issues. First, why do I believe that
consciousness must reveal its presence, if nothing more, at the
level of behavior?
The reason is the ultimate one, the hand of natural
selection. Since consciousness, as we know it, is a feature of
life on earth, we can take it for granted that—like every other
specialized
feature of living organisms—it has evolved because it
confers selective advantage. In one way or another, it must be
helping the organism to survive and reproduce. And of course
this can happen only if somehow it is changing the way the
organism relates to the outside world.
Now, how could this be happening? Conscious creatures do
not smell different or look prettier. Consciousness does not
provide extra strength or better health. Instead, consciousness
can have its effects on survival only by changing what we may
loosely call the creature’s “psychology.” In other words, being
phenomenally conscious must be influencing how the creature
thinks or what it wants or what it believes, in just such a way
that it now acts in the world in adaptive ways it would not have
done otherwise.
In later chapters I will explore in detail just how this may
be working: how the effects may be present on several levels,
and how they may be more or less important for different kinds
of animals, pushing the evolution of consciousness along
species-specific lines. As we will see, human beings, with their
developed sense of “conscious self,” are most likely in a class
of their own. But the important point for now is that if natural
selection can “see” the effects—whatever they are—of the
changed psychology on behavior, presumably so too can other
outside observers (if only they knew where to look). What is
more, if these observers can see what natural selection sees,
they should also be able to see what it is about it that is
beneficial—and hence why natural selection has favored it.
Thus they should be well on their way to constructing a story
about why consciousness evolved.
Still, do not get me wrong about this. I am not suggesting
that because consciousness has been designed by natural
selection, this means that every one of the features of the
design must be able to be seen from the outside. Rather, what it
means is that every one of these features must be contributing
to the beneficial effects that natural selection does see.
It would be easy to misunderstand this, so let me tell a
parable to make it clearer. Imagine that in a certain country the
government has a Department of Happiness, whose minister
has the job of maximizing the general happiness of the
population. The minister must therefore be on the lookout for
things that put people into a good humor. One day he comes
across a group of people who are looking at a cartoon and
smiling broadly. From where he stands, the minister cannot
actually see the picture they are looking at, and so he does not
get the joke. Still, he can see the positive feelings the cartoon is
eliciting. And that is enough to persuade him to take
departmental action to “breed” this cartoon by ordering
additional cartoons in the same style. So he does this, and the
next day he sees more people laughing at the new drawings. He
repeats his order, and soon enough cartoons in this special style
are everywhere. The style has become, as it were, a ministerial
design feature. But note that at no point has the minister
himself needed to know what the cartoons look like. All he has
needed to see is evidence that the cartoons exist and that they
are funny.
My point is that, likewise, natural selection need never have
known what conscious experience is actually like for the
subject. All it must have seen is evidence that conscious
experience exists and that it is in some way life enhancing. This
being the case, it is possible and even quite likely that the
detailed phenomenal content of sensations will not ever have
been evident in behavior. And so today our visiting scientist,
while she
relies on outside observations, will be able to get only
halfway to discovering the facts of consciousness. She should
certainly be able to detect that the special inner state exists in
some creatures and that, in whatever way their behavior
suggests, it adds to their success in life. However, this may well
be as far as she can go.
10
Yet, what if she were able to search inside their heads? Why
do I believe that an observer who can go beyond behavior
down to the level of brain activity should be able to discover
all there is to know?
My reason is simply the guiding principle, which underlies
all science, that nothing interesting occurs without a material
cause. In short, miracles do not happen. When conscious
experience arises in a person’s mind, it is the outcome of events
in the brain. Moreover, if and when these events (in their
totality) occur, the outcome has to be that the person is
conscious (which is why the idea of a philosophical zombie
makes no sense). Thus, if a scientist can go inside and observe
these crucial events, she should be able, in principle, to deduce
what the outcome is—provided only that she has a theory
linking brain states to experience, a theory that enables her to
move from one level of description to the other.
What kind of theory would this be? Philosopher Dan Lloyd
has written: “What we need is a transparent theory. One that,
once you get it, you see that anything built like this will have
this particular conscious experience.”
11
We can draw an analogy with explaining the properties of
water. Scientists are able to deduce that a pail of molecules,
whose chemical composition is H2O, at room temperature will
have the physical properties of the substance we know as water
(fluidity,
wetness, and so on) because, with their understanding of
the laws of physical chemistry, they have a theory of why
water under its chemical description must amount to water
under its physical description.
Then, so too, we may reasonably hope that if and when
scientists have a comparable understanding of the laws of what
we may call neurophenomenology, so that they have a theory
of why brain activity under its neuroscientific description must
amount to mental activity under its experiential description,
they will be able to deduce that, for example, a man whose
brain is in a particular state is a man who is thinking such and
such thoughts.
12
It is already widely agreed by those who study mind-brain
relationships that it is the pattern of information flow in the
brain that determines mental states. I would say we can assume
therefore that the neurophenomenological laws will essentially
be laws about how experience is computed. Admittedly, apart
from having this one insight, our scientists here on Earth are
nowhere near to discovering what the laws actually are. Still,
we need not doubt that the laws exist and will eventually be
found out. So, to continue with our story of the Andromedan
scientist, let us imagine that the theorists on Andromeda are far
more advanced than ours are, and—in anticipation of their
sister’s mission (or perhaps just for the fun of it)—they have
worked out ahead of time the relevant laws as they apply to
alien brains.
Thus, let us suppose the Andromedan scientist has arrived
among us prearmed with the theoretical tools she needs for
interpreting earthlings’ brain activity in experiential terms.
Where will this take her? Given what was said above, we may
assume that, on the basis of her purely behavioral observations,
she will already have concluded that in some of the
earthlings under study (notably, human beings) there does exist
a special inner state that is influencing their outlook on life—
though a state of which the detailed content is so far a mystery
to her. But now that her brain research is under way, she will,
with the help of the theory, be able to deduce that these
particular subjects are having experiences with exactly the
weird and wonderful phenomenal content that you and I know
so well firsthand.
“Well, blow me!” she may say. “Who’d have guessed it?”
For she will indeed have deduced the existence of qualia. She
will, as it were, have arrived at a complete description of the
private joke that lies behind the public smile.
Are you with me still? Or do you think I have tried to pull a
fast one on you (in fact, did I not try to pull it a few pages
back)? Can it be true that the Andromedan—who is not
conscious herself, remember—has discovered what
consciousness is really like? Or has she merely discovered its
pale shadow?
The big question, you may insist, is whether the scientist,
when she examines the brain of someone who is having a
conscious sensation, can deduce what that person’s experience
actually is, and not merely deduce a description of what that
experience is (and calling it a “phenomenological description”
simply begs the question).
But, no, I have not pulled a fast one. Rather, if you make
this objection, I would say you have just pulled a fast one on
yourself. You have fallen for the tempting idea that there is
something conscious experience actually is that is separate
from what the subject thinks it is—that is, the mental
representation that he makes of it. But it is not so. If you do not
see
this now, I hope to persuade you of it as we go on. To give
a foretaste of what is coming, in the very next chapter I will
argue that what I called at the start of this book the inadequate
phrase “it’s like something” is not such a bad phrase after all.
Because, when it comes to it, for a subject to have a sensory
experience that is like something really is for him to represent
the object of experience as if it is something with some very
peculiar features. In short, for the subject to have a sensory
experience that is like something is just for him to experience it
as what it is like.
The philosopher John Searle (with whom, on the question
of consciousness, I agree about very little) put his finger on this
point precisely when he wrote: “If it seems to me exactly as if I
am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious
experiences.”
13
Just so. “Seems to Searle exactly as if” can only mean “is
represented mentally by Searle exactly as being.”
What follows from this? Since mental representations can,
in principle, always be described or re-represented in some
public medium—they would not count as representations
otherwise—it surely follows that, despite what was said above
about the de facto incommunicability of private experience, it
must be possible in principle to describe what it is like to be
conscious.
It is undeniably true that, as of now, we humans do not
know how to do this satisfactorily. We lack both the theory and
the language for the job. But these, we should assume, are
contingent limitations—already overcome in Andromeda and
soon enough to be overcome back here on Earth.
I would say we should acknowledge that the
phenomenological descriptions of conscious experience that
will feature in the final theory will probably require a new
vocabulary,
even a new grammar.
14
But we should not be too alarmed by this, let alone see it as
a reason for giving up. It has happened before in the history of
science that scientists required a new conceptual language
before they could move on—and yet, after initial awkwardness
and even disbelief, soon enough everyone gets used to it.
Think, for example, of how mathematics has had to come to
terms with “complex numbers” involving the square root of
minus one, or of “transfinite numbers” that are bigger than
infinity. Think of how physics has had to come to terms with
relativity.
Future descriptions of conscious experience will almost
certainly require concepts that sit oddly with our standard ways
of thinking today. I already remarked at the opening of this
chapter that the problem with saying “it is like something” to
be conscious is that what it is like seems to us—no, is to us—
unlike anything else out there in the material world. The
phenomenal experience of the “subjective present” as existing
in “thick time”—as I have attempted to describe it elsewhere
15
and as I will revisit shortly—is perhaps just such an
apparently essential yet nonsensical concept.
Yet, let us stick with our story. We have assumed that
scientists on Andromeda are well ahead of us in recognizing the
neurophenomenological laws. Contained within this
assumption must be the assumption that they have already
developed a suitably esoteric language for describing conscious
experience (even if the development of this language must have
been, as it were, “on spec,” since the Andromedans, having
never encountered creatures such as human beings before,
cannot yet have had occasion to apply it).
16
So we are assuming that our visitor will have the tools for
describing what it is like for us, even if we humans at present
do not.
However, I do not want to make our own inadequacy an
absolute sticking point. To claim—as many philosophers
would—that consciousness is essentially ineffable is to
underestimate human ingenuity and creativity. As we will see
later in this book, humans may be more capable of expressing
publicly what it is like to be conscious than the philosophical
and scientific skeptics would have us believe—though when
they do so, they “cheat” by using the language of art rather
than that of science. Well, we will see.
17
This introductory chapter, which started off so breezily, is
getting heavy. It is time to sum up—and lighten up, if possible.
I wanted the Andromedan scientist’s help with the project
of understanding the hard problem—the nature of
consciousness—because I hoped that to see the problem from
her perspective might provide us with some useful guidelines
for our own inquiry. Whatever the differences between us and
her are, I take it that science is science wherever in the
universe it is being done. What counts as evidence and
conclusions for this researcher from a far-off galaxy should be
what counts as such for us on Earth. That is why I asked above
what will the Andromedan find out about consciousness, and
what will she not. I assume this is what, at the limits of our
human abilities, we can expect to find out too.
Here is the score.
We have established that the Andromedan scientist will be
able to discover at a behavioral level crucial hints that
consciousness is present in some creatures. At the very least,
she will discover that consciousness is having certain beneficial
effects—these are the effects on which natural selection has
been acting in the course of evolution. She will discover that
consciousness exists and—in the larger picture—what
consciousness is for.
Nevertheless, while she stays on the outside, she will
probably be unable to reach a deep understanding of the
contents of consciousness. This is because the crucial features
of what it is like for the subject will, in normal circumstances,
probably be hidden from public view—even though these
features are ultimately responsible for the beneficial effects.
To find out more of the details, she will have to go inside.
When she does so, using all the neuroscientific techniques at
her disposal, she should indeed be able to discover everything
about what it is like to be conscious, provided she has a theory.
But this neurophenomenological theory will have to be a new
and remarkable theory: not a theory that we human beings can
never get to understand (as some philosophers, notably Colin
McGinn, have suggested),
18
but certainly a theory we will not understand until we have
put in some more work.
So now, let me set out my agenda for this work and my
book. What I plan to do is to emulate, in my own way, the
Andromedan scientist’s investigation. Yet, because, first, I am
not as clever as she is, and, second, I am a living example of
the phenomenon under investigation, my strategic goals will be
a little different.
On Andromeda, I have suggested, scientists have already
developed the theoretical tools for solving the hard problem of
how matter could in principle give rise to consciousness, even
if they have never yet come across a case of consciousness in
fact. By contrast, we humans know consciousness exists in fact,
but we do not at the moment have the theory of it. The first task
for the book, then, must be to come up with at least the
beginnings of a plausible theory of what consciousness is
and how it relates to the brain. To do this I will, in the next
few chapters, argue for a radically new account of what we
mean when we say that “it is like something” to experience
sensations. I will make a proposal as to what the thing in the
brain that the subject represents as “being like something”
really is, and I will suggest what its biological origins in
nonconscious animals may have been.
The Andromedan scientist, I have assumed, being
completely new to the world of conscious creatures, will, at the
start, have no idea what difference consciousness is making at
either the private or the public level, let alone what good, if
any, comes of it. By contrast, we humans know rather a lot
about the difference that consciousness is making to our private
lives, though we are far from understanding how this translates
into public benefits. The second task for the book then will be
to figure out—knowing what we already do—how being
conscious changes people’s psychology (and perhaps that of
other conscious animals as well) in ways that ultimately
increase their chances of survival.
Having read this far, you may be nervous that the book is
going to be unduly scientistic. Do not worry. There is indeed
work to be done. We need to get the science right if we can.
But my book is called Soul Dust, and it will live up to that title.
The book will continue with some hard-going philosophical
analysis, but it will end with a fairy tale—a scientifically based
fairy tale—about how consciousness lights up the world.
PART ONE
2 Being “Like Something”
So we want a theory of what being conscious is like and
how this could result from the activity of nerve cells in the
brain. If only it did not make us feel so queasy just to think
about it! Four hundred years ago René Descartes described his
own plight as a human mind trying to think about the nature of
its own experience: “It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly
into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can
neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.”
1 We need something to help us get our bearings. Some
clever new idea. Yet where to look for it? If I say I want to start
with the language people use, you may be disappointed.
Surely, you may think, philosophers in the last century pretty
well exhausted that approach without solving any important
scientific problems. Maybe it is true that Ludwig Wittgenstein,
in his Philosophical Investigations, helped clear the air around
consciousness
by showing how the ways people talk about mental states
can lead them astray, creating conundrums and mysteries that
do not really exist. But did not Wittgenstein’s analysis prove
signally unhelpful to understanding what does exist?
Yes, it did. However, that was then. And the zeitgeist of
consciousness studies is very different fifty years later. The
identification of the problem of qualia as the “hard problem”
has changed what questions are worth asking.
2
When the price of gold goes up, it can be worth reopening
seams that were supposedly mined out long ago.
“It is like something.” I do not know when people—at least
those writing in English—first started to use this phrase to refer
to the essence of being conscious. But the use was already well
established when Tom Nagel, in 1974, wrote his famous essay
“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In that essay Nagel simply
asserted (rather as I did in the previous chapter) that being like
something is the defining property of consciousness:
“Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—
something it is like for the organism.”
3
He took it for granted that his readers would understand what
he was referring to. And so it seems they did. The fact that this
way of talking has subsequently become widespread in both
philosophical and popular writing suggests that it must
somehow sit peculiarly well with people’s first-person
understanding of what being conscious means.
Why ever should this be? Since words gain their meaning
from how they are used across the language, presumably the
use of “it is like something” in relation to consciousness must
have something in common with its use in other contexts.
So, can we look to ordinary English for a clue?
Now, in pretty much every other situation, when we say “X
is like Y” (for example, “This wine is like a Beaujolais”), what
we mean is that in our view X resembles Y or X shares some
salient property with Y. However, we mean something rather
more than this too. Note that we would never say “X is like Y”
when we know that X actually is Y. So when we say “X is like
Y,” we mean X shares some particular property with Y, but—
so far as we know at this time—it does not share all its other
properties. True, sometimes we may want to imply that since it
shares at least this particular property, X could share all of its
other properties with Y. But there has to be at the least some
uncertainty about it. It has to be unconfirmed whether X is Y in
fact. “This wine is like a Beaujolais, it could even be a
Beaujolais, though I’m not sure it is not actually a Chianti.”
Suppose, then, that when we say “it is like something for
someone to experience a sensation,” we mean the subject is
literally likening his sensation to something in just this sense.
What might this tell us about consciousness?
I proposed already in the previous chapter that for someone
to be conscious of having a sensation must involve his
representing the object of experience as something with
properties of a special and peculiar kind. But now this would be
taking matters considerably further. It would be suggesting that
for someone to be conscious of having the sensation involves
his representing the object of experience as if it is something
that it may not be— something he has certainly not been able to
confirm it is.
Let us suppose the someone in question is you.
4
Then, when you say “it is like something for me to see
red,” for example, you would be implying that, strictly
speaking, your sensation is a hypothetical entity. Indeed, if we
were to follow this line, I would go beyond this: I think you
would be implying that the sensation is intrinsically
hypothetical, for the phenomenology suggests that the as-if,
unconfirmed quality of the representation is not just a
temporary or remediable condition. When you say it is like
something to see red, you are not allowing that soon enough
you may discover the truth about whether the sensation actually
is this something. You would never expect to say: “I thought
the red sensation merely resembled this, but then I found out it
actually was this.”
No. Sensations, it would seem, are always as-if. So, in this
regard, the being-like-something of sensations is different from
the being-like-something of the wine. With the wine, if you say
“it is like a Beaujolais,” you are assuming there is a
discoverable fact of the matter as to whether it actually is a
Beaujolais or a Chianti. With sensations, however, if you say
“it is like something for me to see red,” you are assuming no
such thing: whatever the fact of the matter about the red
sensation, it is not discoverable by you as the subject—nothing
could help you to decide once and for all whether what it is
like is what it is.
But this is remarkable. What can be going on, such that it
would make sense to say of X that it resembles Y, even though
you could never in principle have the evidence to alter your
opinion about whether X actually is Y?
There is only one set of circumstances I can think of where
this might be appropriate: it would be when you recognize
that Y does not or could not exist as an entity belonging to
the ordinary world where you can test things, but might exist in
another world with different rules to which you have no direct
access—indeed, where X is evidence of there being such
another world.
Imagine, by analogy, that you are facing a wall on which
the shadows of solid objects passing behind you are being cast
by the light of a blazing fire some distance farther back. What
do these shadows look like to you? “This shadow is like a cart.”
“This one is like a bird.” But you cannot confirm that the
objects are what their shadows resemble because you cannot
turn around and enter directly into their three-dimensional
world.
I have taken you now—you may be as surprised as I am—
to Plato’s famous story of the cave. In The Republic Plato uses
this analogy to explain how there might exist a world of
transcendental entities—“pure forms” or “substances”—of
which human beings have only indirect and partial knowledge.
I did not expect our discussion to lead so soon to Plato’s
metaphysics. But now that it has, let me cite a revealing remark
by the painter Bridget Riley. Writing about visual sensations,
she says: “For all of us, colour is experienced as something—
that is to say, we always see it in the guise of a substance.”
5
Does her choice of that word, “substance,” suggest she
believes that we do indeed liken sensation to something
belonging to a higher level of reality? The phenomenal is
transcendental? Is that what we imply by using the language
of “it’s like”?
Well, maybe, kind of. I hope all will become clearer in due
course. But now let us explore this idea further, without asking
for too much clarity at the beginning. Suppose it were so; what
kind of transcendental/phenomenal world might we be talking
about? With the analogy of the cave leading us on, let
me suggest, to start with, that this would have to be a world
that requires at least one novel extra dimension to describe it
(whether a physical or a conceptual dimension, we will see).
And yet what would be the status of such a world? Would it
have to exist for real?
I am sure that for most people “consciousness realism” is
irresistible. Sensations undoubtedly exist, and sensations are
like entities in the phenomenal world. So presumably the
phenomenal world must have a substantive existence. But even
though this may be how most laypeople see it, it is another
question entirely whether theoreticians should see it this way
too. Since things in this other world apparently have such
exotic properties, and since their existence cannot be
independently confirmed, surely we ought to consider seriously
the possibility that it is some kind of make-believe—not real at
all but an illusion. That is, sensation might be merely
appearing, as Riley so well put it, in the guise of a substance.
Yet this would point to further remarkable goings-on. If the
phenomenal properties of sensation are an illusion, this can
hardly be just a stroke of good luck. Conscious experience is
altogether too impressive—even too perfect—to have been
thrown together by chance. There would obviously have had to
be some method behind it. In short, the evidence that leads you
to believe in the existence of phenomenal entities would have
had to be planted. We would be dealing, as it were, with a
coup de théâtre.
Let us pause for breath and collect these thoughts. From
examining the phrase “it is like something to be conscious,” we
have now raised an extraordinary possibility, or rather two.
First, from the subject’s point of view, consciousness appears
to be a gateway to a transcendental world of as-if entities.
Second, from the point of view of theory, consciousness is the
product of some kind of illusion chamber, a charade.
Is this the clever new idea we need? Consciousness as a
Platonic shadow play performed in an internal theater, to
impress the soul! It would certainly take us into interesting new
territory. It might even explain why the hard problem
sometimes seems not just intractable but so gloriously
intractable.
The philosopher Natika Newton has remarked,
“Phenomenal consciousness itself is sui generis. Nothing else
is like it in any way at all.”
6
The Koran says of Allah, “[Allah is] the originator of the
heavens and the earth . . . [there is] nothing like a likeness of
Him.”
7
When the going gets mysterious, mysteries get going.
Suddenly the quasi-magical properties of qualia would no
longer pose such a problem.
8
Magic is just what is to be expected in a magic show.
But that is for later. I would say the immediate reason to be
pleased with this idea as the basis for a scientific theory of
consciousness is that it allows us to start thinking about the
brain basis of it all. If sensations were truly to have out-of-this-
world properties, there is no question that the search for a
theory would be in trouble. However, it is an entirely different
story if sensations merely have as-if out-of-this-world
properties.
Let us exchange Plato’s cave for a more humdrum analogy. I
want to return to the model that you may have realized I have
had in mind since early on: the “real impossible triangle” with
which I opened the previous chapter. It is becoming clearer
where to steer the line of thought.
Suppose, once more, you were to be confronted by the
wooden object, the Gregundrum, as shown next in
figure 3
. Now, however, for the sake of argument, I want to place
you squarely in the special position of Observer A in this
diagram, the one position from which it appears that the top
arms of the triangle are coincident so that you see the whole
thing as joined up.
Figure 3.
As we noted earlier, if only you could move to the position
of Observer B, you would see things differently. But this time,
let us suppose, so as to give you a truly special perspective on
it, that things are rigged so that, as and when you move around
the object, some hidden hand turns it so that it is always facing
you in the same way. (Compare how it is to look in a mirror
and to find your eyes always looking straight back at you.)
Then, what does the object look like to you? You see it
presumably as an impossible object. You represent it in your
mind as such. If asked to explain what you are perceiving to
other people, you might very well prefer to define it ostensively
by inviting them to come and see it for themselves from your
position.
However, assuming there is no opportunity for them to do
this, I expect you could, if pressed, tell them about it in
words—that is, you could describe the perceived object as it
does indeed appear to you.
Here, I will do it for you (refer back, if you like, to the
larger illustration of
figure 1
). “What I see is an unbroken solid triangular object, made
of three square-cross-section posts of equal length. The posts
are connected at right angles, so that, starting at the bottom left
corner, the arm to the right is angled away from me at 45
degrees; at the right corner the arm to the left is angled away at
45 degrees; at the top corner the arm downward is angled away
at 45 degrees.”
The description is surely accurate so far. This is indeed
what you perceive the object to be in terms of its elements. Yet,
even as you perceive it as being this, you are well aware that
such a triangle as a whole could not possibly exist in the
ordinary world. So, I would guess you will want to add: “What
I see is either (a) evidence of there being a world to which the
rules of physics do not apply or (b) some kind of trick.”
However, since no one in his right mind would posit the
existence of a nonphysical world merely because he is
confronted by a wooden object that he cannot explain,
“everything considered, this has to be a trick.”
9
So, how does this bear on the mystery of sensations and
qualia? What I suggest is that the logic of the situation you find
yourself in when you have a sensation is very much the same as
when you are confronted by the Gregundrum—although the
psychological impact is different in two crucial respects.
You look at a ripe tomato, for example, and in response to
the red light reaching your eyes, something happens in your
brain that you experience as the sensation of red. We can say
that, like Observer A, you clearly have a special perspective
on this brain activity. It is only from your privileged position as
the subject of the experience that the brain activity does indeed
come across as a conscious sensation. An outside observer, if
she could observe this same brain activity, would be like
Observer B and never get it.
Then, what does the sensation feel like to you? You
experience it as having the phenomenal quality of “red,” which,
strange to say, is somehow out of this world. Again you
represent it in your mind as such. If asked to explain to others,
your first thought, as with the triangle, will be to invite them to
share the wonder of it by experiencing it for themselves.
However, if there is no opportunity for them to do this, it is
now a different story from the triangle, because you will not
find it straightforward to describe it. In fact, you may find
yourself completely tongue-tied.
So here is the first difference. The phenomenal qualities of
sensations are next to impossible to communicate to other
people. It seems it is not possible even to say what is
impossible about them. People have, of course, tried to put
words—or pictures or music—to their experience. I will have
occasion later to cite many bold attempts to capture and
communicate what consciousness is like.
The painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose preferred medium
for celebrating consciousness was the painted canvas, had this
to say about sensation: “Color is a power which directly
influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the
hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.
10
You may or may not relate to this as true of what it is like
for you. Still, Kandinsky’s words at least hint at the majesty
and mystery of the phenomenon.
Suppose, then, we let the epithet “soul-hammering” do duty
for the description that otherwise seems so elusive. Then, soul-
hammering is what you experience the sensation as being. Yet
soul-hammering does not correspond to any conceivable
quality of the material world. So now, again, you have two
choices about the interpretation: “What I am experiencing is
either (a) evidence of there being an alternative transcendental
soul-hammering reality or (b) some kind of illusion.”
But here is the second crucial difference. For, now, with
sensations, it seems that many a person in his right mind is
prepared to posit the existence of a nonphysical world just
because he is confronted by an entity he cannot explain.
“Everything considered, this suggests I have one foot in
heaven.” I am exaggerating. But not much. When in later
chapters we get to explore the psychological effects of
consciousness, we will see just how far the change in self-
image can go.
I am running ahead. The point I want to make at this stage
is that there does seem to be a formal similarity between, on the
one hand, representing sensations as like something and, on the
other, representing the Gregundrum as like something.
Although what you make of these representations, in the larger
scheme of things, is certainly different, the logic of experience
is the same.
Then where should we take this next? There is a
philosophical term of art, “intentionality,” that I think may
come in useful here. Philosophers say that whenever you form
a mental representation of something—when, for example, you
represent object X in the world as object Y in your mind—the
representing is an “intentional state.” What the term
“intentional” is meant to capture is that the representing is
about
something, it points to or fingers Y (“intendere” is Latin for
“to take aim at”). Expanding on this, we can say that object Y,
the thing the representing is about, is the “intentional object,”
whereas object X, the thing that gives rise to the representation,
is the “real-world source.”
In practice, the Xs and Ys sometimes come to the same
thing. Using your eyes, for example, you may perceive a
physical object to be pretty much what a physicist using his
instruments would say it is—a cricket ball as a red leather ball,
say. In that case, the distinction between the real-world source
and the intentional reading collapses. But it is often the case
that X and Y do not come to the same thing at all: you perceive
a physical object to be something more or other than what the
physicist would say it is—a piece of paper as a dollar bill, a
pattern in the clouds as the face of a cat, a pile of old clothes in
the bedroom as the ghost of your dead grandfather.
Then how about the Gregundrum? This is, of course, a
particularly interesting and revealing case. On one hand, when
you look at the Gregundrum from the special position, the
object as you perceive it—which is the impossible triangle—
becomes the intentional object of your perception. Meanwhile,
the thing you are actually looking at, the wooden object that
was constructed to deceive you, is the real-world source. On the
other hand, when you look at the Gregundrum from anywhere
other than the special position, then the object as you perceive
it—the weird object as it physically is—becomes the
intentional object of perception. And now this is in fact also the
real-world source. Thus, if we return to the situation illustrated
in figure 3
, we find that for Observer A the intentional object and the
real-world source are nothing like each other, whereas for
Observer B they coincide.
What, now, if consciousness were to be an illusion of a
similar kind? Would this not mean we ought, in the case of
consciousness too, to make a distinction between the
intentional object and the real-world source? Exactly. Then let
us do it.
Let us suppose that when you have a sensation, when it is
like something for you to see red, for example, this mysterious
thing it is like is “the intentional object of consciousness.” Then
there has to be a real-world source for this—some physical
activity in your brain that you, from your special position as the
conscious subject, engage with and represent as having the
phenomenal properties. But assuming, as before, that this is not
an accident, this brain activity would have to be nothing less
than some kind of “sensational Gregundrum,” something that
has been created precisely so as to give rise to the
consciousness illusion.
What and where could this wonderful thing be? Actually
we already got halfway to identifying it a few paragraphs back.
“You look at a ripe tomato, for example, and in response to the
red light reaching your eyes, something happens in your brain
that you experience as the sensation of red.” But the phrase
“something happens” is much too weak, and “in response to the
red light” is too weak too. Sensation does, of course, have
specifically sensory qualities, so we can safely assume the
brain activity in question is typically some kind of a response to
stimulation of the sense organs. But sensation—as we will see
in the next chapter—is nothing if it is not personal and affect
laden. So I would say the brain activity that constitutes the
sensational Gregundrum must be something that you create in
response to what the stimulation arriving at your body surface
means for you. But this rather changes the picture. It suggests
that the thing to which you are attributing those marvelous
esoteric properties is in fact your own creation, something
you are doing. Thus, if you are being tricked by an illusionist, it
is not by an outside agent, no Richard Gregory scheming in his
lab; it is by some part of yourself. The sensational Gregundrum
is really an ipsundrum (from the Latin ipse, “self”).
“Ipsundrum” is what I will, from now on, call this
hypothesized, illusion-generating inner creation in response to
sensory stimulation. It is an odd sort of word. But I am not
unhappy with that. It is an odd sort of thing.
So there we are. We wanted a theory of how “it is like
something” to be conscious of sensations. And now we have
one. Consciousness is a magical mystery show that you lay on
for yourself. You respond to sensory input by creating, as a
personal response, a seemingly otherworldly object, an
ipsundrum, which you present to yourself in your inner theater.
Watching from the royal box, as it were, you find yourself
transported to that other world.
I know that philosophers in recent years have mocked the
idea of there being a so-called Cartesian Theater, where the
brain creates a picture of the outside world for the edification of
the mind. Daniel Dennett, the leading critic, writes: “The
persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back
to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its
ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.”
11
He is right, of course, to reject the idea that there could be
a place inside your head where one part of your brain creates a
faithful replica of the world for another part of your brain to
look at (and what part of your brain would look at the replica of
the replica?). But let us note that, despite its entry into the
philosophical literature, this is a bad use of the word
“theater,” and it is certainly not the kind of theater I am now
proposing.
Replication is not what theaters are about. Instead, theaters
are places where events are staged in order to comment in one
way or another on the world—to educate, persuade, entertain.
In this sense, the idea that one part of your brain might stage a
theatrical show in order to influence the judgment of another
part of your brain is perfectly reasonable—indeed, biologically
reasonable, as we will see.
12
3 Sentition
Consciousness is a self-created entertainment for the
mind? A show that dramatically changes your outlook on life,
so as to help you—however indirectly—to propagate your
genes?
I may say I have some hopes for this theory, once we have
properly fleshed it out. However, I do not expect everyone to
be convinced it is a good idea just yet. And among the several
reasons why you would be right to be skeptical would be this.
As things stand, this is a theory that would seem to have been
invented for the sole purpose of “saving the phenomena”; in
other words, providing a plausible explanation of the facts in
front of us—namely, the curious things people say and imply
about the inner state they are in when they are having
sensations. What is lacking are any ancillary reasons to believe
it is a true account.
1
I would argue that even if this is all our theory can do—
save the phenomena—this would be a major advance, since
there is no competing theory that can do so much. I would go
further and suggest that if we were to build a humanoid robot
on these lines, with its own designed inner theater where self-
generated illusory sensory objects—ipsundrums—were on
show, this robot might be able to pass itself off as being
phenomenally conscious; it would make all the right claims
about the soul-hammering qualities of its experience,
ineffability, privileged access, and so on.
2
But why say “pass itself off”? Arguably, this would
amount to the real thing. The building of such a robot would
certainly be an advance too.
Yet I realize we want more than this; we want our theory to
be true not of robots but of human beings and other conscious
creatures as they have evolved here on Earth. Which means we
must show, if we can, how it relates to what we already know
of the evolution of animal nervous systems. This theory of
consciousness as a stage show will deserve to be taken much
more seriously if we can argue that before consciousness ever
arose, animals were already engaging in some kind of inner
monitoring of their own responses to sensory stimulation. If
this is indeed how things started, then it will be relatively easy
to argue that sensations acquired their new and amazing
properties by the accepted Darwinian route of “descent with
modification.”
It has to be said that no one knows for sure how things
started. We do not have an authoritative, empirically grounded
account of what the early evolutionary history of sensation was.
But there have been recent attempts by scientists and
philosophers—including me—to reconstruct this
history from first principles.
3
So, I am now going to give you a summary sketch of my
own version (with the assurance that the missing parts of the
story can be found elsewhere).
4
Let me start with some definitions and distinctions.
What is sensation? In modern human beings, sensation—
for all its special phenomenal features—is still essentially the
way in which you represent your interaction with the
environmental stimuli that touch your body: red light at your
eyes, sugar on your tongue, pressure on your skin, and so on. It
is important to recognize that sensation is not the same thing as
perception. Perception is the way you represent the objective
world out there beyond your body: the chair in the kitchen, the
tall tree in the garden, the thunder booming in the night sky.
Sensation, by contrast, is always about what is happening to
you and how you feel about it: “the pain is in my toe and
horrible,” “the sweet taste is on my tongue and sickly,” “the
red light is before my eyes and stirs me up.” It is as if, in
having sensations, you are both registering the fact of
stimulation and expressing your personal bodily opinion about
it—and indeed, as will emerge shortly from my analysis, I
believe you are doing just that.
Now, sensation as human beings experience it is, of course,
a state of mind: a cognitive state in which you represent things
to yourself as being this way. Yet, we can assume that,
historically, sensation had simpler beginnings. Indeed, we can
be sure that our own far-distant ancestors must have been
sensitive to stimuli, reacting to environmental stimulation in a
purely reflex way, long before they had anything that could be
called a mind.
We can be sure of it not least because we can still see
evidence of mindless sensitivity all around us. In fact, one of
the great branches of life on Earth never took things further.
Many plants today show adaptive bodily responses to stimuli—
opening their petals to the sun, drooping at the touch of a
predator, closing their jaws to trap an insect, leaning over in the
direction of a suitable host. A plant’s responses can show
discrimination and purposiveness. We might even say they are
a behavioral expression of how the plant evaluates the stimulus:
the daisy welcomes the sun, the mimosa recoils from the
deer’s attention. Except, of course, that these evaluations are
hard-wired and automatic. No feelings are involved.
5
We should assume, then, that our distant ancestors—let’s
suppose them to be, say, wormlike creatures living in the
Cambrian seas—were in this respect like plants. They too
would have reacted expressively to stimulation, in ways that
took precise account of the nature of the stimulus and how they
evaluated it. But, at least to begin with, it would have been a
mindless activity: expression without mental representation.
Unlike plants, however, our ancestors were mobile and
free-living animals. They found themselves living in a
relatively fast-changing and complex world. Thus, even while
they continued to show set patterns of response, they must,
soon enough, have come under pressure to raise their game by
developing more “thoughtful” kinds of behavior. They needed
not just to respond reflexly, but to form some kind of internal
picture of what they were responding to, so that they could
begin to engage in cognitive planning and decision making.
Yet, how to go about creating this mental picture, given where
they had gotten to already?
The answer was beautifully simple. When an organism is
already doing something about a stimulus reaching its body
surface, something specifically tailored to the particular
stimulus and its significance, then what the organism is doing is
potentially highly informative about what the stimulus is and
also what it means. Indeed, the expressive response as such is,
to anyone who cares to read it, already a form of
representation. It comes preloaded, as it were, with aboutness
and intentionality.
Think of how much you could tell about what is affecting a
man’s body by observing his behavior when, for example, he
flicks an insect from his arm, winces and covers his ears on
hearing the shriek of chalk on the blackboard, or savors a
chocolate in his mouth. For that matter, think what you could
learn by observing how the petals of a flower open and close as
the light changes.
6
But if you could tell so much from the outside, then in
principle so too could the subject who is making the response.
Indeed, if the subject were to have no other way of knowing
what was happening to his own body and how he felt about it,
he could find out by observing his own behavior. What is more,
since it is his behavior, he would not have to observe it from
the outside; he could do it by monitoring the motor command
signals he is issuing from his brain (perhaps by means of an
“efference copy”—a copy of the signals that has been shunted
to the side just for this purpose). The subject would, in effect,
have elevated his own behavior to the level of a performance
that he himself can read—not yet something that he is
specifically staging for that purpose, but nonetheless a de facto
source of information about what is going on.
The subject could find out like this in principle. And we
have good reasons to believe that this is precisely how the first
animals to form representations of what was happening to them
did find out in practice. Chief among these reasons is the fact
that sensations, as human beings experience them today, still
show all the signs of having been originally a representation of
self-generated bodily activity. We may note, especially, how
both sensations and bodily actions (i) belong to the subject, (ii)
implicate part of his body, (iii) are present tense, (iv) have a
qualitative modality, and (v) have properties that are
phenomenally immediate. (For readers who want to go further,
these resemblances are spelled out in more detail in the notes.)
7
Yet, if monitoring the command signals for expressive
responses was indeed the start of the story, the evolution of
sensation clearly did not rest there. In the early days, the
responses were real bodily responses, wriggles of acceptance or
rejection. The animal reacted to this stimulus with the
equivalent of a scowl, to that with a welcoming smile. But
humans today show little, if any, overt bodily response to most
sensory stimuli. In fact, it is clear that far in the past, long
before humans came on the scene, these overt responses
disappeared from view. And yet humans still feel the
stimulation. What happened?
What happened, I suggest, was that natural selection did
some tidying up. There must have come a point in the course of
evolution when the original expressive responses made by our
ancestors were no longer appropriate. At this point, other things
being equal, these responses would soon have been completely
eliminated. However, by this point other things were not equal
because the animal had become reliant on using the information
contained in the responses as the
basis for its mental representation of the stimulation at its
body surface.
Now, if the animal had been monitoring its responses by
observing from the outside, there would have been no way of
both eliminating the responses and preserving access to this
information. However, if the animal were in fact monitoring
not the actual behavior but the motor command signals, there
was a neat solution. This was that the responses should be
internalized—or, as I have put it, privatized.
How to do this? Given the requirement that the responses
should continue to carry relevant information about the
stimulus, they still had to implicate the locus of stimulation on
the body somehow. But this could be achieved without too
radical a transformation by converting the responses into
virtual responses at loci on a virtual body. Therefore, what
occurred, I suggest, was that the responses began to get short-
circuited before they reached the body surface, becoming
targeted instead at points closer and closer in on the incoming
sensory nerves, until eventually the whole process became
closed off as an internal circuit within the brain. In fact, as
things now stand in creatures like ourselves, the outgoing
command signals now project only as far as the body maps at
the level of the sensory cortex, where they interact with the
incoming signals from the sense organs to create, momentarily,
a self-entangling loop (see
figure 4
).
The upshot is that when today you experience sensory
stimulation, you are still responding to it—behind the scenes—
with something like the ancient pattern of bodily expression
handed down from distant ancestors. The response still retains
vestiges of its original evaluative function, its intentionality and
hedonic tone. But now it has become a virtual expression
occurring at the level of a virtual body, hidden inside your
head. Now it is indeed a kind of pantomime—something
whose purpose is no longer to do anything about the
stimulation but only to tell about it. Action has become acting.
Figure 4.
I have given a name to these internalized responses:
“sentition.” This name—somewhere between sensation,
expression, and exhibition—is meant to capture the creative
and staged quality of the response. More particularly, I have
spoken of the response to red light at your eyes, for example, as
“redding,” to salt on your tongue as “salting,” to noxious
stimulation on your skin as “paining,” and so on.
And where is the sensation you experience at the end of all
this? Sensation is where it has been since early on: sensation is
sentition—the privatized expressive activity—as monitored by
your mind.
Figure 5
illustrates how it works. Red light reflected from a tomato
arrives at your eyes, and you create an internalized expressive
response; you engage in redding. You monitor what you are
doing so as to discover what is happening to you. And the
representation you form of your own response is the sensation
of red. Thus, for you to have the sensation of red means nothing
other than for you to observe your own redding.
Figure 5.
This, then, I suggest was the history of sensation, up to—but
not yet at—the crucial point where the subject began to
represent his sensory responses as having mysterious
phenomenal qualities. Can we now see how this astonishing
new development would have come about?
I will not say it is all there yet. But it is surely looking
good. We wanted reassurance that the idea of consciousness as
a self-generated show could be supported by what we might
separately conclude about how sensation has evolved. Now the
evolutionary story is telling us that the ancestors of human
beings and other conscious creatures, since far back, have
indeed been showcasing their sensory responses—just so as to
learn from this how their bodies are being stimulated.
There is no reason to think that this internal monitoring of
sensory responses will in itself have been sufficient to bring on
consciousness. For the fact is that sentition, to begin with, will
simply have been a handed-down form of bodily expression
that will not have had any of the fancy properties that we
hypothesize are responsible for generating the subjective
illusion of being in the presence of mysterious qualia. Sentition,
in other words, will not—yet—have become that strange thing
the ipsundrum.
This implies, of course, that our ancestors were
nonconscious before they were conscious; what is more, that
they were nonconscious even after they began to form mental
representations of sensory stimulation and so could be deemed
to be fully sentient. This may strike us as a strange idea. What
would it be like to have nonphenomenal sensations—
sensations that provide you with all the requisite information,
but without any of the phenomenal quality you take for
granted? What would it be like, if I may put it so, to have
SENSATIONS as opposed to SENSATIONS? The answer has
to be that it would be “like” nothing in Nagel’s sense of the
term. This may be hard, if not impossible, for us to imagine.
Still, it is certainly a consequence of the theory that this was the
situation early on. Moreover, presumably this continues to be
the situation of many sentient animals today. Animals that have
not come under specific selection pressure to move to the next
stage and generate the consciousness illusion—worms, fish,
frogs—will not have done so.
But some did! I wrote just now that sentition will not—as
yet—have become that strange thing the ipsundrum. But the “as
yet” is why it is looking so good for our theory. For surely we
can claim that by the time preconscious creatures had evolved
to the point shown in
figure 5
, the ground was laid. At this point sentition will have been
perfectly placed to take on an enhanced new role, being already
a stage show of sorts, possibly needing only new direction to
become a magical stage show.
Figure 6.
Figure 6
—where I have taken literally the analogy between the
ipsundrum and the Gregundrum—illustrates what our theory
predicts happened next. You will see that the activity of
redding has taken on a remarkable new look.
4 Looping the Loop
So, the idea now is that, in the course of evolution, the
illusion-generating ipsundrum was conjured up out of
sentition. And our two questions must be: What happened, in
terms of brain engineering, to bring about this remarkable
advance? And why did natural selection favor this
development? In this chapter I will offer a suggestion about
what. The rest of the book will be devoted to the question why.
I cannot pretend to know what exactly went on at the level
of the brain. This will therefore be the least confident—and
possibly the most throwaway—chapter in the book. But you
would expect me to have something to say about the structural
basis of the innovation that I am arguing changed everything.
And so I will.
I feel justified in sharing some highly speculative ideas
with you on two grounds. First, I am convinced that, since the
ipsundrum has to be a real-world object, in the sense I
defined earlier, it must be within the capacity of science to
describe it. The neuroscientists Francis Crick and Christof
Koch have written: “The most difficult aspect of consciousness
is the so-called ‘hard problem’ of qualia—the redness of red,
the painfulness of pain, and so on. No one has produced any
plausible explanation as to how the experience of the redness of
red could arise from the actions of the brain. It appears fruitless
to approach this problem head-on.”
1
But I rather believe the opposite is true: if we do not
venture, we will not gain.
Second, I think it will be not too serious a matter if we get
the answer wrong. At least getting it wrong need not
compromise our discussion of the functional benefits of
consciousness, which will come later in the book. Let the
ipsundrum really be made of chalk while we conclude it is
made of cheese, and we can still go on to ask all the right
questions about what biological advantage creating the
ipsundrum brings (which, incidentally, allows me the luxury of
saying—and meaning it—that if you find parts of the argument
of the next few pages hard going, then it is okay to skip them
and go straight to
chapter 5
).
My starting point is that whatever was done to sentition, it
cannot have been much. Natural selection works by modifying
existing structures, and then only in easily available steps.
Given that sentition was already an internalized kind of bodily
expression, then this must have been the clay from which the
ipsundrum was modeled.
What I would like to do theoretically is to “reverse
engineer” this process. Ideally, this would mean we should
begin with what we want to explain as the end product, namely
sensation
with its phenomenal qualities as human beings experience it
today. Then we should work out what kind of real-world object
could possibly support this illusory experience. And then we
should try to trace the evolution of this structure backward.
Hopefully, at the end we should have discovered a route by
which, through a series of relatively minor quantitative changes
in sentition, a major qualitative change could have been
brought about in how it gets to be represented. I cannot say this
has been my strategy exactly. But you will recognize the spirit
of it in what follows.
Let us turn then to the phenomenology of sensation, with a
degree of attention we have not given it so far.
Consider any moment of sensory consciousness you will.
Drinking a cup of breakfast coffee. Rain falling on your head.
The sting of a stinging nettle. Staring at a starlit sky. This—
whatever “this” is that you are pointing to in your experience—
is how you, a human being, are representing the ipsundrum you
are creating. This, we are assuming, will not be what the real-
world object actually is, but it is what it is like.
Now, sensation, we can all agree, has special qualities on a
variety of levels. Let me list the most salient (while offering
excuses, as always, for the inadequacy of the language here).
There is the sense you have of being there, present and
embodied, and yet as if on a separate plane of existence
from the physical world that carries you.
There is the feeling of singularity, of occupying a place
in the universe that cannot be accessed by anyone or
anything else.
There is the paradoxical sense of living outside the
physical instant, as if in a moment of thick subjective
time.
There is the quality space you have entered, where
every sensation is created out of a sense-organ-specific
medium—light, sound, taste, smell, touch—with a
seemingly unbridgeable gulf between these sensory
domains.
There is the strangely unjustifiable—unjustifiable
because to human reason unquestionable—nature of all
this.
There is the wondrous beauty of it all.
The ipsundrum must have a lot to answer for if it gives rise
to such a many-layered entertainment. We can safely say there
can be few types of real-world objects that could generate an
illusion on this scale: not just a one-trick pony, but a complete
cirque fantastique. Yet, conscious beings are living testament
that there was one type of object that could do it. And if
natural selection found it, and found it merely by modifying
sentition, then so I hope can we.
I will not tease you by holding back my answer. I think the
secret is that the ipsundrum is not so much a physical object as
a mathematical object. It is a complex dynamic pattern of
activity in neural circuits whose special properties are realized
and become “visible” only at the level of a computation that
integrates what happens over time. In short, the ipsundrum is a
bit like a developing thunderstorm, a bit like a wheeling flock
of starlings, a bit like a musical sonata.
I suggest that what is supporting this pattern of activity at
the brain level is the existence of reentrant feedback loops—
loops
that allow the activity initiated by external stimulation to
become, for a brief while at least, self-sustaining. Such
feedback would have been a relatively easy thing for natural
selection to arrange, because the ground had already been laid
by the privatization of sentition. Since the earliest days, when
the sensory responses were an overt kind of bodily expression,
these responses would have been influencing the stimulation to
which they were a response, so the potential for feedback was
already there (think, for example, of what happens when you
scratch an itch). To begin with, the feedback would have been
too uncoordinated and slow to have had any interesting
emergent properties. However, once sentition became
internalized and the return pathway much shortened (see
figure 4
in the last chapter), conditions would have been ripe for the
activity in the circuit to catch its own tail and so begin to cycle
around and around.
Then, all at once, things will have been ready to take off.
Once there is recursion in a loop like this, the potential will be
there for generating dynamic patterns with properties that are
very strange indeed. All that has to happen is that each time the
activity cycles around the circuit, the transmission
characteristics of the circuit are altered by this activity. In that
case, the way in which the activity develops in each new cycle
will depend on the level of activity the previous time around.
The growth of activity in such a circuit will be governed by
what is called “a delay differential equation.” A delay
differential equation (DDE) is an equation where the evolution
of the system at a certain time, t, say, depends on the state of
the system at an earlier time, t-T, say.
What happens then is that the activity, once started, if it
does not quickly die away, will either develop chaotically,
never settling down, or soon settle into a “basin of attraction”—
an “attractor state” in which the same pattern repeats itself
indefinitely and to which it returns even if disturbed.
Figure 7
shows a simple example of an attractor state, where the
stable pattern can be described by the path of a line in a three-
dimensional graph.
2
However, typically the attractor will turn out to be very
much more complicated and will occupy a higher-dimensional
landscape. That is, while the pattern is still stable and has a
precise mathematical description, it would require a graph with
more than three dimensions to portray it. The number of
additional dimensions can be very large indeed. In fact, there
will be cases where it would require a graph with an infinite
number of dimensions.
Figure 7. A typical discrete delay differential attractor.
But is this not exactly the kind of thing we have been
looking for?
3
Suppose that natural selection, in designing the ipsundrum,
had all those extra dimensions to play with. The mind boggles
(perhaps literally) at the possibilities for creating
mathematical objects in the brain that when “seen” by an
internal observer, would give rise to the illusion of something
with extraordinary otherworldly properties.
Of course, insofar as the ipsundrum must be observed from
a unique position for the illusion to work, natural selection
would also have had to arrange for the internal observer to have
this special perspective. But, now it comes to it, I wonder
whether perhaps this condition could be relaxed. It is an
intrinsic feature of attractors that they are resistant to
perturbation: they are indeed “basins” into which things tend to
fall, so that the developing activity ends up in the same state, no
matter where it started from. Arguably, this very feature could
have been exploited so as to give the ipsundrum the same
illusionary look no matter where it was seen from. I wrote
earlier, in relation to the Gregundrum, let us suppose “that
things are rigged so that, as and when you move around the
object, some hidden hand turns it so that it is always facing you
in the same way.” Would it not be neat if this could be taken
care of automatically, so that from the point of view of the
internal observer the ipsundrum as a mathematical object is
“self-positioning”?
At any rate, without more ado let me propose that this is the
solution. What natural selection did to bring consciousness
onstage was nothing other than to adjust the properties of
existing sensory feedback loops so as to steer the activity
toward a special class of attractor states—just such states as
would seem, from the subject’s point of view, to give
sensations their phenomenal qualities.
These are nice ideas. But I would have to agree they are still
very loosely formulated. And I am sure you would want
me to make some more specific suggestions before you come
onboard. So let me discuss one prominent feature of sensation
that I believe can be explained—perhaps can only be
explained—along these lines. It is a feature we have already
identified as a key element of sensory phenomenology, and one
that many commentators have considered fundamental. This is
the peculiar way that time enters in.
Imagine yourself looking at a cascading waterfall or
listening to the song of a skylark. Physical time is flowing
linearly forward, with no letup in the relentless passage from
instant to instant. The stimuli that are reaching your sense
organs are always changing. Many a new stimulus is over just
as soon as it arrives.
But this is not how you experience it at the level of
sensation. Rather, the present moment, the “now” of sensation,
has a paradoxical dimension of temporal depth. Each instance
of sensation is still there for you for a brief period after you
create it, as if it happens for longer than it happens. Thus
successive instances are co-present in consciousness. But this is
not because the old is lasting into the time territory of the new;
it is because each new instance lives on for a little while in its
own time. You have co-presence of sensations without
simultaneity.
The paradoxical status of time in the experience of
sensations has been remarked on since the dawn of philosophy.
Aristotle, in his book Of the Senses, struggled—as we still
do—to describe it. Here is a modern commentary on what
Aristotle meant to say: “The undivided ‘now’ of sensation must
rest upon a duration with which it does not altogether coincide;
the present moment must conceal, within itself, the passing of
another, immeasurable by its own standard. . . . It is another
time; to the degree to which time cannot admit of varieties of
itself, it may well be something other than any time at all.”
4
We may well ask: What is going on? What could possibly
give rise to the illusion—for of course it must be an illusion—
that the past is still present, as if you are living in “thick time”?
Can we imagine some kind of ipsundrum that would appear to
the subject to endure without ever getting older? Is there a type
of attractor that could take us there?
Because of Douglas Hofstadter’s groundbreaking work in a
related area, I believe there is an answer we can take right off
the peg. Hofstadter has pioneered the analysis of a special class
of feedback relationship that he calls a “strange loop.”
5
This exists in a system when there are several layers of
operation, the higher layers being built upon the lower, but in
which the higher layers are capable of reaching down and
changing the structure or rules of the lower levels. Cyclic
activity in such a loop is again described by a delay differential
equation, but in this case with a particularly remarkable
outcome. In Hofstadter’s words, the outcome, for someone
observing it, is that “in the series of stages that constitute the
cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or
structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in
a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upward’ shifts
turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s
sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up,
to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.”
6
What would this be like for the observer on the inside?
Well, if you want a visual spatial metaphor, it might be like
climbing an endless staircase that always takes you back to the
same place you set off from (
figure 8
). Or if it is to be an auditory metaphor, it might be like
listening to a glissando where the sound seems always to be
falling or rising in pitch without the note ever changing (you
can hear such an amazing glissando online).
7
Figure 8.
But where might “unused time” come in? Let us look at it
this way. If you climb the staircase in
figure 8
and end up exactly at the height you started out, we would
conventionally describe this as having traveled no distance
upward. But space and time are equivalent in this peculiar
situation. So, if you climb the staircase and end up exactly
where you set out earlier, an equally good interpretation would
be that you have passed no time. Indeed imagine you were to
measure time by counting how many steps you have ascended:
one second, two second, three seconds . . . no seconds. You
would have spent time, without using it.
Now, to translate this back to sensation. Suppose that, in
responding to a sensory stimulus, you were to initiate activity
in a feedback loop whose attractor turned out to be just such a
strange mathematical object. Then, when you monitored
yourself doing this—and found yourself creating something
that from your first-person viewpoint would appear to be the
temporal analogue of an endless staircase—is it not possible
that you would find yourself having the experience of living in
the thick moment?
I do not know. But I daresay you might. In
figure 9
I have tried to illustrate how it could work. You will see (if
you can follow the diagrammatic convention) that things have
moved
on again since
figure 6
. The activity of redding has now acquired the interesting
new property of seeming to the subject to exist in its own
virtual time.
This is not, of course, all we need to explain the subjective
properties of qualia. But it is surely not a bad start. And having
made this start, I think we can see how we might take it further
by adding appropriate bells and whistles to sentition. If, as
theorists, we can describe just what it is that, as a feature of
sensory phenomenology, we want to add, I would hazard that it
ought to be within the power of the mathematics of complex
dynamical systems to deliver it as the property of an attractor
state. And in that case we are home and dry. For we can safely
assume it would have been within the power of natural
selection to create this attractor by playing around with the
design of the sensory feedback loops. Of course, describing
what we want to add will still be half the battle (though I think
we will make some progress with this as the book proceeds).
Figure 9.
At any rate, who says, now, that it cannot be done, that “we
cannot so much as imagine the solution of the hard problem”? I
should not say this, but I will say it anyway: it is a good thing
that natural selection did not give up on the search for the
ipsundrum so easily. Just how good a thing, I hope to show in
the pages that follow.
Meanwhile, where is the Andromedan scientist in all this? I
have not forgotten her. Let’s suppose—if you will suspend your
reasonable skepticism—that these ideas about the physical
basis of consciousness are basically correct. Should we expect
the Andromedan to discover the existence of this kind of
ipsundrum when she examines the human brain? And will she
realize its significance?
I will start with the second part of this. Will she realize its
significance? As we discussed at the end of the first chapter,
unless consciousness is some kind of uncaused miracle, once an
outside scientist has identified the brain events that correspond
to the subjective experience of sensations—the neural correlate
of consciousness, the NCC—then, provided she is in
possession of the neurophenomenological rule book, she ought,
in principle, to be able to see that these events must lead to the
subject’s having just the experiences he has. Now we are
suggesting that the NCC is in fact the set of brain events that
occur when the subject observes, from a certain privileged
position, his own ipsundrum, which is the integral of the
activity in a special kind of feedback loop. So, yes, why not? If
and when the Andromedan has identified this particular set of
brain events as the NCC, she ought to be able to deduce what it
must be like to be the subject, and so she will indeed realize
exactly how significant the ipsundrum is.
But, we have to ask, will she be able identify this set of
brain events as the NCC to begin with? Let us assume she has
taken an interest in the evolutionary story. She has understood
how sentition has been internalized, and she has picked up on
the existence of sensory feedback circuits. She may even have
noticed how the activity in these circuits tends to settle into
higher-dimensional attractor states (although this may not be
easy for her, it is not exactly going to show up as colored
patches on an MRI scan).
However, here is the difficulty: unless and until she
happens to put herself at the subject’s position and so see for
herself the magical illusion that is being created from his point
of view, she is unlikely to think anything very remarkable is
occurring. Even if, as I suggested a few paragraphs back, the
ipsundrum as a mathematical object has been designed to be
“self-positioning” from the point of view of the first-person
subject, this is unlikely to be at all obvious from the outside.
So, the problem for the Andromedan is that she is going to
require either extraordinary prescience or extraordinary luck,
because without it she is simply not going to appreciate what
the ipsundrum is designed to do. There is surely a lesson for
experimental scientists here on Earth, for if the Andromedan
would have such problems with recognizing the ipsundrum as
something significant, worth further investigation, then so will
they. It goes to show, I would say, that we cannot wait for
advances in neuroscience to solve the problem of
consciousness. Crick and Koch, in the passage I quoted earlier,
continued: “It appears fruitless to approach this problem head-
on. Instead we are attempting to find the neural correlate(s) of
consciousness (NCC), in the hope that when we can explain the
NCC in causal terms, this will make the problem of qualia
clearer.” Good luck to them. But I suspect that finding the
NCC experimentally will be even more difficult than
approaching the problem head on. The probability is that brain
scientists would not recognize the NCC for what it is even if it
were right in front of them.
I know there are scholars who will—and do—tut-tut at my
own way of proceeding in this chapter: by trying to think
things through. The geneticist, Steve Jones, once wrote in
relation to some earlier ideas of mine: “I have a problem with
scientists who spend time looking at their own navels. . . . My
feeling about [most scientists who have gone into the field of
consciousness studies] is that they’d find life more interesting if
they continued to do what most of them started by doing—
getting their feet wet by doing experimental work.”
8
He memorably added: “I often think that philosophy is to
science as pornography is to sex, I mean it’s cheaper and easier
and some people seem to prefer it.”
This is all very well. Yes, of course we should use
experimental evidence when we can. But if—as with
consciousness—we have as yet almost no inkling as to what we
should be looking for, and if, as I am now suggesting, we
would probably miss it even if we did, then we ought not to be
embarrassed to make use of pure theory. This is one problem
that really may be best approached from an armchair.
However, the same is not true of where I will go next in this
book. This is: to the big question of why consciousness—
whatever its brain basis—has been selected during the course
of evolution. Of course, this is a question that can be answered
only by attending to the facts: the facts about what difference
consciousness makes to the survival of those who have it.
PART TWO
5 So What?
I have tried, in
part 1
of this book, to do what no one has done before: to explain
how phenomenal consciousness could be an evolved feature of
the human mind. My particular suggestions about the brain
basis may be wrong. But in putting them on the table, I hope I
have persuaded you that a naturalistic explanation of
consciousness is at least a possibility in principle.
My theory is not quite the “transparent theory” that has
been called for, “one that, once you get it, you see that anything
built like this will have this particular conscious experience.”
But it is getting there. I would say we have every reason to
believe that if a human being were to have evolved to be built
like this, he would end up thinking, saying, and doing all of the
right things for us to suppose him conscious—and of course for
him to suppose it too. What is more, a human being could have
evolved to be built like this, because there would have been
a natural trajectory through the biological design space,
leading him from primitive ancestors to where he is today.
So now let us put the question of what behind us. Now the
challenge is to explain the purpose of it all. We can be sure it
did not happen accidentally. It must be the result of natural
selection favoring genes that underwrite the specialized neural
circuits—whatever they actually are—that sustain the illusion
of qualia, giving rise to the magical mystery show for the first
person. And it is axiomatic that this will have happened only if
those lucky enough to be spectators of this show have somehow
been at an advantage in terms of biological survival compared
with their less fortunate cousins.
In
chapter 1
I mentioned the idea of a philosophical zombie—the
philosophers’ fantasy of a creature who is physically identical
to a normal human being but completely lacks conscious
experience. “Philosophical zombies look and behave like the
conscious beings that we know and love, but ‘all is dark
inside.’”
1
I gave reasons for saying that, in principle, philosophical
zombies do not and could not exist. However, it has to be part
of my evolutionary argument that these zombies have a near
relation that could certainly exist. We might call it a
“psychological zombie.” A psychological zombie, let’s assume,
is physically identical to a normal human being except in one
crucial respect: namely, that he or she lacks just those evolved
circuits in the brain that yield the phenomenal quality of
conscious experience.
Would psychological zombies look and behave like the
conscious beings that we know and love, despite the fact that
all is dark inside? No, that is exactly the point. If consciousness
is an evolutionary adaptation, the answer has to be that they
would not. There must be things that a psychological
zombie would do differently precisely because all is dark
inside. And for natural selection to have seen this, this
difference must result in the zombie’s being less likely to
survive and reproduce. Compared with a conscious human
being, a psychological zombie would fail to thrive.
In the pages that follow, I will discuss, in point after point,
the possible advantages that conscious creatures might have
over psychological zombies. But “psychological zombie” is a
cumbersome term, so I will sometimes talk simply of
“zombies.” Since I will be referring to creatures that are
biologically credible (indeed, creatures whose like must once
have existed on Earth and were outcompeted by the conscious
creatures who came later in the course of evolution), I trust no
one will confuse my zombies with the logically impossible and
ultimately much less interesting philosophical version.
2
But if conscious creatures did outcompete the zombies,
why? What reasons are there to believe that the phenomenal
richness of consciousness could play an essential part in
anything of practical value? Here is a reminder of Flanagan’s
definition of “consciousness inessentialism”: it is “the view that
for any intelligent activity I, performed in any cognitive
domain d, even if we do I with conscious accompaniments, I
can in principle be done without these conscious
accompaniments.” As Fodor has colorfully put it:
“[Consciousness] seems to be among the chronically
unemployed. . . . What mental processes can be performed only
because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness
contribute to their performance? Nobody has an answer to this
question for any mental process whatsoever. As far as anybody
knows, anything
that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well
if they weren’t conscious. Why then did God bother to make
consciousness?”
3
Fodor is undoubtedly asking the right question: “why . . . did
God [or natural selection] bother to make consciousness?” But
I believe I know why he finds it all so baffling (“I understand
his ignorance,” as the poet Coleridge would say).
4
It is because he is looking at the problem from entirely the
wrong angle. Note the bias in both Flanagan’s and Fodor’s
formulations, toward thinking of consciousness as contributing
to the capacity to do something. They are both assuming, as
indeed almost everybody does, that the role of phenomenal
consciousness—if it has one—must be to provide the subject
with some kind of new mental skill. In other words, it must be
helping him perform some task that he can perform only by
virtue of being conscious—as, say, a bird can fly only because
it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because
you know English.
5 However, I have another idea. What if the role of
phenomenal consciousness is not this at all? What if its role is
not to enable you to do something you could not do otherwise
but rather to encourage you to do something you would not do
otherwise: to make you take an interest in things that
otherwise would not interest you, to mind about things you
otherwise would not mind about, or to set yourself goals you
otherwise would not set?
I hedged my bets in the introductory chapter and suggested
that consciousness has its effects on survival by changing what
we may loosely call the subject’s psychology—knowing that
the term “psychology” could cover just about everything the
mind is involved in, from cognition to self-expression. But
from here on I want to put aside all the usual subject matter of
cognitive science—intelligence, information processing,
decision making, attention, and so on—where people have
looked in vain for a role for consciousness, and to explore
instead the impact of phenomenal experience on subjective
purposes, attitudes, and values.
In short, I want to suggest that what having phenomenal
experiences does is profoundly to change your worldview so as
to change the direction of your life. It brings about a kind of
Kuhnian paradigm shift in your take on what it’s all about.
Thomas Kuhn, of course, was concerned with scientific
revolutions: “Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new
instruments and look in new places. Even more important,
during revolutions scientists see new and different things when
looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked
before.”
6
But what, now, if led by the consciousness paradigm,
human ancestors had adopted new instruments and looked in
new places? Even more important, what if they had seen new
and different things when looking with familiar instruments in
places their unconscious predecessors had looked before?
A “consciousness paradigm”? We will have to explore what
this could mean in practice. What difference does being
phenomenally conscious make to the way individuals think
about and conduct themselves? What beliefs and attitudes flow
from it? In the case of humans, if not other animals, what
transformations does it bring about in the collective culture, and
how do these in turn bring further changes?
These are—or ought to be—empirical questions: questions
we can answer only by careful fieldwork in the realm of
conscious creatures. So we need to engage in a
thoroughgoing study of the natural history of consciousness.
And it must be a program of research in which we are ready to
consider all sorts of possibilities—not just those we would
expect to find discussed in the science or philosophy sections of
the library but perhaps those that belong in the self-help, mind
and spirit, or even New Age section.
What we have to do is what Daniel Dennett has called
“heterophenomenology” (phenomenology from another’s
viewpoint). Here is Dennett discussing how Martian scientists
might set about their consciousness fieldwork (Dennett flies in
his investigators from a nearer place than I do): “Among the
phenomena that would be readily observable by these Martians
would be all our public representations of consciousness:
cartoon ‘thought balloons’ . . . soliloquies in plays, voice-overs
in films, use of the omniscient author point of view in novels,
and so forth. . . . They would also have available to them the
less entertaining representations of consciousness found in all
the books by philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists,
phenomenologists, and other sober investigators of the
phenomena.”
7
However, I would go further than Dennett. I think this list
is still too cautious and biased toward traditional kinds of
evidence. Neither he nor any other mainstream philosopher of
consciousness seems to have recognized how consciousness
may contribute to personal growth.
It is our good fortune, however, that other types of
researchers have recognized this all along. We might call them
the “alternative natural historians of consciousness”: on one
side are painters, poets, musicians; on the other, followers of
meditative religious traditions, such as Buddhists. Do not be
surprised, therefore, if I call artists and monks to the
witness box or if I make much of direct quotations from
individuals rhapsodizing about their personal experiences. The
things people say—and especially the things that are
remembered and quoted as seeming right and interesting to
other conscious beings—provide some of the best evidence we
can get about what consciousness does.
In what direction will this testimony lead? I will not hold
back my main conclusion, although I expect I may shock you
with how simple it is (after a lifetime of working on the
question, I have shocked myself).
I think that what the natural history reveals is that
consciousness—on several levels—makes life more worth
living. Conscious creatures enjoy being phenomenally
conscious. They enjoy the world in which they are
phenomenally conscious. And they enjoy their selves for being
phenomenally conscious. But “enjoy” is too weak a term. In the
case of human beings, at any rate, it would be truer to say: they
revel in being phenomenally conscious. They love the world in
which they are phenomenally conscious. They esteem their
selves for being phenomenally conscious.
Moreover, as I will show in the coming chapters, for
conscious creatures there is real biological value in all this. The
added joie de vivre, the new enchantment with the world they
live in, and the novel sense of their own metaphysical
importance has, in the course of evolutionary history,
dramatically increased the investment individuals make in their
own survival.
I say “in the case of human beings, at any rate.” Should I say
nonhuman animals too? And if so, which? The question
of which other species are conscious, and which are sentient
but unconscious—psychological zombies, in effect—is an issue
we have not fully faced yet.
In presenting the evolutionary story, I have of course gone
along with the standard assumption that human beings are not
the first and only animals to have developed phenomenal
consciousness. However, the grounds for this assumption are
by no means as strong as we might wish. If there has been
rather little systematic study of the natural history of
consciousness in our own species, there has been still less for
other animals. Indeed, if you look at Dennett’s list of the
evidential sources that an alien scientist (but it could equally be
an Earth scientist) might use to research consciousness in
humans, you will realize that not one of these sources would be
available for nonhuman animals, not even a chimpanzee, let
alone a mouse. Chimps simply do not go in for dramatic
soliloquies and so on.
You may think it would be absurd to suggest that human
beings alone have consciousness. I would agree. Evolutionary
considerations rule out the possibility that the whole thing
began with human beings. However, this does not mean that
consciousness just as we humans know it is widely shared with
animals.
I drew attention in the previous chapter to how sensations
amaze us humans in a variety of ways. But there is certainly no
reason to believe that these varieties came all at once in
evolution. It is surely more probable that consciousness
evolved in stages and that today there still exist animals with
differing kinds and degrees of sensory qualia.
For a start, given what I have suggested about the brain
basis of the ipsundrum, it would seem likely that phenomenal
properties were established independently in the different
sensory modalities. So, perhaps, for our distant ancestors it was
“like something” to experience touch before it was “like
something” to experience sound or light. And it could still be
the case today that some animals have consciousness in only
one modality.
But beyond this, it would seem likely that different kinds of
phenomenal effects kicked in at different times: temporal
thickening, the absolute separation of quality spaces, aesthetic
valency, intrinsicality, privacy, ineffability . . . In an order we
cannot yet specify (although ineffability could hardly have been
an issue for prelinguistic creatures). Again, this would imply
that some animals today are more richly conscious than others.
True, we might want to argue that the single most important
transition was the first one: from being like nothing to being
like something—and that all the rest is icing on the cake.
Maybe in some sense that is right. You are either in flatland or
in three dimensions; you either enter a magical nonphysical
world or you do not. Arguably, the truly revolutionary
development must have been when, perhaps quite soon after
sentition became privatized, some chance change in its
configuration first created the subjective illusion of being in the
presence of something magically different. But if this was
indeed the tipping point, it was still only the prelude. There
would still have been a way to go before the full-blown magic
show of consciousness was on the road, plenty of scope for
“improving” sensations so as to make them ever more
impressive.
Lacking the evidence to clinch it (though with plenty of
suggestive evidence to be considered in the coming chapters), I
may tell you my guess is that the self-made show did not
become outrightly soul-hammering, in the grand sense
Kandinsky
was alluding to, until quite recent times—and maybe only
thanks to advances that occurred specifically in the human line.
Though I am jumping ahead, I will say it now: no nonhuman
animals make of consciousness what human beings do.
Consciousness may indeed contribute to a sense of self in
nonhuman animals. But there is no evidence that any
nonhuman animals, whatever the level of their consciousness,
have gone on to invent the idea of a “person,” an “I,” let alone a
“soul” with a life beyond the body (which is, of course,
precisely why Dennett’s list of the “evidences of
consciousness” cannot be used with animals: they are all
essentially “I” related).
How far this specifically human notion of selfhood has
followed on from innovations in what sensations are like for
humans—that is, primary facts about the quality of human
consciousness—and how far on feedback from culture, once
humanity as a cultural phenomenon came of age, are issues we
have still to explore. I am sure most theorists would put their
money on cultural influences. Yet the fact is that humans have
evolved rapidly since they split from chimpanzees five million
years ago. Their brains and minds have undergone radical
rewiring. And, remarkably enough, new research in
comparative anatomy shows that human brains have diverged
not only in higher executive functions but also in the early
stages of sensory processing. The primary visual cortex in
humans has an extra layer of cells that does not exist in apes or
monkeys. Todd Preuss and Ghislaine Coleman, who made the
discovery, comment: “The existence of substantial differences
in the organization of primary visual cortex between human
and nonhuman primates (including the commonly studied
macaque monkeys) may come as a surprise, given how widely
held is the conviction that the human visual system is basically
or essentially similar to our close relatives.” There is no
evidence yet as to what this extra layer is doing. The authors
suggest a “low level” explanation in terms of differences in
visual attention and perception of movement. But I wonder if
they are not underestimating the significance of their discovery.
Might not this extra layer be just what is needed to create a
uniquely human kind of reverberatory loop? At least let’s not
rule out the possibility that the wonderfully inflated human
self-image has arisen out of some more basic change in sensory
phenomenology—one that has happened in the human line
alone.
8
Let’s revisit this question of grades of consciousness when
we know more about what exactly is at issue.
6 Being There
In the previous chapter I headlined three levels at which I
believe the lives of our ancestors were transformed by
consciousness, three levels at which, if we look on the negative
side, we could say the lives of psychological zombies—lacking
those extra brain circuits—would be impoverished compared
with our own. Now in separate chapters, I will treat these one
by one—beginning with the simple pleasure of pure being.
The bottom line about how consciousness changes the
human outlook—as deep an existential truth as anyone could
ask for—is this: we do not want to be zombies. We like “being
present,” we like having it “be like something to be me,” and
only in the most drastic circumstances would we have it
otherwise.
Lord Byron says it: “The great object of life is sensation—
to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving
void’ which drives us to gaming—to battle—to travel—to
intemperate,
but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal
attraction is the agitation inseparable from their
accomplishment.”
1
Tom Nagel as a philosopher says it more soberly: “There
are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life
better; there are other elements which, if added to one’s
experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are
set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. . . .
The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself,
rather than by any of its contents.”
2
John Galsworthy, in one of his Forsyte novels, describes
fourteen-month-old Kit Forsyte taking a bath: “He seemed to
lend a meaning to life. His vitality was absolute, not relative.
His kicks and crows and splashings had the joy of a gnat’s
dance, or a jackdaw’s gambols in the air. They gave thanks not
for what he was about to receive, but for what he was
receiving.”
3
The word “sensualism” approaches but hardly does justice to
what these writers are getting at. Maybe we need the word
“presentism.”
4
At any rate, the emotion is a basic and familiar one: the yen to
confirm and renew, in small ways or large, your own
occupancy of the subjective moment, to go deeper, to extend it,
to revel in being there—and, where you have the skill, to
celebrate it in words.
Here is John Keats, in a letter to a friend, sharing his mouth
with us: “Talking of Pleasure, this moment I am writing with
one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a
Nectarine—good god how fine—It went down soft pulpy,
slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my
throat like a large beatified Strawberry.”
5
Or here, on a more heroic scale, is Albert Camus, inviting
us to enter the skin of his young body as he luxuriates among
the flower-covered Roman ruins of Tipasa on the Algerian
coast: “We enter a blue and yellow world and are welcomed by
the pungent, odorous sigh of the Algerian summer earth. . . .
We are not seeking lessons or the bitter philosophy one requires
of greatness. Everything seems futile here except the sun, our
kisses, and the wild scents of the earth. . . . How many hours I
have spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying to
match my breathing with the world’s tumultuous sighs! Deep
among wild scents and concerts of somnolent insects, I open
my eyes and heart to the unbearable grandeur of this heat-
soaked sky.”
6
Or here, to take it down to a more domestic level, is Rupert
Brooke, stirring up thoughts of lesser ecstasies as he provides
an inventory of one small sensory delicacy after another.
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon.
The list is long. The poet fondles each moment, like a bead on a
rosary.
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such—
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns. . . .
7
He is only just beginning, and I will return to this
astonishing paean to sensation in a later chapter. But in reading
this and the passages before it, I want to remark how rooted in
the natural world all these precious experiences are. There is
nothing in Keats’s or Camus’ descriptions, and only the
occasional item in Brooke’s, that has any contemporary cultural
reference. Absinthe leaves, blue massing clouds, moist earth,
and so on, have, since time immemorial, been freely on offer to
anyone with the senses and the inner leisure to appreciate them.
We can and should assume, therefore, that our human ancestors
of 100,000 years ago, or maybe as much as a million, relished
many of these same experiences.
But then perhaps we should assume that the emotion I just
now called presentism does in fact go back much further and
spreads much wider. There is no lack of evidence that many
nonhuman animals have evolved, at some level, to like “being
there” just as humans do—which strongly suggests that they
experience a qualia-rich version of the subjective present,
basically like ours.
Galsworthy, looking for an analogy for the boy in his bath,
went straight to animals: “the joy of a gnat’s dance, or a
jackdaw’s gambols in the air.” And there are, of course, animal
parallels to be drawn on every side, not just for Kit Forsyte but
also for Keats, Camus, Brooke, and even Nagel. Dolphins surf
the waves. Dogs chase their tails in frenzy. Bonobos give each
other erotic body rubs. Cats stretch themselves before the fire.
Lambs frolic on the spring sward. Monkeys leap from high
cliffs into water pools.
At the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania, a
chimpanzee beside a stream was observed by scientists drawing
her fingers repeatedly through the rippling water, trans-fixed, it
seems, by the delicate play of light, sound, and touch on her
body. Other chimps began to copy her, and within months this
kind of water play had become a family tradition. “Sitting
intently nearby was Golden, who watched for a time before
mimicking Gaia’s exact motions. Playing in Kakombe Stream,
the field team observes, has since become something of a
Gremlin family tradition: Every time they cross the creek,
Golden finds time to sit on a rock with her hand immersed in
the water, overturning stones on the streambed.”
8
But at Gombe scientists have also observed examples of
much wilder, Byronic sensation seeking, as when a chimpanzee
emerges into the open in a thunderstorm and dances and stamps
and screams as torrents of rain run from his back and lightning
forks the air.
Marc Bekoff describes: “I once saw a young elk in Rocky
Mountain National Park run across a snowfield, jump in the air
and twist his body while in flight, stop, catch his breath and do
it again and again. Buffalo have been seen playfully
running onto and sliding across ice, excitedly bellowing as
they do so.”
9
George Schaller describes a two-year-old panda on being
released from a dark tunnel: “It exploded with joy. Exuberantly
it trotted up an incline with a high-stepping, lively gait, bashing
down any bamboo in its path, then turned and somersaulted
down, an ecstatic black and white ball rolling over and over;
then it raced back up to repeat the descent, and again.”
10
Birds are up there too, as this account reveals:
A common feature of the hot, dry inland of Australia is
the dust devil or willy-nilly, a small vortex with winds
about 60 kilometres per hour. It can carry dust hundreds
of metres into the air. . . . A common native bird, the
galah, has been seen flying into these whirlwinds and
being hurled upwards, screeching loudly. On reaching
the top, the galahs fly down and enjoy another ride by re-
entering the vortex near the ground. There is one report
of a flock of galahs flying into a much less common and
more dangerous tornado. The winds, spinning at over
100 kilometres per hour, immediately spat them out,
screeching with delight.
11
“To feel that you exist—even though in pain”? It certainly
looks that way.
So here is the question. Why should feeling that you exist—
and valuing the feeling—be biologically adaptive, so that the
underlying brain circuits would have been selected in the
course of evolution?
I believe the answer (at least the beginning of an answer) is
right there in front of us. It is that a creature who takes pleasure
in the feeling of existence will develop “a will to exist” and so,
at least as we see it in humans, “a will to live.” But I must
unpack this. How does a will to exist differ from simply an
instinct to exist, or just existing? Most biological organisms
evidently manage to live their lives just fine without having the
will to do so. We would never attribute a will to live to an oak
tree, an earthworm, or a butterfly. These organisms, when the
need arises, act instinctively in a variety of preprogrammed
life-preserving ways. Human beings do the same much of the
time. You eat your food, withdraw your hand from the flame,
heal your wounds, and so on, without giving a thought to your
existence. So how might there be added value in your having
evolved to be conscious of existing?
It could work like this. If natural selection can arrange that
you enjoy the feeling of existing, then existence can and does
become a goal: something—indeed, as we’ll see, some thing—
you want. And the difference between your wanting to exist
and simply having some kind of life instinct is that, when you
want something, you will tend to engage in rational actions—
flexible, intelligent behavior—to achieve it. You will do things
that are not rewarding in themselves but that are calculated (on
some level) to deliver the goal. You may even do things that
are punishing—including going through pain.
I admit this may sound like some sort of bootstrap
operation, rather as if natural selection had designed a creature
to take pleasure in the sound of its own heartbeat. But why not,
if it works? We accept that Nature made sex pleasurable so as
to encourage animals to take the steps that lead to sexual
intercourse.
Then why not make the feeling of existence magically
delightful in order to encourage conscious creatures to do the
things that lead to their existing?
For human beings, the case hardly needs making. Happily,
we have all seen how it plays out in our own lives. “Where am
I going?” the boy sings in A. A. Milne’s poem “Spring
Morning”:
Where am I going? I don’t quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where am I going? The high rooks call:
“It’s awful fun to be born at all.”
12
Awful fun is not the half of it. We know life can at times be
unspeakably beautiful. But what about those high rooks? And
galahs, and chimpanzees? Do nonhuman animals really want
to feel that they exist? And if they do, is it indeed evidence that
these animals are phenomenally conscious?
We need not doubt that there are many species of animals
who, just like humans, go out of their way to have fun. They
want, as it were, to live it up. The galahs seek out the
whirlwinds. Dolphins follow a ship to ride the bow waves.
Chimps beg to be tickled.
I once observed a young mountain gorilla who climbed a
high vine to fetch down a gourd-like fruit. My field notes
record: “She plays with the fruit, tossing it from side to side,
letting it drop into her hands, then she grips the stalk between
her teeth so that the fruit dangles from her mouth, stands
bipedally
and turns somersaults. Next she stands, still holding the
fruit between her teeth, and beats it repeatedly with both hands,
making a sharp clapping sound.” The following day she came
back to the same vine with the obvious intention of fetching
down another so satisfactory a plaything.
13
Every dog owner has seen the lengths to which a dog will
go to get taken for a walk, the anticipatory joy when he
succeeds, and the hang-dog look if he realizes he is not getting
what he wants. There are few sights so pathetic as a dog who,
having been taken out in the car for what might have been a run
in the woods, realizes he is approaching a boarding kennel,
where his existence will be put on hold.
Do examples such as these really add up to a will to exist in
these animals? Certainly, if you were in their place, conscious
presence would be both the goal and the condition of your
making these efforts to engage with life. It would be the qualia
you would be deliberately seeking. If you were a psychological
zombie, you simply would not bother to do these things. And I
would say it is a fair assumption (though by no means a
logically secure one) that if the animals were zombies, they
would not bother either. True, we should be cautious about
reading too much into the behavior of species distant from
ourselves. Yet we should not feel bound to read too little either.
The survival benefits of delighting in “existence” are
obvious. For a start, any creature who has it as a goal to indulge
its senses in the kinds of ways described will be likely to
engage in a range of activities that promote its bodily and
mental well-being (even if occasionally at some risk). Such a
creature will do life well, we might say. But it will not stop
there. Since you
can reach these moments of intense existence only by doing all
the other things required to stay alive, then, for at least some
animals, being alive as such will become a goal. You will not
just live well, you will want a life because you want to feel.
So here is the crucial question. Could not natural selection
have achieved the same result in easier ways? Given that there
are indeed benefits to be had when living it up becomes a goal
of behavior, then why not simply add some extra reward
circuits to the brain so as to make the experience of intense and
varied sensory stimulation “positively reinforcing,” as the
behaviorists would say, without going the extra mile to invent
the drama of phenomenal consciousness? Psychological
zombies could surely have sensory fun—of a zombie sort.
Zombies could still be designed to engage in play.
Yes, so they could. But I believe the reason their play
would be so much shallower—and in the long run less life
affirming—than that of a conscious creature is this:
phenomenal consciousness gives you (or at any rate gives you
the illusion of) a substantial thing to value. The great object of
life—the ball that, as a conscious being, you strive to keep in
the air—is not a shallow physiological variable, not a mere
number, but something psychologically in a different league. It
is the existence of a conscious self.
There, I have said it: a “conscious self.” It is time to bring
the “self” to center stage. The concept of self is a complex one,
and it will not be until much later in the book that we get the
measure of it. I will argue later that in the course of
evolutionary history, selves have come to exist on different
levels in different species. The self of an adult human being
certainly has no equivalent in animals (or human infants, for
that matter).
But, to begin with, I want to focus on something basic: let’s
call it the “core self,” by which I mean no more or less than the
owner and occupier of the thick moment of consciousness.
When “you feel that you exist” as the subject of sensation, the
core self comes into existence in that illusory time space.
This is not my idea. It is originally Aristotle’s idea
(although seldom acknowledged as such in contemporary
philosophy.) I wrote above, in
chapter 4
, how Aristotle drew attention to the paradoxical temporal
depth of consciousness. “The undivided ‘now’ of sensation
must rest upon a duration with which it does not altogether
coincide. . . . It is another time . . . It may well be something
other than any time at all.” But where did he go with this?
Remarkably, he went on to argue that it is precisely this “extra”
time dimension that underlies—and brings into being—the core
self: “If someone senses himself or something else in a
continuous time, then it is impossible for him not to notice he
exists. . . . In all sensation, simple or complex, sharp or dull, the
animal . . . feels that it lives.”
14
Aristotle realized that it is impossible not to notice that I
am when I feel—Sentio ergo sum. Descartes, fifteen hundred
years later, claimed that it is impossible to doubt that I am
when I think—Cogito ergo sum. Yet, as several modern writers
have observed, Aristotle’s “Sentio” is much truer to lived
experience than Descartes’ “Cogito.” “Sometimes I think and
other times I am,” wrote the poet Paul Valéry.
15
For novelist Milan Kundera, “I think, therefore I am is the
statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel,
therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it
applies to everything that’s alive.”
16
The logical corollary of this, and indeed the obvious
psychological fact, is that if I do not feel, I am not. Your core
self comes into being only as and when you have sensations.
And to suggest, as some theorists have, that there could already
be the shell of a self—an empty self, waiting in the wings—
ready to lay claim to sensations if and when they arise, is to get
things back to front. The philosopher Gottlob Frege
misleadingly argued that “an experience is impossible without
an experiencer. The inner world presupposes the person whose
inner world it is.”
17
But in truth an experiencer is impossible without
experience; the existence of the person presupposes the inner
world that makes him who he is. Johann Fichte said it better:
“What was I before I came to self-consciousness? The natural
answer to this question is: I did not exist at all, for I was not an
I.” 18
In fact, as natural historians of consciousness, this is
something we see for ourselves every morning. At the
beginning of this book I invoked the great awakening that
happens each day on Earth: innumerable conscious selves
emerging from the chrysalis of sleep. Marcel Proust wrote of
how, on waking, there is “a rope let down from heaven to draw
me up out of the abyss of not-being.”
19
Here is Paul Valéry again: “One should not say I wake but
There is waking—for the I is the result, the end, the ultimate
Q.E.D.”
20
So then what next? What when, as the great physiologist
Charles Sherrington has described it, “the full panel of the
‘five-senses’ is in session, and . . . the individual has attained a
psychical existence”? From that moment on the core self
becomes the entity that you, as a conscious creature, think of
yourself as being and in whose future you now have a unique
and peculiar interest. “Each waking day is a stage dominated
for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy, by a dramatis
persona, the ‘self.’”
21
It is your own self, occupying your inner space. For let us
note (and we will discuss this more fully later on) that it is a
key feature of the self that emerges from sensation that it
belongs to you, the subject, alone. Imagine how it would be if
the “my space” of the social Internet were not only a Web site
to which you were alone in having the password for uploading
new information, but a site that was essentially unviewable by
anyone else, and yet the site where it felt the real you resided.
Imagine it? But that is precisely how it is! Your self has
become essentially your concern, your responsibility.
Admittedly, there has been fierce debate among
philosophers about whether this notion of the singular all-
important self can stand up to analysis. Several critics have
argued that people ought not to be so impressed by the
autochthonous illusion of selfhood, as undoubtedly they mostly
are. Thomas Metzinger wrote in response to an earlier essay of
mine: “Of course no such things as selves exist in the world:
nobody ever was or had a self. A self could never be something
you have—like a bicycle or book by Dostoevsky. . . . The
phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process.”
22
James Branch Cabell, the early twentieth-century American
author and wit, took a particularly sardonic view of the
importance people attach to this supposed thing: “What thing
is it to which I so glibly refer as I? If you will try to form a
notion of yourself, of the sort of a something that you suspect
to inhabit and partially to control your flesh and blood body,
you will [find] . . . there seems to remain in those pearl-colored
brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very little
save a faculty for receiving sensations. . . . And surely, to
be just a very gullible consciousness provisionally existing
among inexplicable mysteries, is not an enviable plight.” “And
yet,” he added, “this life—to which I cling tenaciously—comes
to no more.”
23
Maybe so. Yet, in light of our discussion, it seems obvious
that these deconstructionists have missed the point: the point of
what a self amounts to psychologically. Cabell, rather than
ending on that downbeat note, might better have stressed the
extraordinarily positive fact: “And yet, to this life—which
comes to no more—I cling tenaciously.” For it is this that
matters: “the sort of a something,” which as scientists we may
well agree is “very little save a faculty for receiving
sensations,” has been transformed by the magic of conscious
phenomenology into some thing that you can cling to. The
great object in life has become that your core self should thrive.
As William James wrote: “To have a self that I can care for,
nature must first present me with some object interesting
enough to make me instinctively wish to appropriate it for its
own sake.”
24
We can only guess how wide the circle goes among
nonhuman animals—how wide the charmed circle of those who
because they live in the conscious present can contemplate and
enjoy their own existence. To declare my prejudice, I do not
think that gnats—even joyful, dancing gnats—have a will to
exist or have so much as a smidgen of a conscious self. I have
no opinion about fish and cold-blooded land vertebrates. But I
do take seriously the evidence for mammals and birds. What I
see there—in a cat’s and gorilla’s and panda’s and galah’s
straining for sensation—are indeed the signs of a core self
devoted to its own continuance.
But we cannot leave things at this point, with consciousness
simply as a motive to love life in certain species, including our
own. As natural historians, we have to see the extra face of this.
For there is at least one species of animal for which clinging to
life tenaciously means more than loving life. With human
beings, it also means fearing personal death—the extinction of
the self. This will loom still larger for us toward the end of the
book. But some of the issues are pressing, and I want to go
there right away.
Though we have been discussing the evolution of
consciousness in animals in general, we have every reason to
be especially interested in human beings. And when the
evidence suggests that there is something special going on with
humans, we must not ignore it. As it happens, all the issues
raised earlier in this chapter about the motivating effects of
consciousness as a biological force come into sharpest focus
when we consider an outcome that very likely matters to human
beings alone.
Human beings. It could hardly be more obvious. Being is
what it is all about. But this creates problems for humans of a
unique kind. Humans are a part of nature, yet in one respect
they are at a disadvantage to all other species. They know too
much. They want to be, yet they know that every precedent—
all too well recorded—teaches that not being is their certain
fate. John Keats was twenty-four years old when he enjoyed
that nectarine, but within two years he had died from
consumption in Rome. Rupert Brooke was twenty-seven when
he wrote that poem, “The Great Lover,” and a year later he
succumbed to septicemia on a troopship in the Dardanelles.
Albert Camus was forty-six when, with the unfinished
manuscript
of his story of growing up in Algeria in a bag beside him,
he was killed in a car crash on the road to Paris.
Inevitably, you see that it is coming your way too. Yet,
being no less in love with life than any other conscious
creature, your own death may seem completely out of order—it
was never part of the deal. Tom Nagel has said it well:
“Observed from without, human beings obviously have a
natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred
years. A man’s sense of his own experience, on the other hand,
does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence
defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future,
containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has
found so tolerable in the past. . . . Viewed in this way, death, no
matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely
extensive possible goods.”
25
You signed up to be there indefinitely. And maybe nothing
hits you harder than the realization that one day you will not be
able to. Here is an excerpt from an interview with the novelist
Philip Roth. “‘You said you’re afraid of dying. You’re 72.
What are you afraid of ?’ He looks at me. ‘Oblivion. Of not
being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it.’”
26
True, it can be argued that to be afraid of oblivion is a kind
of logical error: you cannot reasonably fear not feeling, because
not feeling is not a state of being. Two thousand years ago the
poet Lucretius tried to persuade us that after we die, “we shall
not feel, because we shall not Be. . . . And since the Man who
Is not feels not woe (For death exempts him and wards off the
blow, which we, the living, only feel and bear), What is there
left for us in Death to fear?”
27
We may agree that, strictly speaking, oblivion is
unimaginable because the mind cannot simulate a state of
mindlessness.
28
But that is hardly the point. When you fear death, it is not
that you fear being somewhere you cannot imagine, it is that
you fear not being somewhere you can imagine (and are living
in right now). Philip Larkin made the argument better than
anyone in his poem “Aubade.” “Specious stuff,” he calls it,
. . . that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
29
The point is that oblivion figures in people’s imagination as
the negation of being there. You fear the deletion of “my
space”—as Nagel said, the cancellation of possible goods.
Zombies would have nothing to worry about even if they saw
death coming, because they could not fear the absence of
something they have never had. Humans, however, can and do
fear death precisely because of what they do have.
It means that for human beings, this fear is indeed one of
the public effects of consciousness: something that would
surely catch the attention of the Andromedan scientist if she
were looking. It is a big effect too. The psychoanalyst Ernst
Becker has written: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the
human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human
activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of
death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final
destiny of man.”
30
To the extent that this is true, it follows that human beings’
fear of death must always have been highly
visible to natural selection—and hence so must have been
the consciousness that lies behind it.
As we will see later in the book, anxieties about death show
up in human behavior at many different levels and have been a
driving force in the development of culture and civilization. But
for now I want to keep the discussion simple. Does the raw fear
of oblivion help people survive?
I have not seen the question put like this before. But maybe
that is because the answer is so obvious. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau may have exaggerated when he claimed, “Without
[the fear of dying,] the entire human species would soon be
destroyed.”
31
But it is certainly the case that in a thousand different
circumstances, human beings have looked death in the face
and—not liking what they saw—have taken whatever steps
they could to avoid it.
Let’s take just one example. The climber Joe Simpson, in
his astonishing tale of survival after a climbing accident in the
Andes, Touching the Void, relates how, first of all, the feeling
of pain reassured him: “A burning, searing agony reached up
from my leg. It was bent beneath me. As the burning increased
so the sense of living became fact. Heck! I couldn’t be dead
and feel that! It kept burning, and I laughed—Alive! Well fuck
me!—and laughed again, a real happy laugh.”
32
That night, Simpson found Shakespeare’s lines running
through his head, teasing him, urging him on:
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
33
The void: Simpson touched it and recoiled. And so he dragged
himself back into the world of the living.
Presumably there have been countless other instances
where humans have done the same—refused to succumb
because they were not ready to let go, because, in the words of
Dylan Thomas, they “raged against the dying of the light,”
34
not of course always with such admirable acts of courage.
To avoid personal death, people will sometimes behave in
craven and immoral self-serving ways. As Dr. Johnson
famously said: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to
be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
35
And when he knows he will be dead in the next hour,
unless he does something about it, we should not be surprised if
his mind turns to escape, perhaps at any cost. Modern humans
are not necessarily the descendants of heroes; they are the
descendants of those who stayed alive when others did not.
Like it or not, human consciousness must regularly have proved
its biological worth in just such moments of last resort.
Think of the extravagant lengths to which throughout
history people have been prepared to go in the vain hope of
ensuring the survival of their selves after they die. How much
more have they always invested in not dying to start with.
But these are indeed human responses. Do any nonhuman
animals fear death? It has generally been assumed that they do
not—actually could not. I do not disagree. There are three
reasons for saying so.
The first is that nonhuman animals have a limited capacity
for “mental time travel.”
36
Even if they are able to look forward to the future, and to
imagine the possible recurrence of good or bad things that have
happened in the past, it is very unlikely
that they can imagine a hypothetical scenario: the
occurrence of something that has never yet happened to them.
Yet dying is of course just that—a lifetime first. It means a
nonhuman animal could not think about being hanged in ten
minutes’ time, let alone a fortnight. As W. H. Auden wrote,
contrasting this state of blissful ignorance starkly with that of
humans: “Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read / The
Hunter’s waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf / Unable to predict
the fall.”
37
The second reason is that nonhuman animals will not have
had anything like the exposure that humans have to the
accumulated evidence of death. Even if an animal has had
occasion to see another animal die, it will still not have much
cause to generalize this fate to include itself, let alone see death
of some sort as inevitable. Voltaire remarked: “The human race
is the only one that knows it must die, and it knows this only
through its experience. A child brought up alone and
transported to a desert island would have no more idea of death
than a cat or a plant.”
38
It may be true that if an animal has seen another of its
species killed, after being caught by a lion, for example, then,
provided it is clever enough, it might possibly conclude that if
it itself gets caught by a lion, it will be killed too. But without
the support of a shared culture, this is a lesson very unlikely to
be learned.
But the third and clinching reason is that nonhuman
animals do not have the conceptual wherewithal to appreciate
the finality of death. How could the animal possibly anticipate
that the death of the body brings with it the death of the self ? If
an animal thinks about it at all, it will most likely conflate
being dead with being asleep. And sleep, though it does entail
the temporary extinction of consciousness, is of course
not such a disaster. Indeed, everyone’s experience—yours
too—has been that sleep is a bourn from which the self has
always returned. This is no doubt why human beings find sleep
such a seductive model for being dead. And if humans do not
always get the truth of it, is it likely that nonhumans ever do?
The difficulties that chimpanzees have in appreciating that
death is the end is revealed in the primatologist Tetsuro
Matsuzawa’s observations of a group of wild chimpanzees at
Bossou, Guinea, following the death from pneumonia of a two-
and-a-half-year-old female infant, Jokro.
39
I quote Matsuzawa’s field notes verbatim (a marvelous
film is also available online):
January 25th 1992.
Jire [Jokro’s mother] puts her daughter on the ground. I
look at Jokro’s chest, but see no signs of breathing. I
realize that she is dead—she died this very day. Jire takes
Jokro’s hand and places her body on her back. Just like
when she was alive, Jokro is “riding” on her mother’s
back in prone posture.
January 27th.
Two days have passed since Jokro’s death. Her corpse is
lying face up, supine posture, on the back of the mother.
The belly is swollen with gas. Jokro’s body has started to
decompose. Jire chases away the flies circling her dead
infant.
January 29th.
4 days after death, Jokro’s body has begun to dry out—it
is mummifying. But the mother has returned to
carrying it the way she would a live infant—right side
up, and in the normal prone position. Tua, the alpha male
of the community, sniffs Jokro’s corpse. I myself can
smell the strong odour of decomposition. However, other
members of the community show no signs of aversion to
or fear of the lifeless body.
February 9th.
15 days have passed since Jokro died. Her body has now
completely dried out. Jire continues to chase away the
flies attracted to the dead body. Then, she picks up the
body and looks directly into its face. She starts to clean
Jokro’s face. She grooms her daughter’s remains as if
she were still alive. Soon after, I observe a youngster
playing with the body, while the adults are taking a rest.
He takes Jokro’s body and climbs a tree with it. He
swings the corpse and lets it fall to the ground from a
height of about 5 metres. He rushes down the tree and
picks it up, then climbs up and drops it again.
Meanwhile, Jire looks on gently.
February 17th.
A very interesting episode occurs. Tua, the alpha male of
the community, rushes toward me in a charging display.
He uses Jokro’s mummified body as a part of his display.
Chimpanzees usually use dead branches to accentuate
power in a charging display. Yet this time, Tua uses the
body of a dead infant. However, I notice a subtle detail.
When Tua turns around, he gently switches the body
from his right to left hand. With
branches, he has never shown such delicate handling as
with Jokro’s remains. Tua abandons the body right in
front of me. The mother, Jire, retrieves Jokro’s body, just
as she always has.
If chimpanzees find it so hard to appreciate what has
happened when, in front of their eyes, one of their number has
permanently ceased to be alive, we can be sure that this is not a
fate that they can ever imagine to be coming their own way.
And if they cannot imagine it, they cannot fear it.
I argued earlier that there are many nonhuman animals that,
because they value their own consciousness, enjoy life and
want more of it. And chimpanzees are of course up among the
best of them. “The creature . . . will want to live because it
wants to feel.” My point now is that if you are a nonhuman
animal, you can very well want to live without having any fear
of death, given that either you do not see it coming or do not
understand that death means no more life. It is these dreadful
premonitions that make the human situation so much more
anxiety laden—but also, for that very reason, so much more
focused on survival.
We are at a surprising pass. If fearing death is, indeed, a
uniquely human trait, if fearing death is one of the
consequences of being conscious, and if fearing death helps to
keep human beings alive, this suggests that consciousness—
core consciousness—contributes more to the biological fitness
of human beings than to that of any other animal. It could even
mean that human consciousness, at this basic core level, has in
fact come under new pressure from natural selection.
We might have expected that new kinds of selection
pressure would be in play when it comes to the grander forms
of selfhood that I will discuss later in the book. But I think no
one—unless he or she had independently made the journey of
this chapter—would have expected this in relation to the core
self. Whether this has really made a significant contribution to
the phenomenology of consciousness in humans—whether it
has reshaped the ipsundrum—is a tantalizing question. But, as I
said, we should delay discussion of all such issues about the
possibility of there being species differences in “what it is like”
to be phenomenally aware until we have a more complete
picture of how consciousness may have developed to serve this
role and others.
Let’s move on then to another, very different way in which
the internal magic show can change your life: by having you
cast a spell beyond your own body on your physical
surroundings.
7 The Enchanted World
You feel life, smell it. Your own existence can at times be
all absorbing. “Everything seems futile here except the sun, our
kisses, and the wild scents of the earth.” In such a state of
body-centered reverie, phenomenal consciousness might seem
to be about nothing but being me. The sensations you yourself
are staging occupy your mind, and you give no thought to the
things in the outside world to which they answer. In fact, when
basking in the present moment, you may want to pull away
from the world altogether.
I promised to take evidence about the natural history of
consciousness from artists and monks. So let us acknowledge
that there are traditions of art and traditions of religious
meditation that, while celebrating the conscious present, make a
point of leaving worldly things out of the picture altogether.
Bridget Riley writes: “If I am outside in nature, I do not
look for something or at things. I try to absorb sensations
without censoring them, without identifying them. I want
them to come through the pores of my eyes, as it were—on a
particular level of their own.”
1
And the finished work of art has to be appreciated as pure
sensation too. Paul Cézanne tells us: “Shut your eyes, wait,
think of nothing. Now open them. . . . One sees nothing but a
great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory
of colour. That is what a picture should give us, a warm
harmony, an abyss in which the evil eye is lost, a secret
germination, a coloured state of grace.”
2
Henri Matisse, in a famous painting now in the New York
Museum of Modern Art, made a copy of a still life by Jan de
Heem in which, following Cézanne’s advice, he pointedly went
against the original artist’s intention and instead represented a
sumptuous banquet as a flat arrangement of colored forms.
Kandinsky, as we saw in
chapter 2
, urged a musical analogy: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes
are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.”
Walter Pater claimed that “all art constantly aspires to the
condition of music.”
3
So let us remark that music can lift you into a state of self-
absorbed detachment from the world more effectively than any
other artistic medium. Perhaps this is just because, in listening
to music, you can so easily cease to pay attention to where the
music comes from, that is, easily hear it as sound at your ear
rather than as the sound of something out there in the world.
“Is it not strange that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out of
men’s bodies?” asks Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing.
4
Yet, if this does strike you as strange, it is surely because
this is really not the way you hear it: when your soul is haled
by the music of the lute, you can—and often will—remain
gloriously uninterested in the vibrations of the gut string
stretched
across the wooden box. We say that you may “lose
yourself” in listening to music. Yet it might be closer to the
truth to say that you lose the world and find more of your core
self.
However, there is another side to it. Being conscious is not
only about being your self. As we are about to see—arguably,
as natural selection was about to see—phenomenal
consciousness also profoundly changes your relationship to the
external world.
I assume you recognize and value the state of detached self-
absorption just described. Still, I assume too that this state is
relatively unusual. In fact, more commonly, even while you are
aware of your own existence, you are nonetheless keenly aware
of the existence of things in your environment.
When you are outside in nature, unlike Riley, you do look
for something and at things—you identify and celebrate, say,
the mountain and the tree for what they are. Even when you
listen to the sounds of music, unlike Benedick, you can and
sometimes will listen to the clash of the cymbal, the twang of
the cello string as such. And these outward-directed states are
not necessarily states of lesser consciousness. Far from it; I
would say they may be states in which phenomenal
consciousness is asserting itself more strongly than ever.
We can take evidence on this side too. There are indeed
other traditions of painting and other traditions of meditation
that teach the path of living as attentively as possible in and
among things.
Matisse transformed the banqueting table into “a great
colored undulation.” But in the original painting, De Heem
depicted fat grapes, a glittering decanter, a game pie, white
linen, crystal goblets, deep velvet cloth, and a polished
mandolin, with every detail lovingly modeled. His intention
was not just to create a feast for the eyes, but to draw attention
to the glories of the world in its own right.
In a Christian cathedral you may be transported heaven-
ward, but in a Zen garden you are pointedly returned to earth.
In the garden your existence is not primary: the lesson is that
you exist alongside other existents—the rocks, the water, the
golden carp, and the rooted cedar.
In
chapter 6
I quoted many examples of people and animals taking
pleasure, as I put it, in “pure being.” Yet let’s recognize now
that even in cases where selfhood may have been very much
the focus, there has been more going on. Keats certainly
reveled in the oozy, slushy sweet sensations, but surely he also
enjoyed the nectarine as such. The chimpanzee Gaia reveled in
the cool water swirling around her fingers, but surely she also
delighted in the existence of the stream.
And Brooke? His poem continues:
Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass.
The poet is pinpointing his personal sensory pleasures. Yet
clearly he is also in awe of the source of these pleasures out
there in the world. Things. Plain old things, and so many of
them. Things that, for the most part, are of no earthly use to
human beings—no good for eating or selling or making love to.
Things, it might seem, that have little if, anything, to do with a
human life. But things whose simple factuality is a cause for
feeling glad.
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings. . . .
5
Gerard Manley Hopkins, like Brooke, multiplies examples
to drive home the message. It is as if, in the manner of the
Dutch still-life painters, these writers want to showcase the
world’s bounty, to pile the table with riches, so as to prove our
good fortune in living in this world where each and every
object calls out to be adored because of its intrinsic value.
But we have no need to rely on high poetry to make the
point. Popular culture has its own way of saying it. “These I
have loved,” writes Brooke. “These are a few of my favourite
things,” sings Maria in The Sound of Music.
6
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings.
She is not finished. And it would seem almost loutish to
break in to ask what is going on here. Yet the question is
pressing: how can we explain this adoration for things as such?
Cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things.
What role, if any, should we assign to consciousness in this?
Could it even be that only a creature who is personally
conscious will mind so much about impersonal facts? You
might think this a surprising possibility. Then prepare to be
very surprised.
Let us start by raising the obvious question with regard to
consciousness and things. Would a psychological zombie find
the outside world so full of wonders?
The question is not, whether a zombie would have his own
list of favorites. Of course he would. Presumably, a zombie,
even if he lacks sensory qualia, should still be perfectly capable
of evaluating things in his environment as good or bad for him,
especially when it concerns his bodily functions. A zombie,
presumably, would know what he likes. Thus we might well
expect to find him listing among his favorites such good-for-the
body items as, for example, warm woolen mittens and crisp
apple strudels.
But the question, rather, is, whether a zombie’s list of
favorites would be nearly as long as that of a typical conscious
human being. And I think the answer is that his list would be
nothing as long, for two reasons, both of which have to do
with consciousness. One reason is relatively
straightforward, arising from issues we have already discussed;
the second is more unexpected.
A few lines back I wrote that you as a normal human being
love things that are of no use to you. However, if we look at the
lists again, it is obvious that many of the things you love, even
if “useless,” tickle your senses in just such a way as to
contribute to your feeling of living in the present and having a
core self—which is indeed partly why you love them. So, the
straightforward reason why a zombie’s list of favorites would
be shorter than yours is simply that, since a zombie does not
have a conscious present to live in, he would not include those
items on his list. Therefore, notably missing from the zombie’s
list would be such purely good-for-the-soul thick-moment-
filling items as, for example, holes in the ground, newly peeled
sticks, finches’ wings, and brown paper parcels tied up with
string.
Yet this cannot be the whole story, for it would imply that
the love of things is really just more of the same: the love of
self (and whatever helps sustain it). However, as we have seen
in the many examples I have cited just now, people again and
again profess to love things in their own right.
Imagine yourself walking in the woods after the rain:
sunshine filters through the dripping leaves, a song thrush
sings, and the scent of primroses permeates the rich air. No
doubt you feel it is good to be you in this world of sights and
sounds and smells. But at the same time, do you also not feel it
is good for the primrose to be yellow, and the leaves to be wet,
and the thrush to be trilling? In fact, is it not true that your
dominant feeling toward the things you are interacting with is
not of gratitude for a service provided (though there is that too)
but of wonder that such things exist as what they are? Dare I
suggest that, strangely
enough, you love the things for being the things they are
almost in the same way that you love yourself for being your
self ?
So what is going on? I want to describe it as follows. It is as
if, when you see and hear and touch and taste things, some of
the magic of your phenomenal sensation is rubbing off onto the
things as such. And this has the extraordinary result of making
it seem to you as if the things themselves possess phenomenal
qualities. As if things out there in the world have an extra
dimension of subjective presence. Maybe even as if you have
a private line to them, as if they are imbued with your
subjectivity.
But of course none of this makes sense! We have
established in the first chapters of the book that the phenomenal
properties of sensation are the properties of a very special kind
of activity you are creating inside your head. What is more,
they are illusory, “impossible” properties. There is therefore no
way that these properties can be properties of things out there
in the world. Why, then, should you even begin to think that
way?
Let’s return to the discussion of sensation and sentition. In
figure 5
, I illustrated the situation when someone looks, for example, at
a red tomato. The explanation of this figure reads: “Red light
arrives at your eyes, and you create an internalized expressive
response, you engage in redding. You monitor what you are
doing so as to discover what is happening to you. And the
representation you form of your own response is the sensation
of red.” To say it again: it is your show, you are creating the
ipsundrum with its phenomenal properties as your way of
representing the stimulation at your body surface and how you
feel about it. The red tomato skin is indeed responsible for the
stimulation. But objectively, there is nothing illusion-
generating or phenomenal about the tomato as such.
So, if now you do in fact believe that the phenomenal
properties inhere in the external thing as such, this can be only
because you are somehow projecting the sensation out of your
own head into the world.
7
In
figure 10
I have tried to illustrate what seems to be occurring. But I
expect this illustration makes it only all the more obvious how
anomalous such “projection” is. What exactly does “projecting
sensation” amount to? Does it mean that the phenomenal
properties of your sensation now pertain to an entity that is not
you? The answer, I suggest, is both yes and no. That is, what is
happening is that you do still feel yourself involved, even
bodily involved, in the sensation, only the limits of your body
have mysteriously been spread out to coincide with the distal
world.
I hope I can explain better what this means by referring to a
remarkable experimental demonstration.
8
In an experiment by Carrie Armel and V. S.
Ramachandran, a subject (S) sits at a table with his hand hidden
from view by a partition (P), while there is a fake rubber hand
(FH) in full view in front of him (see
figure 11
, top). His own hand and the rubber hand are then tapped
and stroked in synchrony by the experimenter (E). It turns out
that in this situation, the subject unexpectedly reports that he
feels the corresponding tactile sensations to be located where
the rubber hand is.
Figure 10. How sensation gets “projected”: the subjective quality of redness moves
over and becomes attached to the perceived external object.
But wait. If there is no rubber hand in view and the real
hand and a spot on the tabletop are tapped and stroked in
synchrony (
figure 11
, bottom), the subject now says he feels the sensation to be
located at that spot in the table. What is more, when a Band-
Aid is placed on both the real hand and the spot on the table,
and then the Band-Aid is suddenly ripped off the table, the
subject shows an emotional change in skin conductance as if
expecting pain.
9
Figure 11.
This finding, it must be said, was unanticipated. But the
experimenters were able to provide a ready explanation. In their
paper they suggest that the illusion occurs because the subject
is seeking the statistically most probable way of integrating
what he or she is seeing and feeling. If you feel a particular
pattern of tactile sensation in the skin of your hand and see a
highly correlated pattern of stroking at a specific place in the
external world, the most likely (even if erroneous) inference
will be that there is only one event rather than two—so that
the tactile sensation must be located where the stroking is seen
to be occurring.
Armel and Ramachandran do indeed title their paper
“Projecting Sensations to External Objects.” But, to return to
the question of what’s meant by “projection,” let’s note that, in
the first instance, you, the subject, will not conclude it is the
table that is having the tactile sensation; rather, it is you who
are having the sensation in the skin of your hand, which has
moved onto the table.
You may well think this is an odd way for things to turn
out. But it becomes odder still. For if the tabletop has become
the skin of your hand, then, while you still feel the tactile
sensation to be a representation of what is happening to you,
two things follow. First, it will seem that the table as such is
sensitive to touch. Second, it will seem that what’s happening
to the table when it is touched has phenomenal qualities—as if
the table is doing something in response to stimulation on a
level with sentition, as if the table is itching or paining!
The experimenters were as surprised as anyone.
10
“To our astonishment,” they write, “subjects often reported
sensations arising from the table surface, despite the fact that it
bears no visual resemblance to a hand.” They then ask, only
half jokingly, “If you looked through a telescope at the moon
and used an optical trick to stroke and touch it in synchrony
with your hand, would you ‘project’ the sensations to the
moon?”
They do not answer their own question. But I would say it
is a perfectly reasonable and pertinent question, and one that
would be more pertinent still if we were to ask it not about
touch but about vision. If you looked at the moon and saw that
its surface was being “touched by light” in synchrony with light
arriving at your own eye, would you project your visual
sensation to the moon?
But while we are at it, why don’t we ask the same question
about the case of looking at a red tomato? Suppose we
substitute the “skin of the eye” (which is to say, the retina at the
back of the eyeball) for the skin of the hand, the “touch of
light” for the stroke of the experimenter, and the tomato for the
table. Then, I think, the logic of the situation should be very
similar. And to make it more similar still, why don’t we
imagine that the tomato, rather than being constantly
illuminated, is being stroked with the light of a flashlight? In
this case, here is how the argument, transposed from tactile to
visual sensation, would go.
11
When you look at the tomato being stroked by the
flashlight, you sense a particular spatiotemporal pattern of light
at your eye, and at the same time you perceive a highly
correlated pattern of events occurring out there at the tomato.
Just as with the table, then, you will make the inference that in
all probability these two events are one, so that the visual
sensation must be located where the light is falling. Again
you will not, in the first instance, conclude that the tomato is
having the visual sensation; rather, it is you who are having the
sensation in a part of the skin of your eye which now seems to
coincide with the skin of the tomato. However, if the tomato has
become part of the skin of your eye, while you still feel the
visual sensation to be a representation of what is happening to
you, two things follow, as before. First, it will seem that the
tomato as such is sensitive to light. Second, it will seem that
what happens to the tomato when light falls on it has
phenomenal qualities—as if the tomato is redding!
I realize, of course, you yourself would not analyze it in
this way, and you might want to use different words if you use
words at all. Yet, I believe we have here the complete
explanation for the effect I was struggling to find words for
above: “the magic of your phenomenal sensation is rubbing off
onto the things as such.” And the story holds not just for red
tomatoes and ticklish tables but across the entire range of your
sensory and perceptual interaction with the world. At every
opportunity you find yourself projecting your own phenomenal
experience out into the world of things. Or rather, I should say,
you do not find yourself doing this except when, as with the
table, the result seems so bizarre: most of the time you never
notice your own role in giving things their marvelous
qualities—you simply assume that is the way they are made.
True, logically speaking, it does not make sense. The
attribution of these phenomenal qualities to impersonal things
really is a category mistake—a philosophical error where a
property is being ascribed to a thing that could not possibly
have that property. As the philosopher Thomas Reid sagely
remarked
more than two hundred years ago: “The confounding our
sensations with that perception of external objects which is
constantly conjoined with them, has been the occasion of most
of the errors and false theories of philosophers with regard to
the senses.”
12
If it is an error, however, is it one that you ought to regret?
My answer, as I trust you will have seen by now, is no; quite
the opposite. For it is precisely this misattribution of
phenomenal qualities that gives conscious human beings the
impression that they live surrounded by things of
unaccountable loveliness in their own right. What matters is
psychological impact, not philosophical rectitude. And,
psychologically, the result is that you come to inhabit an
enchanted world.
What would persuade you that it is indeed you who are the
enchanter, you who are, as it were, coloring things with the
fairy dust of your own consciousness? I would say that as
compelling evidence as any comes from the reported effects of
taking psychotropic drugs. Aldous Huxley vividly described his
own experience with mescaline: “The books, for example, with
which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they
glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a
profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald
books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of
aquamarine, of yellow topaz.”
13
When the outside world takes on new qualities just as your
personal sensation is intensified, there can be little doubt where
the qualities are coming from: they have to be all a part of your
show.
But there is a larger lesson to be drawn from such drug-
induced experiences. The lesson is that no drugs are needed
because what Huxley describes is clearly on a continuum with
everyone’s everyday experience. The fact is, wherever you, as
a phenomenally conscious creature, cast your eye, ordinary
things glow with bright colors and profound significance.
Borrowed phenomenality transforms the world into an
awesome place. How often have you stared into a flaming fire,
listened to the hoot of an owl in a dark wood, dangled your feet
in a cold stream, or watched the sun setting in a blaze of color
and been knocked back by the transcendent beauty of it? How
often have you been captivated by some gemlike detail of your
environment that seems almost too right and too good to be
true, leaving you, perhaps, like Marcel Proust’s Bergotte, in
thrall to “the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow
wall”?
14
“A beauty,” Bergotte says, “that was sufficient in itself.”
“In itself,” “as such,” “in its own right”—these are indeed the
phrases that come to mind. The impression you get that the
qualities inhere in the things as such is, we have seen, all part
of the illusion. But even as you celebrate the things for being
themselves, it will not escape you that it is a peculiarly
generous kind of self-sufficiency, where things are self-
sufficient in ways that are the very qualities you care about.
The things are singing your song.
No wonder that people sometimes lose track of who is the
object and who the subject of this magical relationship. The
Victorian artist William Rothenstein described how “one’s very
being seems to be absorbed into the fields, trees and the walls
one is striving to paint. . . . At rare moments while painting I
have felt myself caught, as it were, in a sort of cosmic rhythm.”
15
For Vincent van Gogh, in the park in Arles, the experience
of union was even more obviously one of interpen-etration: “I
have never had such a chance, nature here being so
extraordinarily beautiful. Everywhere and all over the vault of
heaven is a marvellous blue, and the sun sheds a radiance of
pale sulphur, and it is soft and as lovely as the combination of
heavenly blues and yellows in a Vermeer of Delft. . . . I am
ravished with what I see. . . . I have a lover’s insight or a
lover’s blindness.”
16
So, having reached these heights, dare we ask what is the
evolutionary story behind this?
The caption to one of the illustrations in a recent book, The
Last Human, reads: “The play of light and shadow between
tree, sun and sky fills this Neanderthal man with a sense of
awe.”
17
Did ancestral humans really feel this way about the world
and their relationship to it? Do any living nonhuman animals do
so? The dog sits staring at the fire, as if entranced. The
chimpanzee is mesmerized by the running stream. The infant
gorilla is thrilled by the thump of the drum-fruit she discovers.
Let me add a new example: dolphins have been seen to delight
in blowing bubble rings in the water, playing with their
creations, standing back, and relishing them, as if to say “See
what I’ve got here.”
18
We do not know. But I would say we should happily
assume that, just to the extent that nonhuman creatures do
experience phenomenal consciousness, they too are bound to
end up making the same philosophical errors of attribution that
modern human beings find so compelling. So, yes,
Neanderthals almost certainly felt awe at the beauty of the
world. On their own level, some nonhuman animals probably
feel it too.
By the same token, we can say that a psychological zombie
would not feel it at all. A zombie would never make the
mistake of coloring the world with projected qualia or of
misjudging his own boundaries and feeling himself
mysteriously
connected to nature. Indeed, imagine if you can the
zombie’s world. It would have to be a disenchanted world—a
world where things no longer glow or have any phenomenal
significance. The great psychologist William James raised that
possibility as a dreadful thought experiment: “Conceive
yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion of
which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it
exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable,
hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible
for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness.”
19
It sounds bad. We have said it before: you do not want to
be a zombie. But now we have established a powerful extra
reason, which is that for the zombie the world must be an
infinitely drearier place. However, the evolutionary question is
of course not settled by this. We need to ask whether a dreary
world is necessarily one in which an animal or a human would
lead a less successful life. We need to establish what, if any, is
the biological advantage to being awestruck.
I admit we are so far from having any solid evidence about
this—where is the natural history we need?—that we can only
guess where the advantage may possibly lie. But at least we can
guess as insiders (pity the Andromedan scientist who lacks our
first-person take on it). So here goes.
I think, to start with, we can plausibly argue that some of
the effects of enchanting the world will be of the very same
kind as those we considered in the previous chapter: essentially
a deepening of joie de vivre. If it is good to be alive, then it
will be better still to be alive in a world where there is so much
to enjoy. Robert Louis Stevenson said it so nicely in two lines
of his Child’s Garden of Verses: “The world is so full
of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy
as Kings.”
20
All the arguments deployed above about the benefits of
desiring to be there will be reinforced when this desire is fed
not just by love of self but by love of things outside.
But as insiders we can guess there will be more to it than
this. For when it comes to it, it is not just about the joy of living
but about the point of living too. How so? Because the
externalization of value that results from projecting sensations
onto objects—however philosophically tendentious—provides
a whole new basis for believing that life has meaning. If it is
good to be alive, then it is even better to be alive in a good
world. George Santayana wrote: “That life is worth living is the
most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the
most impossible of conclusions.”
21
I hesitate to contradict him outright about the impossibility
of the conclusion. But I will gladly let Rupert Brooke—yes,
Brooke again—do it for me, by pointing out how a love of
things can seem to justify the lover’s life.
When a friend wrote to Brooke to tell him he was overcome
by pessimism, Brooke, just twenty-three years old, replied:
I have a remedy. It is a dangerous one, but I think very
good on the whole. . . . The remedy . . . consists in just
looking at people and things as themselves—neither as
useful nor moral nor ugly nor anything else; but just as
being. . . . In a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, or a
reach of muddy pavement, or smoke from an engine at
night, there’s a sudden significance and importance and
inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp of
certainty and happiness. It’s not that the wall or the
smoke seem important for anything, or suddenly
reveal any general statement, or are rationally seen to be
good or beautiful in themselves,—only that for you
they’re perfect and unique. It’s like being in love with a
person, . . . one is extraordinarily excited that the person,
exactly as he is, uniquely and splendidly just exists. It’s a
feeling, not a belief. Only it’s a feeling that has amazing
results. I suppose my occupation is being in love with the
universe. . . . With such superb work to do, and with the
wild adventure of it all, and with the . . . enchantment of
being even for a moment alive in a world of real matter
. . . and actual people,—I have no time now to be a
pessimist.
22
If we want an additional adaptive function for
consciousness, perhaps “being in love with the universe” will
do! But more specifically, what might this love affair translate
into? The term “love” has figured repeatedly in the foregoing
discussion. I would say we should take it seriously. Love is a
powerful emotion. It motivates the lover to engage with the
objects of his love—to seek them out, cherish them, and make
more of them. And if he is in love with everything there is?
Why, then he becomes a creature devoted to play, to discovery
and artistic creation, inveterately curious.
In that same book, The Last Human, a caption to another
illustration reads: “A juvenile Australopithecus africanus
greets a new morning two and a half million years ago.” We
may well imagine the australopithecine child going out into the
playground of the African savanna with the same joyous
anticipation shown by the human child we saw celebrated in A.
A. Milne’s poem—a child whose enthusiasm for engaging with
whatever comes his way is, we can now say, driven not just by
the fun of feeling he exists, but the fun of discovering
what in the world exists.
If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You’d lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You’d say to the wind when it took you away:
“That’s where I wanted to go today!”
Where am I going? I don’t quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow—
Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.
23
The authors of a book about children’s minds, which they
title The Scientist in the Crib, write: “Human children in the
first three years of life are consumed by a desire to explore and
experiment with objects.”
24
“Science”, in the grand sense, it may not be. But we need
not doubt that any creature—human or nonhuman—that has
such an incentive to investigate the nature of things in their
own right will be forever learning more about the practical—
life-enhancing—potential of the world he lives in.
That way, of course, lies biological success. Moreover, that
way, in the longer run, lie grand science and human civilization
too. For it is this love affair with the natural world that drives
men and women to their boldest feats of exploration and
invention. Richard Dawkins has caught the mood exactly:
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have
finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with
colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our
eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our
time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and
how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when
I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why do I bother to get
up in the mornings.”
25
And if Dawkins is not to your taste, let Henri Poincaré say
it instead: “The savant does not study nature because it is
useful; he studies it because he takes delight in it, and he takes
delight in it because it is beautiful. If nature was not beautiful,
it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth
living.”
26
8 So That Is Who I Am!
We have been seeking evidence of how, for you as a
conscious creature, phenomenal consciousness changes your
worldview, so as to change the direction of your life. We have
seen first how it makes you care about pure being and
promotes your will to live, and next how it makes you attribute
value and meaning to things in the external world.
I would say these effects, between them, are quite sufficient
to explain why natural selection would have redesigned
sensation to give it phenomenal qualities, probably quite early
on in evolution, and at any rate long before our ancestors
became human.
But the story did not stop there. In the case of human
beings—and now I will say humans and their near relatives
alone—there turned out to be a payoff on a much grander level:
nothing less than the development in each conscious individual
of a quite new idea of what it means to be “oneself.”
This new—and dramatically inflated—conception of the
self arose out of intellectual reflection on the effects of
consciousness, in part reflection on those very effects outlined
earlier.
Intellectual reflection? I mean puzzling over these effects,
meditating on them, experimenting with them, discussing
them with friends—indeed, the very kind of reflection we have
been engaged in in this book. Perhaps you will object that this
is too much to expect of ordinary people, let alone of our
ancestors long ago. I don’t believe so. The fact is human beings
in general are far too inquisitive, too interested in just who and
what they are, to pass over the big questions that consciousness
so obviously raises. If humans can be “scientists in the crib,”
they can be philosophers in the crib—and philosophers for their
whole lives too.
1
Let’s step back and begin again with the core self. When you
reflect on it, rather than just live it, what strikes you as the most
peculiar thing about the experience of being you?
We have discussed already some of the more remarkable
properties of sensations—temporal thickness, and so on. But
there is one overarching feature that I expect impresses you
before all else, and this is that the experience is observable by
you and no one else. It is not simply that it belongs to you, as,
say, your car or your legs belong to you, by virtue of being
under your control; it is that it is absolutely private. There are
no doors between one consciousness and another. Everyone
knows directly only of his or her own consciousness and no one
else’s.
This exceptional aloneness is obvious—even horribly
obvious—when you think about it. And you do think about it.
I am sure that since childhood you, along with just about
everyone else, have played with the riddles that flow from the
inaccessibility of other minds. To take John Locke’s famous
example of seeing colors: how do you know that your color
sensation when you see a violet is not like another person’s
sensation when he or she sees a marigold? The answer, which it
has never required a great philosopher to demonstrate, is simply
that you do not—because, as Locke said, “one man’s mind
cannot pass into another man’s body.”
2
Of course, you long ago ceased to find this conclusion
novel. Yet there is no denying how surprising it was at first
discovery—and how remarkable it still remains whenever you
return to it: not simply an interesting tease but a startling
metaphysical revelation.
3
Indeed, what a strange state of affairs. Nothing else in the
world is private in the same way that conscious experience is.
Everything else in the world joins up in the four-dimensional
space-time manifold that basic physics says is sufficient to
describe the universe. But consciousness, it seems, is
essentially different. Each individual’s consciousness is as
much a world apart, on its own plane of existence, as is each
separate universe in the “multiverse” that cosmologists
sometimes fantasize about. Forget the open doors between one
conscious self and another; it seems there is not even the
possibility of tunneling through a wormhole.
If you find this situation puzzling—as puzzling as it is
wonderful—you are in good company. Your puzzlement is not
because you are missing something or cannot think straight
(though some professional philosophers persist in saying so).
Consciousness, as I had cause to remark in the opening chapter,
really is deeply, fascinatingly, and peculiarly private. And
the meaning and explanation of this privacy have long
posed a major challenge to cognitive science and philosophy of
mind.
In
part 1
we arrived at our own theory of what lies behind it.
According to our model of how sensation arises from
monitoring sentition, there will in fact be several reasons why
the qualities of your sensations will be accessible to you alone.
To start with, you are observing something—the ipsundrum—
that you are doing, your own response to stimulation at your
body, something that belongs only to you in the same way that
any other activity that you initiate belongs only to you. Second,
this response has become internalized in the course of
evolution, so that what you are observing is, as it happens,
literally out of sight of others’ eyes. Third, things have been
rigged so that you observe your response from a special point
of view, the one point from which it appears to have illusory
phenomenal properties—so that even if anyone else could
observe it, they would not describe it as you do.
It may be true that this does not add up to a logical lockout,
such as would make your experience unobservable in principle
to a third party. As I was at pains to point out in earlier
chapters, the Andromedan scientist with super brain-scanning
equipment—and a bit of luck—might still discover what it is
like for you to have your sensations by reading your brain
activity and applying the right theory. Yet, since it is a fact that
ordinary human beings have neither the equipment nor the
theory, this certainly does add up to a biological lockout. And
this is quite enough to make the privacy of consciousness
hugely impressive, creating the irresistible idea of your self as a
separate bubble of consciousness, a separate soul, one self, this
self and none other, this secret packet of phenomena. Your
body may get as close to another person’s body
as is physically possible, and yet the bubbles remain
essentially inviolate. Share the same body even, like conjoined
twins, and there still remain two quite separate
consciousnesses.
William James summed up the effective reality: “Absolute
insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the
elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that
thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither
contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of
quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are
sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal
minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most
absolute breaches in nature.”
4
“Soul,” “solo,” “isolation.” Etymologically, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, there is no connection between
“soul” as a noun and “sole” as a predicate (though I may say I
wonder). But psychologically, the connection is all too clear.
No man, so John Donne claimed, is an island entire of himself.
Yet surely the truth is that at the deepest level of personal
experience, every human being discovers the opposite: when it
comes to consciousness, every man is indeed an island entire
of himself.
But some island! The physicist John Lindner has written:
“An ordinary place in the universe is the near vacuum of
interstellar space, one atom per cubic meter, three degrees
above absolute zero. But you and I are extraordinary places. In
us, the universe has become conscious, able to reflect upon
itself.”
5
I will come back to this momentous discovery and how it
changes your worldview. But let us see where else reflection on
consciousness may lead human beings. Next, after private
ownership, what would you tell the Andromedan visitor—were
she to ask you—about what is so special about being your self ?
Let us suppose she has picked up on those wonderful questions
from the Ballad for Americans: “Who are you? What’s your
racket? What do you do for a living?”
6 Charles Sherrington had no doubt about what he would say:
the primary function of the self—its essential racket—is and
has always been to be an actor in the world, to make things
happen. “In the evolution of mind a starting point for
‘recognizable’ mind lay in its connection with motor acts.
Motor behaviour would seem the cradle of recognizable mind.
. . . Moreover the motor act is that which seems to clinch the
distinction between self and not-self. The doer’s doings affirm
the self. . . . As far back in the evolutionary tree as intuitions
go, amongst them must be that of a subjective ‘doing.’ . . . The
‘I-doing’ is my experience of myself in the motor act. It is my
mental experience in that phase of my activity. It is, if we
prefer, my experience of ‘self’ explicit in action.”
7
This, we can agree, seems obviously right. Anyone who has
observed an infant—human or animal—in the early stages of
mastering control over his body will realize how much of the
self has, from the beginning, been invested in what Sherrington
calls “I-doing.” But where does this take you when you ask—of
yourself—Sherrington’s following question: “This ‘I’, this self,
which can so vividly propose to ‘do’, what attributes as regards
‘doing’ does it appear to itself to have?”
Sherrington’s answer was simple and unequivocal: “It
counts itself as a ‘cause.’” We can agree again. Certainly it is
your “I” that, as the subject of your wishes, is the cause of what
you do. But come to think of it, there is something rather
remarkable about the role of your “I” in this. The wishes of
your
“I” are a cause of material events in your body, but as far
as you can tell they are not always or even usually an effect of
material events—in many respects it seems you are a free
agent, an agent who can generate stuff ex nihilo. Nor is it just
motor acts that lie within your power. Thoughts, images,
memories, intentions . . . all come when you conjure them.
True, as scientists, we know that this is not the physical
reality. Nearly 150 years ago, T. H. Huxley spelled out the true
situation:
Our mental conditions are simply the symbols in
consciousness of the changes which take place
automatically in the organism. . . . [Thus] the feeling we
call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the
symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate
cause of that act. We are conscious automata, endowed
with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-
abused term—inasmuch as in many respects we are able
to do as we like—but none the less parts of the great
series of causes and effects which, in unbroken
continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and
shall be—the sum of existence.
8
Yet, of course this is not how you yourself see it. For
Nature, in designing your mind, has contrived that the chain of
causation is largely invisible to you. You as a subject do not
have mental access to the events in the brain that precede your
“deciding to act.” The result is that the first you know of your
decision is when it is in front of you. And naturally enough, in
the absence of evidence to the contrary, you credit your “I”
with being the prime mover in choosing this action or that.
No wonder then if you see this as further evidence of the
nonphysical status of your conscious mind. As I wrote earlier,
everything else in the world joins up in physical space-time—
except for phenomenal sensations that are essentially private.
Now you find that everything else in the world is the product of
preceding material causes—except for your wishes and
intentions, which are essentially undetermined.
What do you make of this? What is it like to be an
uncaused cause? Do you suppose, like Descartes, that you must
have a bit of God in you? Do you imagine, as a modern
physicist might, that you are your very own big bang? Probably
most people’s speculations are nothing quite so grand. Yet I do
not doubt they are still grand enough to make you reassess your
cosmic status. If you have free will, if you can do what you
like, your life is yours.
I said earlier that human beings can be philosophers in the
crib. Here is a little girl of twenty-one months, Emily, engaged
in what psychologists have actually called “crib talk”—a
private monologue just before falling asleep. Emily is thinking
about the realpolitik of physical causation.
The broke, car broke, the . . .
Emmy can’t go in the car.
Go in green car.
No.
Emmy go in the car.
Broken. Broken.
Emmy Daddy Mommy go in the car,
broke,
Da . . . da,
the car . . . their, their, car broken.
9
At her age she is not so concerned yet with thinking about
the causes of what goes on in her own head. But for
Christopher Robin, by age six, free-flowing mental causation is
at the top of the list.
So—here I am in the dark alone,
There’s nobody here to see;
I think to myself,
I play to myself,
And nobody knows what I say to myself;
Here I am in the dark alone,
What is it going to be?
I can think whatever I like to think,
I can play whatever I like to play,
I can laugh whatever I like to laugh,
There’s nobody here but me.
10
It is a great thing to discover just how much you, the “I-
doer,” count for. You move your limbs, you direct your
thoughts, you make your plans. You—like a notorious
American president—are the “decider.” Your doing self is
clearly somebody to reckon with.
What is it going to be? What will you create today? What
will you bring into the world that was not there before?
Well, how about creating your core self, to start with?
Remember that the sensations that give you the feeling of being
there arise from your own active response to stimulation of
your sense organs. Sensations, from the beginning, involve a
sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your
doing self that brings your core self into being. You are
responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be
you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading
some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember,
too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto
external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are
responsible for the feel of the world.
If you only knew it? But come to think of it—and “come to
think of it” is just what human thinkers do—I would say on
some level you cannot but already know it.
I am not saying you know it up-front. As I wrote in the
preceding chapter, “most of the time you never notice your own
role in giving things their marvelous qualities—you simply
assume that is the way they are made.” So, it is true, you often
admire things as if, in Proust’s words, “it was in them and not
in yourself that the divine spark resided.”
11
Imagine you are watching a glorious sunrise. You feel
lucky to be alive in a world that has so much to offer. You may
even be moved, like the poet William Blake, to insist on its
supernatural origin. “‘What?’ it will be Questioned, ‘when the
Sun rises, do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a
Guinea?’ O no no. I see an Innumerable company of the
Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God
Almighty.’”
12
Such an attitude, as we saw, can and does work wonders
for you.
Nevertheless, on some level you must know what the true
score is. Thomas Traherne, an earlier English mystic and poet,
went straight to the paradoxical heart of it: “By the very right
of your senses you enjoy the world. . . . Doth not the glory
of the sun pay tribute to your sight?”
13
And Traherne’s question does not take you by surprise,
because just this same thought has already occurred to the
philosopher in you. Those red qualia in which that disc of fire
is clothed: who made them the way they are? Already back in
the playground you were wondering how the world of colors
might look to someone else. And if you could ask yourself then
whether the light of the sun you experience as red could be the
same light your friend experiences as blue, you are already
there. Clearly you did not and do not really believe that
phenomenal qualities inhere in things out in the world: at some
level, you understand very well your own creative role in it.
Oscar Wilde wrote, more than a hundred years ago, “It is in the
brain that everything takes place. . . . It is in the brain that the
poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.”
14
Even if you do not actually think of it as happening in your
brain, you know it is you.
I repeat “at some level” because I expect that you remain
genuinely in two minds about this. When nature seems to offer
such riches on her own account, you may well be uneasy with
the idea she might be borrowing it all from you. Indeed, if you
felt some alarm on discovering the loneliness of being your
core self, how much more difficult it may be to admit the
possibility that the universe you are in love with—which may
even have seemed to give meaning to your life—is in such a
crucial respect your own lonely creation also.
Some years after Wilde, the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead grudgingly acknowledged there might be a
scientific case for supposing that “sensations are projected by
the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature
. . .
[that] bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality
do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the
offspring of the mind.” However, he, for his part, was certain
this could not be the truth. And his grounds were not so much
scientific as ethical. For, he said, if it were so, we would have
to concede that things in the world do not have intrinsic value.
And in a famous passage, heavy with sarcasm, he spelled out
where that must leave us: “Thus nature gets credit which should
in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the
nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets
are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to
themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-
congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is
a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the
hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” And this,
Whitehead pronounced, “is quite unbelievable.”
15
However, it would seem Whitehead has seriously
underestimated ordinary people’s commitment to philosophical
inquiry, even when—perhaps especially when—it leads to
shocking conclusions. You may not wish to believe it all
comes from you. But there is no question you can believe it.
And if and when you realize you have no choice but to believe
it, then whatever your initial disappointment, it hits you like a
revelation: not of the dullness of nature, but of the sublimity of
your own mind.
Nor has this escaped the poets. While the nineteenth-
century English Romantics, whom Whitehead found so
compelling—Wordsworth and Shelley, and the German
Romantic Goethe—dwelled on the “haunting presences” out
there in nature, German modernism by the 1920s had found a
different voice. Rainer Maria Rilke went on to express better
than anyone I know the grandeur for you of being here—
and the awful responsibility you thereby bear as the enchanter,
the “sayer” of things.
Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away as
laurel, a little darker than all the surrounding green, with
tiny waves on the border of every leaf (like the smile of a
wind):—oh, why have to be human, and, shunning
Destiny, long for Destiny? . . .
Not because happiness really exists, that precipitate
profit of imminent loss. Not out of curiosity, not just to
practise the heart, that could still be there in laurel. . . .
But because being here is much, and because all this
that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concern us. Us the most fleeting of all . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge,
Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window,—possibly:
Pillar, Tower? . . . but for saying, remember, oh, for such
saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely
to be.
16
Being here is much, Rilke tells us, not just on your own
account, but because your being here is what is required for all
those things around you to become what you make of them.
Thus it is up to you to project the beam of consciousness out
onto the world so that nature can fulfill her promise—so that
she can come, as we say, into her own.
What a job! What a racket! How does it feel, then, for you
to be here for that? To be the one who brings it all to life? For it
all to be yours? Thomas Traherne, for one, could hardly
contain himself in his excitement at realizing he was the creator
of such splendor: “The streets were mine, the temple was mine,
the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were
mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy
faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and
stars; and all the World was mine, and I the only spectator and
enjoyer of it.”
17
Most people are of course more laid back about it. However
surprised—alarmed, impressed, proud—you may have been
when you first realized the part you yourself are playing in
lighting up the world, I assume that by now you have come to
take it pretty much for granted. But let’s recognize that what
you are taking for granted is a kind of miracle, and I have no
doubt that behind the scenes it has profoundly shaped your
sense of who and what you are. For if you have a miracle at
your very center, then miraculous you are.
In the two previous chapters we found more than enough
positive outcomes of consciousness, at a relatively low level, to
keep natural selection interested. But now we are into a
different kind of game. It was already something to be a core
self. It was something to live in an enchanted world. But now
the canopy has been lifted to reveal who is pulling the levers: it
is you.
If we are looking for ways in which consciousness changes
people’s psychology, this could be the big one. We have a way
to go yet. But let me anticipate where we are heading. Suppose
the feeling of transcendent significance that comes from
reflecting on consciousness so changes people’s sense of their
own importance—of what they count for in the wider
scheme of things—that it sets a new agenda for human
relationships. Then perhaps this opens up a new ecological and
cultural niche in which humans can thrive as never before.
But I should not jump the gun on my own argument, or on
evolution’s. I believe what came first was a new emphasis on
the importance of the individual self.
9 Being Number One
The “psychological individual” has had a bad press from
philosophers and ethicists in recent years. To left and right,
there have been scholars ready to declare that individualism is a
modern European invention, a product of the Enlightenment or
even modern capitalism—never of Nature.
The art historian Jakob Burkhardt famously claimed: “In
the Middle Ages . . . Man was conscious of himself only as a
member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only
through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted
into air; an objective treatment of the State and of all the things
of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same
time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became
a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.”
1
In the same vein, the literary critic Peter Abbs, discussing
“the historical development of self-consciousness,” wrote
of “that complex dynamic of change which separated the
person from his world making him self-conscious and self-
aware, that change in the structure of feeling which during the
Renaissance shifted from a sense of unconscious fusion with
the world towards a state of conscious individuation.”
2
Among anthropologists, Marylyn Strathern has been
influential in arguing that the traditional—and by implication
prehistorical—way for human beings to see themselves has
been as “dividuals” whose personhood and even whose body is
partly shared by the social group.
3
Desmond Tutu, explaining the Swahili concept of Ubuntu,
writes, “You cannot be human in isolation. A solitary human
being is a contradiction in terms. You are human precisely
because of relationships: you are a relational being or you are
nothing.”
4
Douglas Hofstadter, extending his ideas about strange loops
to human relationships, concludes, “In the end we are all part of
one another.”
5
And Nietzsche: “Consciousness is really only a net of
communication between human beings. . . . My idea is, as you
see, that consciousness does not really belong to man’s
individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature.”
6
It is a strong lineup (to which we could add many more),
7
a lineup, the subtext sometimes reads, on the side of the
best human values: for who could dare assert the moral claim
of individualism against dividualism? Nonetheless, I think this
attempt to derogate the “individual” misses the essential
psychological point. No doubt human beings have always had
ways of seeing themselves other than as isolated selves. And
the emphasis on the individual or the collective has varied in
human groups at different times and places.
8
Yet, even if people can think of themselves as parts of the
collective, even
if sometimes they should do so, there is still no way that
they cannot also be aware of their essential singularity. For the
phenomenology of conscious sensation guarantees that this is
where every individual starts—as just that, an individual. What
is more, as I will argue shortly, primary individualism, although
not uncomplicated, is a highly beneficial trait for the individual
in question and for the social group as well. If morality comes
into it, the moral good arises not through denying individualism
but through extrapolating it.
So, I have some explaining to do. I must explain, to start
with, what I understand as constituting the larger “personal
self”—and then why this self too remains a phenomenal
individual even as its scope and powers expand.
I quoted Sherrington in the previous chapter on the subject
of the self and action. But I also quoted him earlier where, in a
famous passage from another book, he wrote more grandly of
the self as a unified “psychical existence.” The passage
continues:
Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in
comedy, farce or tragedy, by a dramatis persona, the
‘self.’ And so it will be until the curtain drops. This self
is a unity. The continuity of its presence in time,
sometimes hardly broken by sleep, its inalienable
‘interiority’ in (sensual) space, its consistency of view-
point, the privacy of its experience, combine to give it
status as a unique existence. Although multiple aspects
characterize it it has self-cohesion. It regards itself as
one, others treat it as one. It is addressed as one, by a
name to which it answers. The Law and the State
schedule it as
one. It and they identify it with a body which is
considered by it and them to belong to it integrally. In
short, unchallenged and unargued conviction assumes it
to be one. The logic of grammar endorses this by a
pronoun in the singular. All its diversity is merged in
oneness.
9
Clearly this dramatis persona—let us call it now the Ego—is
something of a different order from the “core self” that has
figured in our discussion of consciousness so far. This larger
self is indeed a complex, multifaceted entity: not only a self
that feels and does, but one that thinks, perceives, remembers,
dreams, desires—a veritable factory, with different specialized
divisions, whose product is a whole person with a life story.
Yet, as Sherrington stresses, this Ego is unified. So, what
does this amount to at the level of phenomenology? Who or
what is at the center of the grand unified self? Whatever it is, it
may not be an easy thing to say. You may think I have come up
with some unattractive neologisms earlier in this book. So, how
about philosopher Galen Strawson’s latest: “SESMET”—short for
“subject-of-experience-as-single-mental-thing”?
10
But to name it does not resolve its status. The Brazilian
author Clarice Lispector, writing at the age of nineteen in her
debut stream-of-consciousness novel, Near to the Wild Heart,
expressed her own puzzlement as well as anyone: “How
curious that I’m unable to say who I am. . . . The moment I try
to speak, not only do I fail to express what I feel, but what I
feel slowly transforms itself into what I am saying.”
11
It may seem we are back with Descartes in his whirlpool.
Yet why should we be so scared of taking hold? If you reflect
on what is going on when you claim—as no doubt you
would—to be one self, I am sure your immediate sense of it
will
be that what makes your Ego a unity is simply the fact that
the different components all take your “I” as the subject: “I”
feel, “I” think, “I” perceive, “I” remember, “I” dream, “I”
desire, and so on, the same “I” in each case. And the
explanation, if we now unpack this using more technical
language, is surely nothing more mysterious than these three
points:
First, the mental activities of feeling, thinking, perceiving,
willing, and so on, are all “intentional states” in the sense we
defined earlier: states that are about something (although
certainly about different kinds of things).
Second, because they are about something, each of these
states must have a subject for whom they are about whatever it
is—the subject to whom the feelings, thoughts, perceptions, or
volitions respectively are being represented.
Third—and here is what is so special—all of these states
do, as it transpires, have one and the same subject. So all the
representations are, as it were, ending up on the same desk (or
being displayed on the same instrument panel in the cockpit of
your mind), where they can engage in free and easy cross talk.
12
Now, since you do indeed experience things as being this
way in your own case, you may well assume that it could
hardly be otherwise. But as theorists, we have to recognize that
the unity of the Ego, which you take for granted, is by no
means a logical necessity. In principle, there is no reason why
an individual’s brain/mind could not contain several intentional
agents operating relatively independently of each other. There
could in fact be several disconnected “I”s.
In pathological cases, the unity of the self does sometimes
radically break down.
13
And, of course, it can happen in everyday experience that
parts of your mind sometimes wander,
get lost, and return. When you have come around from a
deep sleep, for example, you may even find yourself having to
gather your self together bit by bit.
Proust provides a nice description of just this peculiar
experience. “When I used to wake up in the middle of the
night,” he writes, “not knowing where I was, I could not even
be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary
sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of
an animal’s consciousness. . . . But then . . . out of a blurred
glimpse of oil-lamps, of shirts with turned-down collars, [I]
would gradually piece together the original components of my
ego.”
14
Is this how things start out in infancy? Do human babies
not have a unified sense of self ? Every student of infant
behavior would tell us they do not. Indeed, I myself have
argued, in an essay that takes off from observations of my two-
month-old son, that for the first few months of life the mind of
a human baby really must be host to a variety of unallied
subselves, separate “I”s.
15
In which case the question becomes: what brings about the
unification that will, by the age of three years or so, become the
child’s normal state. Presumably it is not imposed from outside
(although, as Sherrington suggests, other people’s expectations
may well play an important part). Instead, the infant has
somehow to learn to be a single Ego. He has—literally—to
self-organize the parts of his mind into a single whole.
How is this is done? There are not many answers out there,
so I dare mention my own. I believe it is a matter of the
components of the mind, which are initially relatively
independent, being dynamically linked as participants in a
common enterprise. Rather in the same the way that the
divisions in
a factory become part of the same business because they are
jointly contributing to manufacturing the final product that will
go on sale, rather as members of a band come to be bound
together as an artistic unit because they are jointly creating one
work of music, so the components of your mind become united
as your Ego because they are involved in the common project
of creating your singular life: steering you—body and soul—
through the physical and social world. Within this larger
enterprise, each of the subselves may indeed still be doing its
own thing: providing you with sensory information, with
intelligence, with past knowledge, goals, judgments, initiatives,
and so on. But the crucial point is that each subself, in doing its
own thing, shares a final path with all the other selves doing
their own things. And the evolution of this production system
over the first year of life gradually brings the initially separate
“I”s into correspondence. In short, your subselves become co-
conscious through collaboration.
16
But now, what qualities accrue to the Ego? How far do you,
as this larger self, remain private and singular? Let us note—as
we already did in the first chapter—that many of the mental
representations of which you are the subject are not as
intrinsically private as conscious sensations are. Indeed, the
content of your thoughts, perceptions, wishes, and other kinds
of intentional states that lack phenomenal quality in their own
right can, in principle, be relatively easily externalized and
shared (most obviously by language, but by nonlinguistic
means as well). So the fact is the boundaries of your larger Ego
are not so unbreachable in principle as those of the core self.
The point was well made by Milan Kundera: “My self does not
differ substantially from yours in terms of its
thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less
the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one
another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel
the pain. . . . While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its
unique and uninterchangeable self.”
17
Yet—here’s the thing—while Kundera is no doubt correct
to say that your self “in terms of its thought” does not have the
same unique status that your self as a sufferer does, this really
is not how it comes across to you. The fact is you do not regard
your thinking self as somehow less personal, less special, less
yours. And the reason for this is that your larger self is unified
under the core self.
What has happened is that your core self, that “rudimentary
sense of existence” around which Proust found the other parts
reassembling, has emerged as first among equals. And the
reason the core self becomes leader of the pack is just that, as
we discussed in
chapter 6
, the phenomenal qualities of sensation, especially the
illusion of temporal thickness, give the core self a substantial
existence. Here, in your mind, is where the weight is; this is the
self that can take the strain; this provides the continuity.
Thoughts, memories, volitions, come and go, but you are
always living in the presence of sensations. Thus your core
self—the self who is because it feels—has become de facto
also the self who thinks, perceives, remembers, dreams,
desires, and ultimately wills the body into action. Every one of
your “I”s is now an honorary phenomenal subject—by proxy,
as it were.
We saw in
chapter 7
how “borrowed phenomenality transforms the world into
an awesome place.” Now, although the explanation is quite
different, we might equally say that
borrowed phenomenality has transformed your Ego into
“an awesome being.” In particular, the astonishing singularity
of your self as the subject of phenomenal sensations has been
extended to your whole Ego. You seem indeed to be an island,
not just as a sufferer but as an entire mental self. An inhabited
island, mind you. Here is where all those bits and pieces of you
live: live and enjoy the easy cross talk between themselves,
which is so much harder to establish across the borders to
another person. If I may push the metaphor, imagine an ocean
of islands, each with its own internal world of shared ideas,
dreams, desires, and able to communicate to its neighbors only
by smoke signals.
18
But of course you already know all this. I am sure I have
described only what is obvious to you: that as a conscious
human being you naturally think of yourself as an individual
with a separate and unique psychic existence. If there has been
a strong tide running in the academic community against this
all-too-obvious idea, then as scientists we should resist it. In
this book we are discussing consciousness in evolution. We
want to know what consciousness does. And if we were to let
ourselves be swayed by deniers of the self into underestimating
what is arguably one of the most significant aspects of how
consciousness affects human lives, we would miss the point.
The point is that psychological individualism, when it arose
as the inevitable consequence of people’s reflecting on what it
is like to be a conscious Ego, transformed the landscape in
which human beings conducted their affairs. “Egoism”—let us
now unashamedly call it that—acquired new levels of
justification and found new outlets in people’s plans and
ambitions, both for themselves and, as we will see, for others.
To start with, the distinction between me and not me must
have assumed an absolute importance it never had before.
William James, as always, states the case bluntly and elegantly:
One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves
is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of
the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw
the line of division between them in a different place.
When I say that we all call the two halves by the same
names, and that those names are “me” and “not-me”
respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The
altogether unique kind of interest which each human
mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me
or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental
psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in
his neighbor’s me as in his own. The neighbor’s me falls
together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass
against which his own me stands out in startling relief.
19
“Startling relief,” James writes. But this is hardly strong
enough. It is not just that your conscious Ego shines more
brightly than your neighbor’s or creates a bigger wave. It is that
your Ego exists for you as an observable entity in a way that
your neighbor’s does not. You could not take the same interest
in your neighbor’s Ego even if you wanted to—simply because
you know so much less about it.
But now, what kind of “interest”? Again the word hardly
seems strong enough. Elsewhere James writes: “Each of us is
animated by a direct feeling of regard for his own pure
principle of individual existence, whatever that may be.”
Further on he
asks: “What self is loved in ‘self-love?’” The term “self-
love” is good. But I would say that “self-esteem,” coupled with
“self-entrancement,” might get closer to the reality of the
emotion. Remember James’s words I quoted earlier: “To have a
self that I can care for, nature must first present me with some
object interesting enough to make me instinctively wish to
appropriate it for its own sake.” Now, in presenting you with
your conscious Ego, Nature has done just that—with knobs on.
For what “interests” you is precisely this awesome treasure
island.
And you instinctively value this Ego for its own sake? I
would say, instinctively, yes, and rationally too because your
Ego never ceases to amaze and fascinate you. This is to say
more than I did in
chapter 6
, where I expounded the pleasures a conscious creature
takes simply in “being there.” Now we mean business on a
different scale. Not just the pleasures of being there, not even
just the pleasures of being there as a somebody, but the
pleasures of being there as who you are and are becoming.
Oscar Wilde put it in his own narcissistic way: “The aim of
life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that
is what each of us is here for.”
20
And again: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong
romance.”
21
But narcissistic or not, Wilde was right on the mark so far
as the biological impact of this goes. Once it becomes your
purpose to nourish and preserve your conscious Ego, you
become a very different kind of operator in the world. Once
you anchor your plans and ambitions to the existence of this
amazing thing, me, you become naturally the kind of being
that aspires not only to be your self, through continually
affirming your presence in the world, but to make more of your
self through learning, creativity, symbolic expression, spiritual
growth, social influence, love of others, and so on.
I said “love of others.” How so? Let me come to the surprise
that, as I have already hinted, human egoism has always had in
store. I have been arguing that consciousness separates and
isolates people, and so I believe it does; that it promotes
individualism, and so I believe it does. But this is by no means
the end of the affair.
We know from research in child psychology that human
infants acquire a unified sense of self in the first few years of
life. The three-year-old has already become an Ego who is
fascinated by his own developing story as an individual. Yet
what happens next makes up for all the latent and actual
narcissism. For no sooner does the child discover the glories of
being me than he is led to a daring speculation about the selves
of other human beings: “If I have this astonishing phenomenon,
known only to me, at the center of my existence, then isn’t it
likely, even certain, that the same holds for other people too?”
I don’t say that anyone thinks it through in any such
explicit way to reach this aha! revelation. The acquisition by a
child of what scientists call a theory of mind, which can be
applied to other people, comes slowly through social
interaction, exploration, and experiment.
22
It dawns gradually on the child, even hesitantly, that he can
attribute phenomenal consciousness to others. But once it
comes, his outlook on life, the universe and everything has to
undergo a radical adjustment. For he has stumbled upon a truth
second only in importance to the truth of being conscious in
himself: “It’s not just me.” Everyone else is a self-sufficient
hub of consciousness. All human beings have been endowed by
the creator with an inalienable and inviolable mind space of
their own, that is just as special, just as private, just as precious
and important to them as mine is to me.
Traherne delightedly expressed this side of things: “You
never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your
veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with
the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole
world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every
one sole heirs as well as you.”
23
What human beings wake up to is that they are indeed a
part of a society of selves. The idea is extraordinarily potent—
on psychological, ethical, and political levels. And there can be
no question that from the moment it took off among our
ancestors, it must have been highly adaptive. For from the
beginning it would have transformed human relationships,
encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly
increasing the value individuals placed on their own and others’
lives.
I have made much in this chapter of my quarrel with
theorists who underestimate human individualism. But as you
will see now, my argument about the centrality of the Ego does
not so much contradict as set the stage for those who plead the
case for “dividualism.” I quoted Desmond Tutu above: “You
are human precisely because of relationships: you are a
relational being or you are nothing.” It is a fine sentiment—and
one I may now say that it is not only compatible with but
actually dependent on the truth of what I have been arguing.
Human beings need relationships. But the deepest and best
relationships are going to be those between individuals who
recognize the existence in others of a conscious self that is as
strange and precious—and private—as their own. Every one a
soul in good standing, the equal of themselves.
PART THREE
10 Entering the Soul Niche
At a conference on science and spirituality in 2009, the
philosopher of physics Michel Bitbol opened his lecture as
follows:
Yesterday evening, I wondered how exactly I would
connect our topic of this morning [quantum mechanics
and the observer] with the broader issue of spirituality
that is at the center of this conference. . . . I am not
convinced that one can formulate an exhaustive
characterization of spirituality, but let me state at least
one important aspect and source of it. This source is the
continuous, never completely digested astonishment of
being there, being in this unique situation: why do I live
now, in this special period of history? Why am I me,
born in this family, in this place of the world? I was
taught that there were many other possibilities: being any
person, at any time,
or even just not being at all. And yet here I am, in front
of you. Me, not you; here, not there; now, not then. . . .
What is the reason, if any, of this inescapable
singularity? Does the fact that we all live through this
mystery, alleviate it in any way? There is a deep, old,
and permanent sense of awe which is associated to such
realization of our situation, and I am convinced that this
experience is a crucial ground of spirituality as opposed
to science. For, how could we take care of the sense of
uniqueness and fate that pervades our lives from an
undefined moment of our childhood until the unique
moment of our own death, if we stick to the
methodologically objective discipline of science?
1
Bitbol does not use the term “soul.” But it will not have
escaped your notice—and possibly even your censure—that I
myself have been using the word with increasing frequency
since the beginning of the book. Should I really be using it so
freely? Doesn’t the word “soul” carry too much baggage? Yes,
it does, and I should—I should because it does.
At the end of his discussion of “mind-stuff,” early in the
Principles of Psychology, William James wrote: “Many readers
have certainly been saying to themselves for the last few pages:
‘Why on earth doesn’t the poor man say the Soul and have
done with it?’” He noted that there might be methodological
problems with going down that road. Nonetheless, said he, “I
confess . . . that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious
way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious
affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical
resistance.”
2
And yet, three chapters later, James was having none of it.
Admittedly, he wrote, “The theory of the Soul is the theory of
popular philosophy.” Admittedly, it would seem to have
practical uses—among other things it guarantees the “closed
individuality of each personal consciousness” and underpins
the idea of “forensic responsibility before God.”
3
“The consequences of the simplicity and substantiality of
the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural immortality—
nothing but God’s direct fiat can annihilate it—and its
responsibility at all times for whatever it may have ever done.”
But all this, James claimed, is metaphysics, not science.
And “as psychologists, we need not be metaphysical at all.” In
short, “altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of
philosophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson,
is: ‘Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the
explanation of everything else.’” And “My final conclusion,
then, about the substantial Soul is that it explains nothing and
guarantees nothing. . . . I therefore feel entirely free to discard
the word Soul from the rest of this book.”
That James had taken 350 pages to get to this point—and
had become so tetchy—suggests more than a little internal
conflict. You can almost hear a rational soul-denying ego
battling it out with an emotional soul-affirming id. The
rationalist wins the argument (that is what rationalists always
do). But it is remarkable what hard work it seems to have
been—how stubbornly something inside him clung to the big
idea.
Well, James was free to do what he liked. It was his book.
But this is mine. And I make no apology for not following
James’s lead. Even if it is true that as scientific psychologists
we need not be metaphysical—no more than our visiting
Andromedan
scientist need be—we need not and should not be blind to
the role of metaphysical ideas in boosting the morale of
ordinary human beings. As Bitbol said so eloquently, from
childhood until the day you die, you find yourself living at the
center of a metaphysical mystery. You cannot but be fascinated
by the facts of your own psychical existence. Like it or not, you
see yourself, in James’s words, as a “simple spiritual substance
in which the various psychic faculties, operations, and
affections inhere.” If that is not to have a soul, I do not know
what is.
The theologian Keith Ward has written: “The whole point of
talking of the soul is to remind ourselves constantly that we
transcend all the conditions of our material existence; that we
are always more than the sum of our chemicals, our electrons,
our social roles or our genes. . . . We transcend them precisely
in being indefinable, always more than can be seen or
described, subjects of experience and action, unique and
irreplaceable.”
4 So, here is where I am driving. For members of the human
species to live in a world where people in general have this
opinion of themselves—and the opinion is in fact nearly
universal—is to live in what we may call the “soul niche.” I
mean “niche,” now, in the conventional ecological use of the
term—an environment to which a species has become adapted
and where it is designed to flourish. Trout live in rivers, gorillas
in forests, bedbugs in beds. Humans live in soul land.
Soul land is a territory of the spirit. It is a place where the
magical interiority of human minds makes itself felt on every
side. A place where you naturally assume that every other
human being lives, as you do, in the extended present of
phenomenal consciousness. Where you acknowledge and honor
the
personhood of others, treating everyone as an independent,
respectable, responsible, free-willed conscious being in his or
her own right. Where you recognize and celebrate the awesome
possibilities of individual, private joy and suffering.
It is a place where the fate of your own consciousness and
that of others is a constant talking point. Where souls are the
topic of gossip, of tender concern, of mean speculation. Where
souls are the subject of prayer and spells and ritual
management.
It is a place where the claims of the spirit begin to rank as
highly as the claims of the flesh. Where you join hands with
others in sharing—sharing, paradoxically, each in yourself—
the beauties of the world you have enchanted. Soul land is the
natural home of the artists, monks, and popular philosophers
(as James would call them) whom I have quoted so liberally
throughout this book—a land fit for the heroes of
consciousness to live in. I could go on in this vein, but I do not
need to. You live there. You know.
Anyone who studies the natural history of human beings
must recognize that this spiritual territory is not only where
almost all humans do live but where they give of their best.
There can be no question that this is the niche to which the
human species is biologically adapted, where individual men
and women are able to make the most of their opportunities for
leaving descendants. And yet this niche is in many ways a
cultural product, by no means a given of the natural world.
Human beings have largely invented the soul niche.
We should not be surprised to find culture giving a leg up
to nature in this case. Many other animal species besides
humans play an active role in constructing the ecological niche
to which they are biologically adapted, by modifying the
local physical and social environment.
5
Beavers change the geography by building dams, termites
create a whole new eco-climate within their mounds, baboons
construct a network of social relationships that helps shelter
them from natural hazards and allows them to live in a range of
otherwise inhospitable terrains.
Humans, however, have taken “niche construction”—
especially social niche construction—to a quite new level. Ian
Hacking, the philosopher, has drawn attention to how humans
“make up people”: they create roles for individuals to adopt,
roles that may never have existed before, which then become
confirmed as “human kinds,” partly because other people
encourage the role-players to live up to what is expected of
them.
6
In fact, almost all the categories humans use to structure
the landscape of their society—such ordinary categories as, say,
woman, priest, footballer, clown, Frenchman, beggarman,
thief—have been partly created and subsequently reinforced by
a looping process of this sort. More to the point, the same is
true of extraordinary categories too. Even when a role is,
strictly speaking, an impossible or a meaningless one, it can
still be one to which individuals are encouraged to aspire and
that they may end up simulating. Thus, for example, although it
is presumably impossible to be a “witch,” many a poor woman
in medieval Europe, coming under pressure from the
community, embraced this impossibility and did indeed
become a witch of sorts.
But the most surprising and exotic example of a made-up
human kind is the most ordinary of all: namely, the basic
category of “human being” as such. Anthropologists have
provided rich accounts of how human cultures everywhere
believe that
human beings—at any rate the members of their human
tribe—belong to a class of being elevated above the rest of
nature. Even if no one can, in reality, live up to the job
description of a supra-animal and even a supraphysical being
that the culture advertises, people who believe in the possibility
for themselves do become such beings of a sort.
This is not the place to review such an extensive literature.
Instead, to make the point generically, I’ll rely on a passage
from the essayist Cabell. I have already quoted him in an earlier
chapter on the subject of how a human being, who begins with
“very little save a faculty for receiving sensations,” becomes “a
very gullible consciousness provisionally existing among
inexplicable mysteries.” Cabell is an eccentric and pompous
writer. But these words on the subject of how people have gone
on to invent themselves, by living their dreams, are
unexpectedly wise.
And romance tricks [the human being], but not to his
harm. For, be it remembered that man alone of animals
plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is undoubtedly
who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and
aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion;
and that his existence is a pageant (appreciatively
observed by divine spectators), and that he is strong and
excellent and wise: and to romance he listens, willing
and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction.
The things of which romance assures him are very far
from true: yet it is solely by believing himself a creature
but little lower than the cherubim that man has by
interminable small degrees become, upon the whole,
distinctly superior to the chimpanzee: so that, however
extravagant may seem these flattering whispers to-day,
they were immeasurably more remote from veracity
when men first began to listen to their sugared susurrus,
and steadily the discrepancy lessens.
7
Cabell is surely right that human beings have talked
themselves into having this grandiose picture of themselves.
And the more they have talked themselves up, the taller they
have truly grown. Yet, all the while, and for every new
individual, it begins with the in-your-face mystery of being
there.
Can we begin to guess how far back in history this goes,
when human beings first became denizens of this niche of their
own making? I rather doubt it happened “by interminable small
degrees”; I think, more likely, there would have been a rush of
invention once the ideas first got off the ground. Assuming it
depended on language, the tipping point can hardly have
predated the emergence of modern humans in Africa 200,000
years ago. But maybe it was much more recent, coinciding
with—perhaps indeed being responsible for—the Upper
Paleolithic revolution that began in Europe not more than
50,000 years ago.
The question is, are there are any kinds of portraits in the
archaeological record that would allow us to place the arrival of
souls on the scene at least so far back in history? I like to think
there may be. At any rate, I will share an intriguing observation
with you. In the village of Vilafamés, in the Valencia region of
Spain, there is a cave just below the castle where there are rock
paintings that date to about 15,000 BC. When I visited the cave
in 2006, I was taken aback to see the resemblance between one
of the images (
figure 12
)
8
and a drawing I made for a scientific journal several years
earlier (
figure 13
).
9
My drawing was intended to illustrate the “privatization of
sensation.” You will see why the thought immediately occurred
to me that the ingoing spiral in the head of the humanoid figure
on the left was meant by the Neolithic artist to signify
containment, privacy—the essential qualities of conscious
selfhood.
Figure 12 rock painting, Vilafamés, Spain.
Figure 13 Figure from humphrey, (2000, p. 249).
But if so, let me take the speculation a bit further. What
about all those other spirals, cups, and rings within rings—
designs that might seem to speak so strongly of interiority—
that, painted or pecked into the stone, are a recurring theme in
rock art from the Neolithic and Bronze ages of human history
all over the world, not only in Europe but also across Asia,
Australia, and America? Archaeologists have had no good
theories of what such symbols are about. It has been suggested
that multiple representations, such as that from the Iveragh
Peninsula, Ireland (
figure 14
), are some kind of “field plan.” Or perhaps they are merely
decorative doodles, without meaning. I would suggest, with all
due reservation, that they are in fact graffiti recording the
presence of conscious human beings. Soul plans, if you like. As
I wrote on the opening page of this book: Here live souls.
Figure 14. Rock art panel at Derrynablaha, Iveragh Peninsula, Ireland. Photograph
by Ken Williams, reproduced by permission.
11 Dangerous Territory
“Here live souls.” But today we must surely say, “Here
lived souls.” For whether I am right about the rock art symbols
or not, what is certain is that the human beings who made those
marks are here no longer. The marks on the rock persist, the
individual people do not.
We could take the discussion in a hundred directions from
here on. But given the agenda of this book, there is one big
problem outstanding: the question of consciousness and death.
It is a subject we visited in
chapter 6
. But we have moved on since then. The original core self
has grown into a larger and more estimable entity, the Ego, and
now the soul, and presumably people’s attitudes to death, will
have evolved alongside. I argued earlier that humans, alone
among animals, are capable of fearing death. But if oblivion—
the absence of sensation—which follows the death of the core
self, was already a frightening prospect for human beings, then
complete psychic extinction—the
absence of memory, personality, knowledge, skills—which
follows the death of the soul, has to be more frightening still.
As Susanne Langer has written: “And with the rise and
gradual conception of the ‘self’ as the source of personal
autonomy comes, of course, the knowledge of its limit—the
ultimate prospect of death. The effect of this intellectual
advance is momentous. Each person’s deepest emotional
concern henceforth shifts to his own life, which he knows
cannot be indefinitely preserved.”
1
Potentially this is the major down side of psychological
individualism. The higher you climb, the harder you fall. As the
future of the individual Ego has acquired ever-greater
psychological significance in the course of human evolution, so
the death of this Ego must surely have come to be seen as an
ever-greater tragedy—a tragedy for that one person who loved
himself and a tragedy for the others who loved him too.
The particular person has gone, the very person whose
consciousness and intellect were designed by Nature to make
him believe himself a being of such singular importance. We
can hardly underestimate the loss involved. Yevgeny
Yevtushenko said it for us:
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Not people die but worlds die in them.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
2
Such a pity. It hurts us even to think of it. And yet, let’s
stand back if we can. As scientists, we should surely recognize
that for you as a human being to lament the loss of this
however-so-interesting individual—even to lament it in
advance—may not be such a bad thing, from the point of view
of biological survival. We have already remarked in the earlier
discussion how your fear of losing the core self will in some
circumstances motivate you to go that extra mile to save your
own life. Then, by the same token, your fear of losing your
larger Ego will presumably provide a stronger incentive still.
And just to the extent that you have come to value the Egos of
your companions, your soul mates, it will provide an incentive
to save their lives too. The more you dread the loss, the more
you will actively avoid it. As the evolutionary psychiatrist
Randolph Nesse has pointed out in an essay titled “What Good
Is Feeling Bad?”: “Emotions are set to maximise Darwinian
fitness, not happiness.”
3
Thus we might want to argue that the increased death
anxiety that has accompanied the rise of individualism has
actually been a further way in which consciousness has proved
its worth as an adaptation for human beings—another reason
for the genes for consciousness to be selected.
Maybe there is really some truth in this. But we have only to
look more widely at the natural history of consciousness to see
that it is clearly not the whole truth. In fact, there is more than
enough evidence quite to the contrary: the prospect of
individual death can sometimes be so deeply depressing as to
seriously damage biological fitness.
The trouble is that people really do die. And although fear
of death may sometimes help delay the final reckoning, this is
all it can do—delay it. It is not the same as, for example, the
fear of having your house burn down, which may very well be
effective in ensuring that it never happens. With death, in the
end, all precautions fail. “Wonders are many on earth, and the
greatest of these is man,” sings the Chorus in Sophocles’
Antigone. “There is nothing beyond his power. His subtlety
meeteth all chance, all danger conquereth. For every ill he hath
found its remedy, save only death.”
4
Human beings can manage with the longest of odds against
them, provided there are at least some small grounds for hope.
But it is clear that everything changes when you realize your
doom is sealed. I have known people (I am among them) who
have been knocked back when they first heard of the inevitable
heat death of the universe 150 billion years from now. (“What’s
the point of doing my home-work, then?” was nine-year-old
Alvy Singer’s response.)
5
The idea that your own soul is not going to survive so
much as a paltry one hundred years hardly bears contemplating.
Here is W. H. Auden again:
Lucky the leaf
Unable to predict the fall. . . .
But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart,
Know to the bar when death shall cut him short, like the
cry of the shearwater?
6
Why does it matter so much? The answers may seem
obvious, but let’s state them anyway. To start with, a hundred
years does indeed seem less than a human soul—with its
boundless hopes—deserves. To return to Tom Nagel’s
observations:
Having been gratuitously introduced to the world by a
collection of natural, historical, and social accidents, [a
man] finds himself the subject of a life, with an
indeterminate and not essentially limited future. Viewed
in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt
cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. . . .
If the normal lifespan were a thousand years, death at 80
would be a tragedy. As things are, it may be just a more
widespread tragedy. If there is no limit to the amount of
life it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad
end is in store for us all.
7
So, you would like to have more. But surely this is not the
chief reason why you do not want to die. While the prospect of
not getting all those possible goods may make you feel hard
done by, it will not in itself make you depressed. Life can still
be beautiful even if it is imperfect. No, the bigger problem is
that the prospect of death threatens to take away the beauty of
life even as you live it—because it strips life of meaning.
Albert Camus stated it bluntly: “There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life
is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy. . . . Beginning to think is beginning to
be undermined.”
8
I would say it comes down to this. Whether life is worth
living has become an increasingly serious problem for human
beings because of a quite special feature of the way the
human mind works: the importance of—and the need for—a
justifying narrative. As a human, because you have evolved to
think of yourself as a responsible individual, you count on
having reasons for every project you undertake. That is, you,
as an Ego, expect to be able to answer the question “Why am I
doing this?”: “Why must I . . . ,” “Why ought I . . . ,” “Why
wish I . . . to achieve this goal by these means?” It may be true
that, so long as the going is easy and no one challenges you,
you will generally let the reasons go unstated. But just so soon
as you come up against obstacles or have to make hard choices,
then it is your habit to use reasons as mental drivers: to
motivate you, to direct or redirect your actions, to keep yourself
on target.
The development of this kind of rational self-control has, in
the course of evolution, brought a new level of intelligence to
human endeavors, and also a new level of commitment. You as
an Ego think ahead to find good personal reasons for acting
now. In so doing you throw a hook to the future by means of
which you are able to pull yourself upward.
This special reliance on reasons allows you to be—as no
nonhuman animal can be—confident in the rightness, the
worthwhileness, of your cause. Typically you believe in what
you are doing. However, there is a potential danger in this. For
the dreadful truth is that your reliance on reasons also allows
you to be—as no animal can be—beset by doubts. Indeed, just
as the existence of reasons strengthens your resolve, the lack of
reasons can and should weaken it. And when you do not
believe in what you are doing you may—often you ought to—
stop doing it at all. It has been well said that if something is not
worth doing, it is not worth doing well. What, then, if you start
asking whether life as such is worth the doing?
There will be several obvious short-term answers to be
found. But having a life is not a short-term project. Everyone
can be famous for fifteen minutes, and no doubt everyone can
find happiness and fulfillment for an hour, a day, even a year.
But when you ask whether life—your particular life—is worth
living, you are looking much farther down the road, to the
account you might later give of why the sum of what you have
experienced and done has been worthwhile.
The trouble is precisely that “beginning to think is
beginning to be undermined.” Once you start thinking it
through, it can become distressingly clear that the reasons you
might immediately fasten on to for having a life may not stand
critical scrutiny. The philosopher George Santayana said it
plainly: the idea “that life is worth living is the most necessary
of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible
of conclusions.”
9
How so? What would block you from concluding rationally
that life is worth the candle? What is the problem? There is one
overriding one: the fact of death. For it is death that threatens
to undermine just about every good reason you might otherwise
come up with for determining that life is—or, at the end of the
day, will have been—worth living.
This is not to say that everything would necessarily be fine
if you were not going to die. But it is to say that maybe nothing
is fine if you are going to die. You throw a hook to the future,
and, when you put the weight of your life’s purpose on it, the
ground gives way.
Here is David Hume’s summation of the problem: “When
we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how
despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness? And even, if we
would extend our concern beyond our own life, how frivolous
appear
our most enlarged and generous projects . . . hurried away
by time, lost in the immense ocean of matter?”
10
And here is Woody Allen’s: “The experience is just so
hopeless and awful and fraught with tragedy. . . . By the end—
what is it, after all? It’s kind of a meaningless experience that
ends with decay and death. It’s nothing. . . . It is of no
consequence. You live, you die, you’re forgotten.”
11
The literary critic George Steiner writes of “the scandal, the
incomprehensibility of individual death.”
12
“The future tense, the ability to discuss possible events on
the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space a million years
hence, looks to be specific to homo sapiens. . . . There is an
actual sense in which every human use of the future tense of the
verb ‘to be’ is a negation, however limited, of mortality.”
Now, we might think that concerns such as these about the
“lack of future” must be a peculiarly modern phenomenon,
which can hardly be relevant to the long march of mankind
through evolution. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung was of the
opinion that even among contemporary humans, “fortunately,
in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal
question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of
most people. And where no one asks, no one need answer.”
13
But let us have no hesitation in contradicting him. Knowing
what we do of human genius and imagination, we can be quite
sure that—Nature’s supposed “kindness” notwithstanding—it
is simply not true that most people have been created to be too
incurious to ask the obvious question or too dull spirited to
know a scandal when they see one.
We may not be used to thinking of our ancestors of the
Paleolithic era as Hamlets or young Werthers, wandering
across
the sand—or ice—pondering the pointlessness of existence.
But human beings have had brains that are anatomically very
much like those we have today for about the last 150,000 years.
And charity—but science as well—demands that we should
assume they have had minds vulnerable to forms of existential
anxiety at least that long.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
14
Thus Gerard Manley Hopkins describes, even in the shape
of his verse, the vertiginous landscape that people have created
for themselves and made their home.
The soul niche, let it be said, is dangerous territory. Can a
life that is bound to end so pointlessly have had any point to it
along the way? Homework is the least of it; why not kill
yourself right now? For, of course, you, as a human, if you
should want to avoid the pointless future, always can. As
Erwin Stengel noted: “At some stage of evolution man must
have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-
men but also himself. It can be assumed that life has never
since been the same to him.”
15
True, if you really fear death, you will presumably not kill
yourself because of that. But if, as may be more the case, you
find the prospect of death demoralizing and dispiriting, then
suicide could be a rational way out. Why not? Why not, with
Hamlet, “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing
end them”? Why not, with Eve in Milton’s poem, seek for
yourself and offspring “some relief of our extremes”?
“Miserable it is,” Eve says to Adam, “to be to others cause of
misery. . . . Childless thou art, childless remain.”
Why stand we longer shivering under fears
That show no end but death; and have the power,
Of many ways to die, the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy?
16
It is not even as if the decision to let go would require
unusual courage or commitment, nor be technically difficult.
To end yourself, you have only to omit to preserve yourself. To
escape the future, you have only to omit to invest in it. Every
time you walk down a cliff path, every time you take the wheel
of a car, every time you swim beyond your depth, the smallest
of actions—or inactions—would do the job.
“How thin the line between the will to live and the will to
die,” Susan Sontag suggests. “How about a hole . . . a really
deep hole, which you put in a public place, for general use. In
Manhattan, say, at the corner of Seventieth and Fifth. . . . A
sign beside the hole reads: 4 PM–8 PM / MON WED & FRI / SUICIDE
PERMITTED. Just that. A sign. Why, surely people would jump
who had hardly thought of it before.”
17
In 1913 Ludwig Wittgenstein told a friend that “all his life
there had hardly been a day, in which he had not thought
suicide a possibility.”
18
More typically, among today’s American high school
students, 60 percent say they have considered killing
themselves, 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the
last year, and 5 percent have attempted it—more than one
million students a year.
19
If—it is, of course, a big “if”—such has been the pattern
since human beings first started to ask whether life is worth
living, it means there must have been a severe challenge for our
ancestors to discover defensive measures, whether at the level
of culture or biology. For there is no question that any tendency
to suicide—or childlessness, which comes to the same
thing—could not but pose a serious threat to the continuity of
the human species. In fact, if unchecked, it would certainly
have been terminal.
How many direct parental ancestors have you had in the
last fifty thousand years? With an intergeneration time of
twenty-five years and two parents per generation, the answer
must be many millions.
20
But we know for a fact that among all the individuals in
the lines that led to you there cannot have been a single one
who, worrying about the ultimate pointlessness of life, chose
early on to end it or to forsake his or her infant offspring.
Indeed, if there had been so much as a thousandth of a chance
of any one of those millions doing so, the probability of your
being here now would be near zero.
Yet while none of them did it, it seems only too likely that
many, even most of them, did think of it. And let’s note, by the
way, that suicidal thoughts need not be chronic, everyday
thoughts to be lethal. Being tempted to kill yourself just once a
year—in the course of an otherwise happy life—could still
spell termination. For living and dying have different tenses:
the first requires continuing imperfect investment, the second
only a perfect single act. “I have set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing, therefore choose life that thou and thy
seed may live,” says the Preacher.
21
But the choice is not symmetrical. Choose the first, and
you can still choose the second later; but choose the second,
and that’s it.
What stops those who think from acting? Maybe in some
cases not enough. Evolution has taken wrong turns before with
other species, which have resulted in extinction. Maybe for
some branches of the human line this was true also. We know
from the evidence of “bottlenecks” in the genetic record—times
when the number of human genes in circulation had been
severely reduced—that after the emergence of modern humans,
there were several sudden collapses in the human population,
which are as yet unexplained.
22
The cause could have been epidemic disease, internecine
warfare, or volcanic eruptions. But I wonder: could the cause
have been consciousness itself—a conscious self that had
become so precious as to be a burden? Søren Kierkegaard
writes: “Having a self, being a self, is the greatest, the infinite,
concession that has been made to man, but also eternity’s claim
on him.”
23
Did whole groups of humans yield to this claim—lose
heart and succumb?
There is no way of knowing the answer. Loss of heart will
have left no identifiable trace in the paleoanthropological
record. However, we do know for certain that even if those
others succumbed, your ancestors did not. What was different?
What helped your ancestors to make it through? If there is
indeed something that stops those who think from acting, it
must surely be that other thoughts come to mind.
12 Cheating Death
“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross
the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love,
convictions, faith, history. Human life—and herein lies its
secret—takes place in the immediate proximity of that border,
even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction
of an inch.”
1 So Milan Kundera has written. His message—which is the
message of the previous chapter—is that human beings’
solution to their existential dilemma has been and is a close
call. Kundera labels whatever this solution is a “secret.” Yet, as
we have stressed all along, secrets do not play well with
natural selection—or, for that matter, with cultural selection. If
human survival has depended on it, this secret must be out in
the open, evident in the natural history of consciousness. Our
question then should be: looking again at that natural history,
what can we see people doing and saying to fend off
despair, to inoculate themselves against the immanent loss
of heart?
To answer this question properly would, of course, require
telling the whole story of human civilization from the
beginning. You will see, however, that this is the next-to-last
chapter of the book. What I am about to say must therefore be
quite inadequate. But this is a book about the history of
consciousness, and I want to round it off by arguing that
consciousness had one more trick up its sleeve.
“What shall man do, who knows to the bar when death shall
cut him short?” I will review—or at any rate visit—three
strategies of restoring meaning to life that are widely on display
as human responses to anxiety about death.
Discount the future—and live for the present.
Disindividuate—and identify yourself with cultural
entities that will survive you.
Deny the finality of bodily death—and believe the
individual self to be immortal.
Discounting the Future
I have remarked often enough in earlier pages that for a
phenomenally conscious creature, simply being there is a
cause for celebration. So, perhaps Walter Hagen had it right:
You’re only here for a short visit.
Don’t hurry, don’t worry.
And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.
2
When you can, as we have seen, revel in living in the thick
moment of the finite present, do you really have to spoil it by
worrying about infinity? Blaise Pascal, gloomy saint that he
was, spoke for the worriers: “When I consider the brief span of
my life, absorbed into the eternity before and after—as the
remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day—the small
space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite
immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know
nothing of me, I take fright. . . . The eternal silence of those
infinite spaces terrifies me.”
3
But the mathematical philosopher Frank Ramsey took a
lighter view of things: “I don’t feel in the least humble before
the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they
cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me
far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly
seventeen stone. My picture of the world is drawn in
perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is
occupied by human beings, and the stars are as small as
threepenny bits.”
4
David Hume, while recognizing, as we saw, that there is
indeed an intellectual problem with the prospect of loss of
future, boldly announced that it was not in human nature to
dwell on it.
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is
incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself
suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this
philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by
relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and
lively impression by my senses, which obliterate all these
chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I
converse, and am merry
with my friends; and when after three or four hours’
amusement, I would return to these speculations, they
appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot
find it in my heart to enter into them any farther.
5
For philosopher Michel Ferrari: “The eternal present of my
‘pure’ experience, when I attend to it, is more alive to me than
some later eternity.”
6
And for Camus: “If there is a sin against life, it consists
perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for
another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
7
Meanwhile, Pascal himself reflected: “We never keep to the
present. We anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in
coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if
to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander
about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the
only one that does.”
8
Brave talk from the philosophers. But how effective a
strategy is this? Do ordinary people really manage to calm their
fears by living in the present? I think the answer must be they
do and they don’t. That is, they do cherish the present,
sometimes as a deliberate defiance of death, but they do not
make their parting with life any the easier by doing so.
The evidence is all around that people will attempt to pack
in as much experience as they can before they go, precisely so
as to cheat death of its victory. And the kind of experience they
look for in these circumstances does seem to be
overwhelmingly sensory, rather than, say, intellectual or
cultural. In 2003, BBC television asked its viewers what they
would like to do before they die.
9
Twenty thousand people responded, and in the top fifty
things they mentioned, almost
every one of them involved as-yet-untried forms of
sensation. The top experiences were classified on a related Web
site under four headings: “Earth,” “Fire,” “Water,” “Wind.”
10
No one followed Bertrand Russell in saying the one thing
they wanted was to know more mathematics.
11
But let’s get particular. This news item appeared in 2001:
A terminally ill boy had his dying wish granted in
Australia this month. . . . The wish was not for a trip to
Disneyland or to meet a famous sports star. Instead, the
15-year-old wanted to lose his virginity before he died of
cancer. The boy, who remains anonymous but was called
Jack by the Australian media, did not want his parents to
know about his request. Because of his many years spent
in hospital, he had no girlfriend or female friends. Jack
died last week, but not before having his last wish
granted. Without the knowledge of his parents or hospital
staff, friends arranged an encounter with a prostitute
outside of hospital premises.
12
It makes sense that Jack and others should focus on having
novel experiences before they die. For there is certainly
something different and special about the first time. Yet the
record shows that when people are actually facing death in the
near future, they are as likely to seek intense experiences as
novel ones. Hume observed: “We are informed by Thucydides,
that, during the famous plague of Athens, when death seemed
present to every one, a dissolute mirth and gaiety prevailed
among the people, who exhorted one another to make the most
of life as long as it endured. The same observation is made by
Boccac[cio], with regard to the plague of Florence. A like
principle makes soldiers, during war, be more addicted to riot
and expense, than any other race of men.”
13
It is true that not everyone behaves in this way. Still, if you
question how general this phenomenon is, then consider the
undoubted evidence relating to the ritual of the last breakfast
before execution in the contemporary United States. I have
quoted several well-crafted lists of sensory pleasures offered by
poets, from Brooke to Hopkins. But here is a rather more
surprising list—a prose poem of sorts written by several
hands—that could, until recently, be found posted on the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice’s Web site:
Fried fish fillet, french fries, orange juice, German
chocolate cake.
Double meat cheeseburger (with jalapenos and
trimmings on the side), vanilla malt, French fries, onion
rings, ketchup, hot picante sauce, vanilla ice cream, two
Cokes, two Dr. Peppers, and a chicken fried steak
sandwich with cheese pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and
salad dressing.
Eight soft fried eggs (wants yellow runny), big bowl of
grits, five biscuits with bowl of butter, five pieces of
fried hard and crisp bacon, two sausage patties, pitcher of
chocolate milk, two pints vanilla Blue Bell ice cream,
and two bananas.
One cup of hot tea (from tea bags) and six chocolate chip
cookies.
14
Remarkably, 238 of 301 prisoners executed in Texas
between 1982 and 2003 not only chose to give over some of
their remaining minutes to eating this last meal, but evidently
gave considerable thought to the menu. A menu, mind you, full
of familiar things. I find it telling that no one in this situation
chose to have a virginal experience with oysters. In 1994
Robert Alton Harris put in his order for “two pizzas, twenty-
one pieces of extra-crispy Kentucky Fried Chicken, jelly beans,
and a six-pack of Pepsi.” Then, the prison officer reports, “He
stood in the deathwatch cell and ate this stuff in ‘big bites, big
bites.’” A few hours later he was killed by poison gas.
15
Think consciousness—think Nature’s most astonishing
creation—as you read those lists. What is going on? No doubt
intense sensation can at least act as a distraction from thoughts
about the oblivion that is about to overtake you. While you are
living in the present, you are certainly alive. Like the man who
is falling from a skyscraper, you can shout to someone at the
window as you pass the fortieth floor, “All right so far!” You
may even persuade yourself that this present moment is so full
of glory that afterward nothing else matters.
Yet, I regret to say, as a rule this is not how human
psychology works. Rather, the greater the pleasure experienced,
the greater the appetite for more. Would Harris, while savoring
the sweet sensation of the jelly beans, have become any better
reconciled to his imminent extinction, or would he have wished
ever more fervently to be spared so as to have such sensations
again? Would Hume as he dined and made merry with his
friends have really banished those chimeras permanently, or, at
four in the morning, would they have returned with still-greater
force? Samuel Johnson was of the opinion that Hume’s
serenity—which he continued to display even in
the days of his final illness—was only a pose, “an
appearance of ease” to confound believers.
16
Hume claimed that nature herself turned his thoughts away
from death, but I am inclined to side with Pascal when he
observed that for a man in a dungeon, waiting to know whether
he was to die in an hour, “it would be unnatural for him to
spend that hour . . . playing piquet.”
17
And then young Jack? I wonder whether it would have been
better for him if his sexual encounter had left him disappointed.
For it would surely have been easier for him to leave this world
if he did not think life—and sex—were such a big deal, easier
than if a single experience had made him all the more keenly
aware of what he would be missing. Remember Nagel’s
summary comment that “death . . . is an abrupt cancellation of
indefinitely extensive possible goods.”
I do not want to seem to preach. The issues are complex
and personal. Mary Oliver, in a poem full of courage, “When
Death Comes,” has written that at the end of her life she wants
to be able to say that all along she was “a bride married to
amazement . . . the bridegroom, taking the world into my
arms.”
18
Perhaps, when it is over, these will truly be Oliver’s parting
thoughts. But I come back to Rupert Brooke. As we saw, he
also declared himself to be in love with the universe—and to be
loved in return:
I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment.
Still, he ended his hymn to sensation on a more disillusioned,
even angry, note.
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass.
Whatever passes not, in the great hour, Nor all my
passion, all my prayers, have power To hold them with
me through the gate of Death. They’ll play deserter, turn
with the traitor breath, Break the high bond we made,
and sell Love’s trust And sacramented covenant to the
dust.
19
“Deserter,” “traitor.” Brooke will not be reconciled. He
returns us to the shocking reality of nature’s double-dealing
over consciousness: that while she has designed the human soul
to look forward to an everlasting marriage to experience, she
has at the same time allowed the body that sustains it to seek an
early divorce.
The BBC’s book has a peculiar title: Unforgettable Things
to Do before You Die.
20
The trouble is you will forget everything when you die.
Disindividuation
Then, where else might you, as an individual, turn for comfort?
Perhaps there is a straightforward answer, which is to persuade
yourself that, even if you cannot always be there, your world,
the world you have made and helped propel into the future,
will continue after you are gone.
The first steps at least are easy. It is true that you will forget
everything when you die, but not, of course, that all will be
forgotten. It is true too that you will no longer play a role in
lighting up the world, but not that the world will no longer be
lit up. John Donne, in a terrifying line, asked: “What if this
present
were the world’s last night?”
21
Imagine if your consciousness were the only consciousness
there is, so that your death would bring an end to phenomenal
properties across the universe. This would certainly be the
nightmare case of individual responsibility. And, if you were to
believe in it, I am sure you would justifiably succumb to total
panic. But why should you even consider it? You live in the
soul niche. However special and alone you feel subjectively,
you can rest assured it is not just you. Thankfully, Nature has
spread the joy.
I have taken a strong line in the earlier chapters in arguing
that the individual self, with its bounded consciousness, has to
be central to human beings’ picture of who and what they are. I
do not want to retreat from this position. However, I can see
that there is room to move beyond this: there could be
additional ways—and perhaps more comforting ways—of
seeing things. Dividualism could make some kind of sense after
all. The unified self, I argued earlier, is a construction. During
your development as an infant, the components of your
individual Ego came to be united as one self because and
insofar as they found themselves participating in a common
project—the project of creating your life. But suppose, now,
this project could be broadened to include not just your first-
person’s life but the lives of others too. In that case perhaps
your self could come to have this wider remit by the very
process that it became unified to start with.
Bertrand Russell, as he entered old age, wrote:
The best way to overcome [the fear of death]—so at least
it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually
wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of
the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly
merged in the universal life. An individual human
existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly
contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past
boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows
wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly,
and in the end, without any visible break, they become
merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual
being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this
way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the
things he cares for will continue.
22
I will agree, this sounds good. It sounds quite natural too.
A relatively selfless interest in the success of your own
biological descendants, even after you are dead, must surely
have an instinctive basis in the human mind (and of many
nonhuman animals too). Thus the evolved sentiments that are
apposite to caring for a biological family might be easily
extended to the symbolic family or the clan. This would not
perhaps amount to “universal life,” as Russell puts it, but it
could well embrace the life of your culturally defined social
group.
Such disindividuation ought indeed to help allay your fears.
However, it is not going to leave you free of anxiety about the
future. For you still have to worry that “the things you care for”
will in fact continue. The buck will have been passed to cultural
institutions. And those institutions, although certainly less
vulnerable than you are as an individual, are by no means
guaranteed to last forever. Cultures can be overthrown by alien
forces or decay of their own accord. The history of the world’s
civilizations is one of unexpected collapses: of empires and
Reichs and religions that thought themselves eternal, being
wiped off the map. If you are to die happy in the knowledge
that the things you personally care for will continue, you
have to believe that your culture is different.
Recognizing this, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann
have spelled out the importance of symbolic immortality:
Death posits the most terrifying threat to the taken-for-
granted realities of everyday life. The integration of
death within the paramount reality of social existence is
. . . consequently, one of the most important fruits of
symbolic universes. . . . All legitimations of death must
carry out the same essential task—they must enable the
individual to go on living in society after the death of
significant others and to anticipate his own death with
. . . terror sufficiently mitigated so as not to paralyse the
continued performance of the routines of everyday life.
. . . On the level of meaning, the institutional order
represents a shield against terror. . . . The symbolic
universe shelters the individual from ultimate terror by
bestowing ultimate legitimation upon the protective
structures of the institutional order.
23
So, let us ask, do people actually think this way? If they
do—if they cope with the threat of personal extinction by
identifying with institutions and symbols that will survive
them—then we might expect to find them responding to
reminders of individual death by rushing to defend cultural
values.
Just such evidence has come from a remarkable body of
new research on what happens when human subjects are made
to think about mortality. The research has been spearheaded by
those involved with so-called terror management theory.
24
What they have shown, in study after study, is that when
people go through what they refer to as a “mortality salience
induction”—as, for example, when people spend a few minutes
writing about their own deaths, watch a film of a fatal car crash,
or simply have the word “dead” flashed on a screen—a number
of strong changes in attitude follow. The immediate reaction,
predictably enough, tends to be one of defense and denial: the
experimental subjects look for reasons why they as individuals
are at no immediate risk. But the delayed reaction that emerges
once these subjects relax their guard and let subconscious
thoughts come through is much more surprising and interesting.
In a variety of ways they become more socially conformist and
centered on group values, more authoritarian, less
understanding or forgiving of deviance, and all the more
willing to punish eccentrics and outsiders and to reward
mainstream heroes.
Let me cite just a few of the experimental findings. When
municipal court judges in the United States were asked to set
bail for an alleged prostitute, those who had filled out a
questionnaire relating to their own death set the mean bail at
$455, whereas those who been questioned about a more neutral
topic set it at just $50. When American students were asked to
say what they thought about an essay, supposedly written by a
foreigner, that either praised the United States or criticized it,
those who had been through the mortality salience induction
showed an increased liking for the pro-American essayist and a
dislike for the anti-American—and when given the opportunity
to administer spiteful punishment to the anti-American, were
all the more ready to do so. When students were put in a
position where, to solve a practical task, they had to sift black
dye through an American flag or to hammer in a nail with a
crucifix, those who had been through the mortality salience
induction showed much greater resistance to carrying out the
culturally offensive actions.
Nor are these effects limited to the somewhat contrived
situation of the social-psychology laboratory or to Americans.
In a study in Germany (subsequently replicated in the United
States), mortality salience was manipulated in a more
naturalistic setting by stopping people in the street either
directly in front of a funeral parlor or a hundred yards before or
after it. When subjects were asked to estimate what proportion
of the population shared their own view on a controversial
political or religious issue, those stopped in front of the funeral
parlor showed a marked tendency to overestimate how many
other people agreed with them (especially if their opinion was
in fact the minority one). In the U.S. study, subjects were asked
whether Christian values should be taught in public schools;
those who held this view, when questioned in front of the
funeral parlor, reckoned that 61 percent would agree with them,
but this estimate fell to 42 percent or 46 percent when they
were a hundred yards either side.
More than ninety studies in five countries during the 1990s
demonstrated the reality of these effects. Then, tragically, in
2001 came real-world confirmation of this research, such as no
one could have wished for. After the attack on the World Trade
Center on September 11, all the patterns that had been observed
to occur after experimentally induced mortality salience
emerged with a vengeance across certain sections of the
population of the U.S.A. (and to some extent elsewhere):
patriotism, flag-waving, exaggerated confidence in national
values, derogation of foreigners, antihomosexual sentiments,
abuse of prisoners, and so on. The remarks of the
fundamentalist
Christian preacher Jerry Falwell, on a radio chat show with
Pat Robertson a few days after the event, apparently showed
the process in full flood: “I really believe that the pagans, and
the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians
who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the
ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have
tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and
say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
25
What should we make of these results? The experimental
facts are clear and undisputed (so much so, that I would be
pretty sure that, with the emphasis on death in what you have
just been reading, you yourself will have shifted politically in
the last hour).
Though there have been competing interpretations, I think
the researchers have made a strong case that people do indeed
respond to reminders of mortality by seeking reassurance that
their cultural world is stable, lawful, protected from alien
influences, and thus potentially eternal.
26
However, it is one thing to provide evidence that this is
what people are doing, and another to show that the strategy
actually succeeds—succeeds, that is, in what is supposed to be
its chief purpose, which is to enable people to overcome the
terror of death. For sure, disindividuation, identification with
cultural entities that will outlive you, can help relieve some of
the pain. Symbolic immortality is of course worth having; it is
better than nothing. If you did not have it, you would be in even
greater trouble. But can you honestly say that symbolic survival
is all—or even a truly significant part—of what you want?
As the Roman poet Horace wrote, “You can drive out
nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.” We might
equally say you can tame individualism with culture, but it will
always fight back. And as you lie awake wondering what
will become of you, I doubt you will be able to hide for long
behind the conceit that “in the end we are all part of one
another.” True, there are forms of brainwashing, such as
advanced Buddhist exercises (I mean brainwashing in the best
sense), that can help to counter individualism. But let no one
suggest the end result is achieved without great intellectual
effort.
David Galin, a psychiatrist with a special interest in
Buddhism, has explained:
The Buddhist tradition holds that Ordinary Man’s inborn
erroneous view of self as an enduring entity is the cause
of his suffering because he tries to hold on to that which
is in constant flux and has no existence outside of
shifting contexts. Therefore a new corrective experience
of self is needed. Buddhism takes great interest in how
people experience their self, rather than just their abstract
concept of it, because Buddhist practices are designed to
lead to a new (correct) experience. It takes arduous
training to modify or overcome the natural state of
experiencing the self as persisting and unchanging.
27
But the “natural state of experiencing the self” is of course
the natural one. Maybe there are some people who, with or
even without arduous training in “correcting” their experience,
come to take an interest in the fate of “life in general” or even
“mind in general.” Yet it is, as a matter of fact, a rare person
whose primary concern does not remain his or her own life—
the one life “I am living now.”
The point was made forcefully by George Howison, a critic
of William James, after James had speculated, in a lecture titled
“Human Immortality,” that after bodily death all separate
minds might become folded into some kind of transcendental
group mind (the “mother-sea”). Howison retorted: “One weak
point in your exposition, as it appears to me, is your failure to
connect your argument securely with the possibility of
individual immortality. . . . [If] these transcendental minds are
not ours, of what earthly avail is their survival of the death of
the brain to us?”
28
Woody Allen said it just as well: “I don’t want to achieve
immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality
through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my
countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
29
Denying Death
So where next? If human beings cannot bear to be mortal
individuals with a temporary presence in their physical bodies
or to be immortal dividuals with a lasting presence in the
collective culture, perhaps there is only one way left. They
must become immortal individuals with a lasting presence in
some kind of eternal spirit world.
I said at the end of the previous chapter that bad thoughts
can be beaten only by other better thoughts. Since the bad
thoughts stem directly from the expectation that your individual
consciousness will die when your body dies, then, of course,
the best thought of all would be that you need not actually
expect this. True, Woody Allen is asking too much when he
asks not to die at all. Yet his request points the way to another
solution: the continuation of Woody Allen’s personal self in a
disembodied form. Carl Stumpf, one of the founders
of scientific psychology, wrote, in another letter to James,
“Personal immortality stands for me in the foreground. . . . The
realization of ideals is only possible on the presupposition of
individual immortality. Psychical values cannot be added
together. This is for me the first condition, if life is not to be
absolutely without consolation and meaning.”
30
Of course the one snag is that for this solution to work, you
have to believe in it. And this may seem rather a tall order. For
how could you possibly believe in personal immortality if and
when the idea runs completely counter to common sense? Yet,
when it comes to it, it may not, after all, be so difficult. And the
reason is that your evolved conscious Ego already has
everything it takes to drive your thoughts this way. Indeed, far
from running counter to common sense, for most human beings
belief in personality immortality arguably is common sense.
Even better, common sense based on the evidence.
What evidence is this? I would say there are three minimal
requirements for the belief to be sustainable. First, your
conscious Ego should evidently be an immaterial entity not
tied to the body, so that it could, in principle, survive your
bodily death. Second, it should evidently be capable of leading
an independent life, so that it could, in principle, have a future
history as “you.” Third, it should evidently have endless
staying power.
We have said enough in previous chapters to show that
immateriality is never going to be a problem. It is at the very
root of what phenomenal consciousness seems to be about.
Nearly two hundred years ago the Enlightenment philosopher
Sir William Hamilton introduced the term “natural dualists”: “I
would be inclined to denominate those who implicitly
acquiesce in the primitive duality as given in Consciousness,
the Natural Dualists. . . . [They] establish the existence of
the two worlds of mind and matter on the immediate
knowledge we possess of both series of phenomena.”
31
Hamilton was not thinking as an evolutionist. But in the
last twenty years there has been an increasing realization
among psychologists and anthropologists that it is indeed
human nature to think this way.
32
Thus, developmental psychologist Paul Bloom aptly
describes human beings as “natural-born dualists.”
33
Anthropologist Alfred Gell writes: “It seems that ordinary
human beings are ‘natural dualists,’ inclined more or less from
day one, to believe in some kind of ‘ghost in the machine’ and
to attribute the behaviour of social others to the mental
representations these others have ‘in their heads.’”
34
Neuropsychologist Paul Broks writes: “The separateness of
body and mind is a primordial intuition. It has sprung from our
evolution as social beings and coalesced into the hardware of
the central nervous system. Human beings are natural born soul
makers, adept at extracting unobservable minds from the
behaviour of observable bodies, including their own.”
35
And this, moreover, comes from scholars who have yet to
take on board the new ideas about phenomenal consciousness
that we have been discussing in this book. As you will realize,
all my arguments about the magical mystery show would fall
flat if human beings were not dualists. It would mean the show
had failed.
The first requirement, therefore, is easily met. However, if
the conscious Ego is to go on to be immortal, it is not enough
that it should simply be immaterial; it must also be
independent of the material body. And this does not follow
necessarily. Suppose, as some have suggested, that
consciousness were simply an “epiphenomenon” of neural
activity—the mere whistle that accompanies the working of the
engine. Then,
even though completely immaterial, there would be no
reason to think consciousness capable of independent existence.
So, what further evidence might you rely on to prove that
the conscious Ego can indeed have a life of its own? The
nineteenth-century social anthropologist Edward Tylor
suggested the answer is likely to be your firsthand experience
of sleep and dreaming. In his view, dreams seem to provide as
good evidence as anyone could ask for that the soul can say
good-bye to the body and continue its individual life. While
your body sleeps, engages in no actions, and receives no
stimulation, your dream Ego goes its own way, engaging in
dramatic adventures of doing and feeling. I would agree with
Tylor; there could hardly be a more promising indication that
your soul will be able to have a future life, even if and when
your body is no longer simply dormant but turned to dust.
Independence of the body, however, will still not be enough
for immortality. The third requirement is that your soul must
have unprecedented staying power—indeed, it must be able to
endure as your soul for ever and ever. But this is certainly
asking a great deal. Look around you, and you’ll realize that
almost nothing on Earth is capable of retaining its identity
forever. Change and decay are in everything you see. What,
then, other than wishful thinking, could possibly suggest that
your own soul might have the miraculous capacity to go on
indefinitely?
I believe the answer again lies with the evidence of sleep. I
noted earlier one of the most obvious and reliable properties of
sleep, which is that in your experience—and by the time you
are seventy years old this may be based on twenty-five
thousand exemplars—you always wake up and come to. But
there is something more than a little remarkable about this
phenomenon of “coming to.” When you fall asleep, your
body enters a state of slumber, but it nonetheless remains
ticking over, its life continues, ready to resume where it left off.
Your consciousness, however, vanishes completely. In no
sense does it remain ticking over. You, as we say, pass out.
And when you emerge again, either in a dream or when you
finally resume waking life, you emerge from nothing—but as
the very same you you were before.
The fact of your self bootstrapping itself back into
existence is such a familiar happening that you may not be as
astonished by it as you should be. Nonetheless, you can
scarcely fail to notice what goes on. And it could well provide
an essential plank in your reasoning about immortality. For
such a proven capacity for endless resurrection out of nothing
is of course the one thing that really could guarantee everlasting
existence—or at any rate re-existence—for your individual
Ego.
36
Pulling these strands together, we can see that human
beings have, to say the least, a good enough set of excuses for
believing in an afterlife. But I would put it more strongly. I
think that unless and until extraneous arguments come into play
(most insidiously the arguments of modern natural science),
they have good enough reasons for believing. Human beings
rationally ought to believe in an afterlife. No wonder, then, that
almost everyone in the world does believe in it, in one way or
another, making it in effect a species-wide human trait.
This is not to say that the belief is simply a “natural
intuition,” at which everyone arrives spontaneously without
cultural input. No doubt children, who are struggling to
understand their metaphysical situation, need to think about the
issues carefully and will be more than willing to listen to what
others have to say. There is evidence that beliefs in an afterlife
grow stronger and more specific as children come under the
sway of ideas about ghosts, angels, heaven, hell, or whatever
the local culture offers. But to suggest, as some anthropologists
have done, that because the beliefs are culturally conditioned,
and not uniform or universal, they owe relatively little to the
evolved properties of the conscious mind cannot be right.
37
Think again about psychological zombies. We can presume
those zombies would never come to believe in their personal
survival after death, no matter what they were taught in Sunday
school. But then, of course, if I am right, the zombies would do
just fine without the belief, because, as I remarked in
chapter 6
, they would not fear death and the loss of meaning in the
first place.
Perhaps this seems almost too neat. I have ended up
suggesting that consciousness, which—because of its very
success in giving individual lives a purpose—was in danger of
condemning its human hosts to a prison of anxieties about
death, came up in the nick of time with a get-out-of-jail-free
card. I agree this would seem to have been an extraordinarily
lucky break. Yet neat things happen. That is the story of
evolution (and if neat things did not happen, it is arguable we
would not be here to see they did not happen). In any case,
nothing in evolution by natural selection is really just a matter
of luck (even if luck comes into it).
Throughout this book I have been asking, in relation to
each of the public effects of consciousness that I have
identified: is it adaptive? Is natural selection helping to
maintain it as a designed-in feature? And now, with belief in
the immortality of the soul, I should ask the same again. True,
it may be
getting increasingly difficult to untangle low-level
biological benefits from higher-level cultural ones. Indeed, it
may not make much sense to try to do so. Ideas about
immortality have by now become woven so deep into the warp
of human societies that even those few individuals who profess
not to believe in an afterlife (in the contemporary United States
this is still fewer than one in five) may benefit from the positive
energy generated by a belief that runs throughout the culture.
Still, we can ask the question. And since, generally, the best
way to discover whether a trait is contributing to biological
fitness is to investigate what happens when the expression of
the trait is blocked, perhaps the question we should really be
asking is this: what would the consequences be if the belief in
personal immortality were to be taken away—taken, that is,
from people who already have it and may be coping quite well
with their anxieties just because of it?
Now, you might think this can be no more than a thought
experiment, because in real life there is no way an experimenter
could rob an individual person of his or her unverifiable beliefs
about the afterlife (even if they should be so wicked as to want
to). But actually this is not entirely true. For there is indeed one
experimenter who can do the robbing, and this is the individual
himself. The individual can entertain his own doubts. He can
imagine that his own belief is false.
You will not need any convincing that such self-doubt is
quite common. In fact, it probably happens to almost all
humans at some point in their lives that they find themselves
imagining the afterlife is a mirage. And there is no shortage of
testimony from people who have been to the brink and reported
back. I will quote just one example, but a particularly telling
one because the doubts were sown by a best friend.
Elizabeth Barrett writes in a letter to her future husband,
Robert Browning, in the year of their marriage, 1846:
Miss Bayley told me . . . that she was a materialist of the
strictest order, & believed in no soul & no future state. In
the face of these conclusions, she said, she was calm &
resigned. It is more than I could be, as I confessed. My
whole nature would cry aloud against that most pitiful
result of the struggle here—a wrestling only for the dust,
& not for the crown. What resistless melancholy would
fall upon me if I had such thoughts!—& what a dreadful
indifference. All grief, to have itself to end in!—all joy,
to be based upon nothingness!—all love, to feel eternal
separation under & over it! Dreary & ghastly, it would
be! I should not have the strength to love you, I think, if I
had such a miserable creed. And for life itself, . . . would
it be worth holding on those terms,—with our blind
Ideals making mocks and mows at us wherever we
turned? A game to throw up this life would be, as not
worth playing to an end!
38
We could hardly have more eloquent proof of how belief in
the afterlife can be essential to a person’s willingness to
continue with her mission here on Earth. Barrett’s letter shouts
biological adaptiveness—life and love and family all hang in
the balance. But let’s note how this is working in terms of her
psychology, because it is actually quite subtle. Her belief that
her soul is immortal makes her bodily life worth living just
because the soul, whose life it is, is not destined for extinction.
Thus the prospect of life after death gives meaning to life
before death and provides her with the all-important reasons
to live that the prospect of personal oblivion would have
undermined. It is true that on one level she will now have less
of an incentive to fight for life, because she will have less cause
to fear death. But this will be more than made up for by the
value that has been added to life as such.
39
It is complicated. But I think we should not be shy of
drawing the evolutionary conclusion. If belief in the afterlife
really does increase biological fitness, there will have been
selection for whatever psychic structures help sustain it. This
will have meant selection for phenomenal consciousness and
the conscious self as such. But incidentally, it will have meant
selection for the ancillary sources of evidence that help to
persuade people of the soul’s immortality—especially, if I am
right, the propensity to dream.
Many nonhuman animals probably have dream experiences
of some kind. But experimental psychologists have generally
concluded that humans are unique in having narrative dreams:
dreams in which the individual Ego is at the center of a lifelike
story taking place away from the dreamer’s physical location.
40
Such dreams, in humans, may well have several biological
functions. But encouraging people to believe in the
independence of the soul could be a particularly important one.
Given all this, and how much the spiritual health of future
generations of our species could depend on it, you may wonder,
as I do: is people’s belief in the afterlife secure? I suggested
above that the one thing that might potentially undermine the
belief would be modern science. Miss Bayley’s materialist
arguments against the existence of an immortal soul were
clearly not sufficiently cogent to force Elizabeth Barrett to
change her mind. But the day may come—even come soon—
when
science will have revealed the illusion of consciousness for
what it is, and any rational person will have no choice but to
accept the game is up.
What then? Paul Bloom has thought about the possibility
and is none too sanguine. When asked by the Edge Question
Centre in 2007, “What is your dangerous idea?” he came out
with this: “The dangerous idea is that . . . if what you mean by
‘soul’ is something immaterial and immortal, something that
exists independently of the brain, then souls do not exist. . . .
The widespread rejection of the soul would . . . require people
to rethink what happens when they die, and give up the idea
(held by about 90% of Americans) that their souls will survive
the death of their bodies and ascend to heaven. It is hard to get
more dangerous than that.”
41
I am with him on this. Yet, to look on the brighter (or
arguably darker) side, I would point out that some illusions are
so well structured that they are effectively immune to invasion
by the scientific truth. Look at Richard Gregory’s Gregundrum
from a position where its true shape is revealed (
figure 2
of the opening chapter) and then look back at it from the
one position from which it appears impossible (
figure 1
), and you will still always see the wonderful impossibility
rather than the boring truth. So it is, I expect, with
consciousness. Every newborn human child, starting over, is
bound to see the magical properties of qualia the way Nature
intended. And even if a materialist explanation such as mine
should win the day with scientists, people’s knowledge of this
explanation is never going to change the way they experience
consciousness firsthand, nor stop them from continuing to build
monuments to the human spirit on that foundation. Belief in the
immortal soul surely has a lot further to run.
Envoi
Tom Nagel, in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” wrote:
“Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be
much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”
1
In light of the psychological effects of consciousness we have
been considering, let me put it another way: Without
consciousness human beings would be much less interesting.
With consciousness they seem to be almost too interesting for
words.
Nagel continued: “The most important and characteristic
feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly
understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to
explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently
available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new
theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a
solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.”
The year 2011 hardly counts as the distant future. But we
have seen in
part 1
of this book how we can already claim some success in the
search for a reductionist theory of what phenomenal
consciousness is—it is a magic show that you stage for
yourself inside your own head. In
part 2
we have seen how the evidence of natural history provides
several good leads as to what consciousness does—it lights up
the world and makes you personally feel special and
transcendent. And now in
part 3
we have seen how, in the case of human beings, when
individuals reflect on their own situation, this paves the way for
spirituality—so that humans reap the rewards, and anxieties, of
living in the soul niche. To cap this, we have seen how, in the
last stages of this extraordinary story, nature and culture have
connived to persuade humans that their souls may be able to
live on after bodily death—so that their earthly lives acquire
new meaning. Thus, in the end, one of the strengths of this
reductionist theory is that it can explain how the experience of
being conscious adds to people’s lives by convincing them that
any reductionist theory must be false.
We have argued that all this is based on a contrived
illusion: the sensory ipsundrum, which, as an evolutionary
development of sentition, has been designed to appear to the
subject to have surreal phenomenal properties. Consciousness
is an impossible fiction, or, perhaps better said, a fiction of the
impossible. Yet, the fact is this fiction has worked wonders to
improve its subjects’ lives. The psychological attitudes that
flow from it have been immensely empowering. As William
James wrote about a more recent, but related, development,
religion, “Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and
capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have
religious faith. For this reason, the strenuous type of
character will on the battlefield of human history always
outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion
to the wall.”
2
You may think I have left it late in the book to mention
religion. And you may ask why at this point I do not make
more of it. The reason for my reticence is not that I think
religion has been unimportant in human affairs, but rather that
religion—at any rate, theistic religion—has not been
evolutionarily important. Long before religion could begin to
get a foothold in human culture, human beings must already
have been living in soul land. Indeed, according to the
anthropologist Maurice Bloch, humans had first to invent the
“transcendental social,” and “religion simply appears as an
aspect of this that cannot stand alone.”
3
Religion is parasitic on spirituality (and not, as some
religionists would have it, the other way round).
It is true that several evolutionary psychologists have
wanted to argue that religious belief is a biological adaptation
in its own right, some even claiming that there is a genetically
constructed “god-module” in the human brain. But I do not find
this fits with the evidence—either for the belief in God being
sufficiently ancient or for it adding to the chances of individual
survival.
4
By contrast, the case for consciousness-driven spirituality’s
being adaptive rests on evidence of a much longer history and
of much greater relevance to individual success in life. In fact, I
might argue (but at this late stage I won’t) that spirituality is
probably all the more adaptive without religion, because
religious belief—especially belief in God—can be something
of a drag on it.
5
I am nearly ready to wrap up. But these last few chapters
have been all about human consciousness, and an evolutionary
theory cannot of course be concerned with one species only.
So, we still have questions to answer about how human
consciousness relates to that of other creatures, past and
present.
I make no apology for the fact that the discussion of the last
six chapters has been concerned largely with humans. It is not
just species chauvinism on my part. Any objective observer—
such as our Andromedan visitor—looking at the wider natural
history of consciousness across the animal kingdom, could not
fail to remark that human consciousness is in a league of its
own. In several obvious respects consciousness matters more
to humans than to any other animal. It plays a bigger and more
complex part in shaping their lives and relationships. In fact,
humans now provide the best advertisement for consciousness
imaginable.
This being so, I think we can safely assume that
consciousness has been under greater pressure from natural
selection in humans than in nonhumans. We might expect
therefore that humans have evolved to be more conscious than
any other species—that consciousness is more salient, closer to
the front of their minds. However, should we also assume that
consciousness has been under special kinds of selection
pressure in humans? And, if it has been, should we expect
humans to have evolved to be not just more but differently
conscious—so that “what it is like” for a human to experience
sensations is qualitatively different from what it is like for any
other species?
At the end of
chapter 6
, I first raised the possibility of there being evolved
differences in phenomenal quality in relation to our discussion
of the fact that human beings, alone
among animals, fear their own death. It was, I wrote, a
tantalizing question whether this would have meant that human
consciousness has been pulled in a novel direction that would
have reshaped the ipsundrum. Now, in the chapters since, we
have explored other areas where the human penchant for
reflecting on the meaning of consciousness might again have
exposed the ipsundrum to new evolutionary forces. So we have
further reasons for asking that tantalizing question. It is time to
answer it, as best we can.
There would seem to be two possible scenarios.
On one hand, it could be that phenomenal consciousness,
having evolved under the influence of other factors, such as a
simple love of life and the value of having a substantial core
self, reached a plateau long before human beings and
intellectual reflection came on the scene. In that case the
quality of consciousness would already have been something of
a fixture—and today it would still remain much the same
wherever consciousness exists on Earth. Although
consciousness would be contributing to human survival in ways
it never did in other animals—and although this could have
brought about changes in the way humans access
consciousness, as, for example, when they dream—no
modifications in the basic quality would have been called for.
On the other hand, it could be that the new uses to which
humans were putting consciousness really did create
opportunities for doing the job still better by “improving” the
quality of phenomenal experience as such: specifically, so as to
ramp up the fear of oblivion, to increase the sense of awe, to
emphasize loneliness and individuality, to encourage thoughts
about immortality, and so on. In that case the ipsundrum might
have been remodeled repeatedly in the later stages of
human evolution, so that now there are several peculiarly
human dimensions to “what it is like.”
Who knows how far this might have gone? I think we
should at least allow the possibility that humans have evolved
to have radically different (and—arguably—radically more
wonderful) forms of phenomenal experience than anyone else. I
confess I find this possibility as worrying as it is intriguing.
One of the comforts for humans of living in the soul niche has
been that, once you recognize that other people are as
conscious as you are and that you share the same phenomenal
world, it is easy and natural to suppose the same holds true for
many nonhuman animals. But if this is not so, the curtain of
existential separateness begins to close around you again. Does
your dog not enjoy being tickled the way you imagine it? Does
the skylark miss out on the glories of his own song? Worrying
or not, I do not know of any good reason to discount it. I have
mentioned already that there may even be anatomical grounds
for supposing that sensations in human beings have features
that do not exist in other animals.
Nevertheless—call me lacking in courage, if you will—I
am inclined to think the truth lies in between. That is, while
conscious experience is almost certainly richer, more
impressive, and more poignant for humans than for our animal
cousins—more truly soul-hammering, to revert to that useful
phrase—it still makes use of the same basic tricks. So, the
qualities of phenomenal consciousness, which were established
early on, are still recognizably the same across all extant
conscious species (or would be recognizably the same to the
Andromedan scientist if she could—as we earthling scientists
cannot yet do—make the comparison). Although the
differences between humans and nonhumans are there, they are
not so great as to make human attempts to imagine what it is
like to be an animal completely off target.
Figure 15. Oscar Reutersvärd, Opus 1, 1934.
Let me explain my view on this further by returning to my
favorite metaphor, although I must ask you again not to take it
too literally. The impossible triangle, which I called the
Penrose triangle in
chapter 1
, was discovered by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in
1934, when, at the age of eighteen, he was doodling in the
margin of a textbook during a Latin class. He started by
drawing a perfect six-pointed star and then began to add cubes,
placing them around the star nestled into the spaces between
the points. As he worked on the drawing, he realized he had
chanced on a remarkable new kind of object (
figure 15
).
6
This was to be the first of many impossible objects that
Reutersvärd would go on to create. But the evolution and
elaboration of these objects did not happen right away. In
fact, it was not until the 1950s, when Roger Penrose
independently came up with same design, that Reutersvärd
realized that the “perspectival deceit” he had hit on with the
triangle could be used to generate a whole family of similarly
paradoxical figures. He went on to produce the first
“impossible staircase” and the first “Devil’s tuning-fork.” And
soon the ideas were taken up and embellished by others, most
notably by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher and the Swiss Sandro
Del Prete. Thus it came about that in the next decade
Reutersvärd’s original drawing spawned more and more
complex cathedrals of impossibility.
7
Figure 16
shows one of the later variants, Del Prete’s Gateway to the
Fourth Dimension (note how the goddess holds the original
triangle in her left hand).
8
Figure 16. Sandro Del Prete, Gateway to the Fourth Dimension, 1966. Copyright
estate of Sandro Del Prete, reproduced by permission.
So I like to think of there having been a similar
evolutionary progression with the ipsundrum. The crucial first
step would have been Nature’s discovery—through some
“natural doodle”—of a variation in the expressive response to
sensory stimulation, sentition, that just chanced to steer the
reverberatory activity in the feedback loops into a new kind of
attractor state: a state that perhaps gave rise to the illusion of
existing in “thick time” and so lifted sensation onto the
phenomenal plane.
In the nature of things, this innovative step must have
occurred at a particular date in a particular evolutionary line
(although it is possible it was repeated later in other lines.)
Pushing it as far back as seems credible, let me suggest it took
place around 300 million years ago in the primitive reptiles that
were ancestral to birds and mammals. We can assume that, to
have been selected at that time, the innovation would have had
to have brought immediate benefits to survival. So let’s
suppose these would have involved benefits of the kind we
discussed in chapters 6 and 7—although no doubt relatively
modest versions of them to begin with. Thus, those ancient
conscious reptiles would already have been beginning to enjoy
the benefits of having a core self and of being there in an
enchanted world.
From this point on, any backsliding to the state of having
nonphenomenal sensations would have been severely punished
by natural selection. Nonetheless, there could have been a long
period of stability in which, except for small adjustments and
refinements, the ipsundrum underwent no further development.
Like other ancient biological inventions, such as the heart, for
example, consciousness had reached a plateau of efficiency
beyond which no improvements were required.
So what consciousness was like for those ancient reptiles
continued to be what consciousness is like; and what its
evolutionary function was continued to be what its function
is—for all species of conscious animals that were later
descended from them, from crows to cats to dolphins.
All except one. With the emergence of human beings, there
came into existence a species whose members reflected on their
experience in quite new ways. Humans emerged as
connoisseurs of consciousness who took an unprecedented
interest in the phenomenological details of what it is like to be
there and pondered its metaphysical ramifications. So, aspects
of phenomenal quality became important that would not have
counted for anything before. This could have been the cue for
major changes in the presentation of sensations, even a
complete revamping of the magic show to satisfy this more
philosophically demanding audience. Yet, as it happened, I
believe this was unnecessary. There was already quite enough
“unused” potential in the existing qualities of consciousness for
the new demands to be met without departing radically from
the original tradition. All it required—and brought about—was
some clever restaging: new lighting, a more daring set,
additional mirrors to add new layers to the illusion, but still
essentially more of the same. Phenomenal consciousness was,
in this respect, preadapted to take on its expanded role in
humans.
As scientists, how could we possibly know? Let me repeat
the methodological truth that I emphasized in the first chapter.
All we can see as natural historians of consciousness are the
behavioral consequences, and these do not necessarily
have a unique mapping onto the internal mental states that elicit
them. To revert to an earlier analogy, the same smile could be
elicited by many different jokes.
In the end there could be only one way to tell, and that must
be to go inside the subject’s head—armed with the right
neurophenomenological laws for translating between brain
activity and conscious representations. We have supposed that
the Andromedan scientist already has all the necessary tools, so
that she, unlike us as of now, should be able to compare
consciousness across species and individuals and come up with
definite answers. Her book Coming-to Explained, when she
completes it, may even contain a detailed taxonomic guide
describing what it is like (or mostly not like) to be any of the
animal species here on Earth.
You and I may have a certain feeling of sour grapes about
this. It hardly seems fair that an alien scientist should be able to
arrive at answers to questions that so deeply interest us about
our world but that for the foreseeable future we cannot get to
for ourselves. But philosophers of science, at least, will be
reassured by the knowledge that there is somebody somewhere
who is able to answer these questions empirically—which
means, if nothing else, that the questions do count as proper
scientific questions.
However, I have an admission to make. I do not believe the
Andromedan will ever make the visit.
When I introduced her, I wrote: “As a scientist, she has
much to look forward to.” I wrote this because I assumed her to
be a scientist like one of us: one of Poincaré’s savants “who
studies nature because he takes delight in it, and who takes
delight in it because it is beautiful,” or one who, like Dawkins,
bothers to get up in the mornings because he has “opened
his eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour,
bountiful with life.”
But the Andromedan—as I stipulated as a condition of
involving her to start with—is not phenomenally conscious
herself. I noted that this would not stop her from having an
exceptionally brilliant analytic mind. Yet the fact remains she
herself is a psychological zombie. And—as we have learned
since—such zombies do not care about things the way that
conscious creatures do. In particular they do not see it as their
job to be “in love with the universe.” I imagined our visitor to
be thrilled to watch the dawn rise on Earth and to witness the
awakening of conscious minds. But now I am afraid she will
have stayed in bed.
It means it is all going to take a bit longer. One of us
humans will have to write the book instead.
Acknowledgments
I presented an early version of this book as the John
Damien Lecture at the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 2007,
and since then have test run the ideas at meetings in Oxford,
Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Belfast, Genoa, and Kyoto. I
am grateful to all those in the audiences whose questions and
challenges to what I was saying helped me say it better next
time. In 2008 Daniel Dennett hosted a seminar, aboard his
sailboat Xanthippe, to give me feedback from himself and
graduate students, and we spent three happy days tossing ideas
around off the coast of Maine. A number of friends have read
the book in draft, and their notes have been invaluable. I want
to thank especially Ross Anderson, Ruth Brandon, Dylan
Evans, Ayla Humphrey, Petter Johansson, Justin Junge, Arien
Mack, Anthony Marcel, Natika Newton, Matt Ridley, Rupert
Sheldrake, and John Skoyles. It has been my privilege to be
represented by the literary agent
John Brockman, whose enthusiasm for the big questions is
unbounded. The finished book owes much to my editors, Nick
Johnston and Richard Milner at Quercus and Rob Tempio at
Princeton University Press, who have been supportive and
creative at every stage, and especially to my copyeditor at
Princeton, Dalia Geffen.
Notes
Invitation
1
. See reviews at
http://www.humphrey.org.uk/nick_007.htm
.
2
. Walter Mischel, Editorial, APS Observer (September
2008).
3
. Bill Rowe, “The Innocent Illusion,” American Journal of
Psychology 121 (2008): 506–13.
4
. Steven Poole, Guardian, 29 May 2006.
Chapter 1 Coming-to Explained
1
. Colin McGinn, “Consciousness and Cosmology:
Hyperdualism Ventilated,” in Consciousness, ed. M. Davies
and G. W. Humphrey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
pp. 155–77
.
2
. Jerry Fodor, “Headaches Have Themselves,” London
Review of Books, 24 May 2007,
p. 9
.
3
. Richard Gregory has confirmed: “I think I was the first to
make the wooden model Penrose Triangle. It doesn’t have a
name. What would be a good name? I rather like
Gregundrum!” E-mail from Gregory, 16 May 2008.
4
. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890; repr.,
Harmonds-worth: Penguin Classics, 2001), ch. 6,
p. 42
.
5
. The trope of the Andromedan, aka Martian, scientist has
been used before. I discussed what a Martian could figure out
about consciousness
in Humphrey, “Thinking about Feeling,” in Oxford
Companion to the Mind, ed. R. L.Gregory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004),
pp. 213–14
. Daniel Dennett took up the same theme still more
effectively in “A Third-Person Approach to Consciousness,” in
Sweet Dreams (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005),
pp. 25–56
. Dennett and I have batted these ideas around for so long
now that neither of us can be sure who came first.
6
. Jeffrey Gray, “The Contents of Consciousness: A
Neuropsychological Conjecture,” Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 18 (1995): 659–722, p. 660.
7
. Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),
p. 5
(italics are in the original in this and all other quotations).
8
. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992),
p. 71
.
9
. David Chalmers, comp., “Zombies on the Web,”
http://consc.net/zombies.html
.
10
. On this point, I disagree with the philosopher to whom I
am otherwise closest, Daniel Dennett, who has argued that
what he calls “heterophenomenology”—the method of looking
at everything that shows up in behavior—should be sufficient
to reveal all there is to know. See Dennett, Consciousness
Explained (New York: Little Brown, 1991).
11
. Dan Lloyd, Radiant Cool (Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books, 2003),
p. 16
.
12
. Mike Beaton provides a sophisticated discussion of the
logical problems of explaining qualia. He makes the important
point that when arguing from one conceptual level to another,
scientific explanation goes one way only. Thus, while we can
deduce the properties of water from its chemical composition,
we cannot deduce the chemical composition from the properties
of water. And the same will presumably be true of qualia and
the brain: brain states to qualia, yes; qualia to brain states, no. It
follows that no one should expect to be able to deduce what
happens at the level of his or her brain purely by introspection.
Beaton, “Qualia and Introspection,” Journal of Consciousness
Studies 16 (2009): 88–110.
13
. John Searle, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” pt. 2, New
York Review of Books, 16 November 1995.
14
. I am not dismissing entirely the valiant efforts of the
“phenomenologist”
philosophers and psychologists, such as Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty, to provide a full description of sensory
experience. It is just that I don’t think they had much success.
15
. Nicholas Humphrey, Seeing Red: A Study in
Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006).
16
. Consider, as a parallel example here on Earth, how the
theory of complex numbers was developed as a mathematical
exercise long before it came into use in applied physics.
17
. The poet and physician David Sahner, in an essay
comparing the ideas of this book to the philosophy of Wallace
Stevens, expands on how poetry can capture the ineffable: “At
their core, qualia and, by extension, integrated phenomenal
experiences in general, defy ‘verbatim’ description. We are left,
for example, with anemic terms such as the ‘redness of red.’
What the poet avails himself of in his efforts to duplicate the
felt nuances of experience is poetic technique, consisting
mainly of tropes (e.g., symbol, simile and, as Stevens called it
in one poem, ‘evading metaphor’). Other technical devices that
enable poetic legerdemain, with the result that conscious
experience is enlarged and made novel, include anthimeria
(e.g., use of a noun as a verb), synesthesia (i.e., descriptions of
one type of sensation in the parlance of another sense
modality), parataxis (the use of a dearth of linking terms, which
conveys a rushing effect), and strategies that evoke religious or
trance-like feelings through the use of repetition (e.g.,
anaphora). And this is not all. Line configuration (which may
be enjambed to provide double-meaning, tension and even a
sense of violence) and rhythm (which may provide intensity,
speed, a balm-like effect, or a sense of awkwardness) are
carefully deployed by poets. These devices push the envelope
of poetic description in a bid to more closely mimic the manner
in which experience is actually sensed, in the blaze of all of its
affect and meaning-laden intensity.” David Sahner,
“Phenomenal Experience as a Basis for Selfhood in the Poetry
of Wallace Stevens: Communion with a New Theory,”
manuscript under submission, 2010.
18
. Colin McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”
Mind 98 (1989): 349–66.
Chapter 2 Being “Like Something”
1
. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans.
John Cottingham, Second Meditation (1641; repr., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986),
p. 16
.
2
. The term “hard problem of consciousness,” coined by
David Chalmers, refers to the problem of explaining why we
have qualitative phenomenal experiences. It is contrasted with
the “easy problem” of explaining purely functional abilities—to
perceive, discriminate, integrate information, report mental
states, focus attention, etc. The easy problem is easy because all
that is required for its solution is to specify a computational
mechanism that can perform the function. According to
Chalmers, hard problems are distinct from this set because they
“persist even when the performance of all the relevant
functions is explained” (Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem
of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 [1995]:
200–219).
3
. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435–50.
4
. I will adopt this convention from now on, with “you”
being the test case for whatever experience we are discussing,
the generic example of a subject. I will use “we” and “I” for us
as the discussants.
5
. Bridget Riley, “Colour for the Painter,” in Colour: Art
and Science, ed. Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau,
pp. 31–64
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
p. 31
.
6
. Natika Newton, “Emergence and the Uniqueness of
Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001):
47–59,
p. 48
.
7
. Koran 43:11. See the fascinating list of attempts to
translate this passage at
http://www.islam-muslims.org/Quran/42/11/default.htm
.
8
. At this point I should acknowledge my further debt to
Daniel Dennett, who has stolidly—solidly and brilliantly—
maintained that consciousness may indeed be a kind of fiction.
See especially Dennett’s reply to Eric Schwitzgebel in Dennett,
“Heterophenomenology Reconsidered,” Phenonom Cogn Sci 6
(2007): 247–70.
9
. Of course, not everyone will choose so rationally.
Sometimes when people are confronted by evidence of events
that cannot be accommodated within the known world of
physics, they do choose the magical or paranormal
interpretation instead. The mathematician John Taylor, for
example, was all too ready to throw away his physics books
when he
first witnessed Uri Geller’s spoon bending (John Taylor,
Superminds: An Enquiry into the Paranormal [London:
Macmillan, 1975]).
10
. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans.
M.T.H. Sadler (1911; repr., New York: Dover, 1977),
p. 25
.
11
. Dennett, Consciousness Explained,
p. 107
.
12
. Bernard Baars has stoutly defended the metaphor of a
“theater of consciousness” (although with a different emphasis
from me), in, for example, Baars, “In the Theatre of
Consciousness: Global Workspace Theory; A Rigorous
Scientific Theory of Consciousness,” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 4 (1997): 292–309.
Chapter 3 Sentition
1
. The question for all theories, as Thomas Bayes insisted,
is not just whether the theory does the job, but how likely it is
to be true a priori. Consider, for example, the theory that God
made the universe in 4004 BC, complete with all its geological
strata, fossils, etc., which can certainly explain the data but is
completely implausible on other grounds.
2
. You don’t think so? Well don’t hold me to this. But this
is the way I think we could go about giving a robot red qualia.
First we would arrange for the robot to make some kind of
fancy response to red light falling on its light sensors, while at
the same time it keeps track of what it is doing and computes
an internal representation of it. To begin with, presumably, the
robot will not be especially impressed by this representation of
its own response—interesting maybe, but certainly not magical.
But we would then fiddle with the design of the response,
tweaking it this way and that, with the goal that at some point
the robot will suddenly see it in quite a new way. If we are
successful, then bingo! The robot will start to claim its
experience is soul hammering. And who would we be to deny
it? 3
. For example, Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Towards
an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books,
1997); Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, “The Evolution of
Information in the Major Transitions,” Journal of Theoretical
Biology 239 (2006): 236–46; and Derek Denton, The
Primordial Emotions: The Dawning of Consciousness (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
4
. This is a summary of ideas developed at greater length in
Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind (New York: Basic
Books, 1992); “The
Privatization of Sensation,” in The Evolution of
Cognition, ed. L. Huber and C. Heyes,
pp. 241–52
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and especially
Seeing Red.
5
. Recent evidence on the sensitivity of plants is discussed
in Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Study Hints Plants Have Sensibilities,”
New York Times News Service, 19 June 2008,
http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/union-
trib/20080619/news_1c19plants.html
. The possibility that this might involve some kind of brain
is rejected by Amedeo Alpi and thirty-five others; “Plant
Neurobiology: No Brain, No Gain?” Trends in Plant Science
(2008): 12.
6
. I must mention here Philip Steadman’s suggestion that a
camera obscura could be built with a “photographic plate”
consisting of cress seeds. The cress would grow only where the
light fell on the plate (Stead-man, personal communication,
October 2008).
7
. These are some of the striking homologies between
sensation and bodily expression: (1) Ownership. Sensations
always belong to the subject. When, for example, you
experience a red sensation in your visual field or a pain in your
toe, you own the sensation; it is yours and no one else’s; you
are the one and only author of it. . . . As, for example, when
you smile, you own and are the author of the smile. (2) Bodily
location. Sensations are always indexical and invoke a
particular part of the subject’s body. You feel the red sensation
in this part of your visual field, you feel the pain in this part of
your foot. . . . As, when you smile with your lips, the smiling
intrinsically involves this part of your face. (3) Presentness.
Sensations are always in the present tense, ongoing, and
imperfect. When you experience the red sensation or feel the
pain, the sensation is here just now for the time being. The
experience did not exist before and will not exist after you stop
feeling it. . . . As, when you smile, the smiling too exists just
now. (4) Qualitative modality. Sensations always have the feel
of one of several qualitatively distinct modalities. When you
have the red sensation, it belongs to the class of visual
sensations; but when you have the pain, it belongs to the wholly
different class of somatic sensations. Each modality, linked to
its own class of sense organ, has, as it were, its own distinct
phenomenal style. . . . As, when you smile with your lips, this
expression belongs to the class of facial expressions, as
contrasted with, say, vocal expressions or lachrymatory ones.
Each expressive modality, linked to its own class of effector
organ, has its distinct style of expression. (5) Phenomenal
immediacy. Most
important, sensation for the subject is always
phenomenally immediate, and the four properties just described
are self-disclosing. Thus, when you have the red sensation,
your impression is simply that “I’m doing this, now, in this part
of my visual field of my eyes”—and the fact that it is your
eyes (rather than someone else’s), that it is this place in your
eyes (rather than some other place in your body), that it is
happening now (rather than some other time), and that it is
something occurring in a visual way (rather than, say, in an
auditory or olfactory way) are facts of which you are directly
and immediately aware for the very reason that it is you, the
author of the red sensation, who makes these facts. So, too,
when you smile with your lips, your impression is simply that
your lips are smiling, and all the corresponding properties of
this action are facts of which you, the author of the smile, are
immediately aware for similar reasons. (Taken from
Humphrey, Seeing Red,
pp. 82–83
.)
Chapter 4 Looping the Loop
1
. Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “A Framework for
Consciousness,” Nature Neuroscience 6 (2003): 119–26,
p. 119
.
2
. The figure is taken from
http://www.mgix.com/snippets/?MackeyGlass
.
3
. It was a conversation with the physicist Paul Gailey that
first alerted me to the potential of DDEs for explaining qualia.
4
. Aristotle De anima 3.2.426b, quoted by Daniel Heller-
Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New
York: Zone Books, 2007),
pp. 54–55
.
5
. Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
6
. Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York:
Basic Books, 2007),
p. 102
.
7
. Try Googling the “Shepard-Risset glissando.”
8
. Steve Jones, in The Third Culture, ed. John Brockman
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996),
p. 207
.
Chapter 5 So What?
1
. Chalmers, “Zombies on the Web.”
2
. Psychological zombies—who completely lack
phenomenal experience—do not exist in practice. But there are
human patients with brain damage who are in a state of partial
“zombiedom.” The best-known example
is the syndrome of blindsight, where, after damage to the
visual cortex, patients are able to see without experiencing
visual sensations (I discuss this at more length in Humphrey,
Seeing Red). Note that the Andromedan scientist, as we have
imagined her, is a psychological zombie (not, of course, a
philosophical one).
3
. Jerry Fodor, “You Can’t Argue with a Novel,” London
Review of Books, 3 March 2004,
p. 31
.
4
. Coleridge had what he called a golden rule for dealing
with the arguments of other writers with whom he disagreed.
Do not presume to say the argument is wrong unless you can
see just how the writer came to hold his mistaken views; in
other words, until “you understand his ignorance.” Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Leavitt,
Lord, 1834), ch. 12,
p. 140
.
5
. See, for example, Christof Koch: “What benefit for the
survival of the organism flows from consciousness? One
answer that I hope for is that intelligence, the ability to assess
situations never previously encountered and to rapidly come to
an appropriate response, requires integrated information.” “A
Theory of Consciousness,” Scientific American Mind, 16–19
July 2009,
p. 19
.
6
. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970),
p. 111
.
7
. Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2005), p. 26.
8
. Todd M. Preuss and Ghislaine Q. Coleman, “Human
Specific Organization of Primary Visual Cortex,” Cerebral
Cortex 12 (2002): 672–91, p. 687.
Chapter 6 Being There
1
. Lord Byron to Annabella Milbanke (later Lady Byron),
1813, quoted by Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science:
Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter (London: Macmillan,
1999),
p. 28
.
2
. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 2.
3
. John Galsworthy, The Silver Spoon (London:
Heinemann, 1926),
p. 65
.
4
. Not to be confused with “presentism” as a technical term
in the philosophy of physics.
5
. John Keats to C. W. Dilke, 22 September 1819, in The
Life and Letters of John Keats, ed. Lord Houghton (London: J.
M. Dent & Sons),
p. 179
.
6
. Albert Camus, “Nuptials at Tipasa,” in Lyrical and
Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy
(1938; repr., New York: Vintage, 1970),
p. 65
.
7
. Rupert Brooke, “The Great Lover,” in 1914 and Other
Poems (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915).
8
. Allan Fallow, “Gombe’s New Generation,” National
Geographic Magazine Online Extra, 2003,
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0304/feature4/onl
ine_extra.html
.
9
. Marc Bekoff, “Are You Feeling What I’m Feeling?”
New Scientist, 26 May 2007,
p. 44
.
10
. George B. Schaller, The Last Panda (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993),
p. 66
.
11
. Report in New Scientist, 29 October 1994,
p. 108
.
12
. A. A. Milne, “Spring Morning,” in When We Were Very
Young (London: Methuen, 1924),
p. 34
.
13
. Nicholas Humphrey, field notes, Camp Visoke, Rwanda,
12 May 1971.
14
. Aristotle De sensu et sensibilibus 7.448a–448b, quoted by
Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch,
p. 59
.
15
. Paul Valéry, “Cantiques spirituels,” in Variété: Œuvres,
vol. 1 (1924; repr., Paris: Pléiade, 1957), p. 450.
16
. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (London:
Faber & Faber, 1991),
p. 225
.
17
. Gottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” in
Philosophical Logic, ed. P. F. Strawson (1918; repr., Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967),
p. 27
. (I have replaced the word “experient” in the quotation with
the more familiar word “experiencer.”)
18
. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed.
and trans. p. Heath and J. Lachs (1794–1802; repr., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982),
p. 97
.
19
. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, vol. 1 of Remembrance of
Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin
(1913; repr., London: Chatto & Windus),
p. 5
.
20
. Paul Valéry, Cahiers, vol. 2 (1974), quoted by Heller-
Roazen, The Inner Touch,
p. 76
.
21
. Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the
Nervous System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1947), p. xviii.
22
. Thomas Metzinger, response to a “Talk with Nicholas
Humphrey,” Edge, online edition 144, 5 August 2005 (
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge144.html
). For a fuller statement, see Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel:
The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York:
Basic Books, 2009).
23
. James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life: Dizain des Démiurges
(New York: Robert McBride, 1919), p. 353.
24
. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New
York: Henry Holt, 1890), p. 319.
25
. Nagel, Mortal Questions,
p. 9
.
26
. Philip Roth, “It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice That I
Have to Die,” interview by Martin Krasnik, Guardian, 14
December 2005, section G2,
p. 14
.
27
. John Dryden, “Translation of the Latter Part of the Third
Book of Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death,” in Dryden:
Selected Poems (1685; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics, 2001).
28
. Jesse Bering, “Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine
Death,” Scientific American Mind, 22 October 2008,
p. 34
.
29
. Philip Larkin, “Aubade,” Times Literary Supplement, 23
December 1977.
30
. Ernst Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free
Press, 1973), p. xvii.
31
. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Eloise, quoted
in D. J. En-right, ed., The Oxford Book of Death (1761; repr.,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983),
p. 22
.
32
. Joe Simpson, Touching the Void (London: Jonathan Cape,
1988),
p. 109
.
33
. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 3.1.129.
34
. Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,”
in Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems (London: J. M. Dent &
Sons, 1974),
p. 131
.
35
. Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell, The Life of
Samuel Johnson (1791; repr., London: Wordsworth, 2008), p.
600.
36
. Whether any nonhuman animals have a general capacity
for mental time travel remains undecided. But there is
persuasive evidence that under special conditions, both
chimpanzees and members of the crow
family can in fact plan for the future. See, for example,
Mathias Osvath, “Spontaneous Planning for Future Stone
Throwing by a Male Chimpanzee,” Current Biology 19, no. 5
(2009): R190–R191. For a more skeptical view, see Thomas
Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, “The Evolution of
Foresight: What Is Mental Time Travel, and Is It Unique to
Humans?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2007): 30, 299–
313.
37
. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, chorus, The
Dog beneath the Skin (London: Faber & Faber, 1935).
38
. Voltaire, quoted in Enright, Oxford Book of Death, p. ix.
39
. This is an edited version of Tetsuro Matsuzawa’s field
notes, which can be found online at
http://www.greenpassage.org/green-
corridor/education/JokroPamphlet.pdf
. For the downloadable video, go to
http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/chimp/Bossou/Jokro.html
. See also Dora Biro et al., “Chimpanzee Mothers at Bossou,
Guinea, Carry the Mummified Remains of Their Dead Infants,”
Current Biology 20, no. 8 (2010): R351–R352.
Chapter 7 The Enchanted World
1
. Bridget Riley, Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art, ed.
Robert Kudielka (London: Zwemmer, 1995),
pp. 79–80
.
2
. Paul Cézanne, quoted by Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A
Memoir with Conversations (London: Thames & Hudson,
1991),
p. 162
.
3
. Walter Pater, The School of Giorgione, Studies in the
History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1877),
p. 138
.
4
. William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, 2.3.62.
5
. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” in Poems, 1918
(London: Humphrey Milford, 1918).
6
. Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music (1965).
7
. As I noted in
chapter 3
, when you look at the red object, you not only have the
sensation of being stimulated by red light, you also have the
perception that there is a red object out there. Sensation, as a
representation of “what is happening to me,” and perception, as
a representation of “what is happening out there,” have
psychologically different functions and are performed by neural
pathways that are largely independent of each other (see
Humphrey, Seeing Red). However, as the eighteenth-century
philosopher Thomas Reid observed: “The perception and its
corresponding sensation are produced at the same time. In our
experience
we never find them disjoined. Hence, we are led to
consider them as one thing, to give them one name, and to
confound their different attributes. It becomes very difficult to
separate them in thought, to attend to each by itself, and to
attribute nothing to it which belongs to the other” (Thomas
Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, pt. 2 [1785;
repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969], ch. 17, p. 265).
8
. K. Carrie Armel and V. S. Ramachandran, “Projecting
Sensations to External Objects: Evidence from Skin
Conductance Response,” Proceedings Royal Society Lond. B.
270 (2003): 1499–1506.
Figure 11
reprinted by permission.
9
. In Seeing Red, I misdescribed one aspect of this. I wrote
that “the subject reports feeling pain” when the Band-Aid is
ripped off. I regret the exaggeration of saying he actually feels
it rather than expects it.
10
. The finding was not completely without precedent. In 1996
a case study appeared of a man with Tourette’s syndrome, for
whom “the itchy sensations preceding motor tics could arise in
other people or in objects. The extracorporeal sensations are
associated with the need to scratch or touch the itchy item in a
particular way. External sensations most frequently arise in
angles, corners, and points of objects such as elbows, the edges
of tables, or the edge of his computer screen. . . . When
younger, the patient would act on the accompanying urge and
would scratch his sister’s elbow.” B. I. Karp and M. Hallett,
“Extracorporeal ‘Phantom’ Tics in Tourette’s Syndrome,”
Neurology 46 (1996): 38–40.
11
. If the visual-tactile parallels seem somewhat forced, I
would point out that vision and touch do in fact share an
evolutionary ancestry. “When photoreceptors evolved they
were not an entirely new kind of receptor. . . . By packing a
sensory cilium with photo-sensitive pigment, it could be made
to be specifically excitable by light. Even the rods and cones in
the retinas of our own eyes show evidence of having started out
this way in evolution—as cilia that were sensitive primarily to
touch” (Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind [London:
Chatto & Windus, 1992],
p. 53
).
12
. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers, ch. 16,
p. 242
.
13
. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York:
Harper and Row, 1954),
p. 19
.
14
. Marcel Proust, The Captive, vol. 3 of Remembrance of
Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin
(1923; repr., London: Chatto & Windus, 1981),
p. 184
.
15
. William Rothenstein, Men and Memories (London: Faber
& Faber, 1931), p. 325.
16
. Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 17 and 27 September
1888, “Van Gogh’s Letters: Unabridged and Annotated,” at
http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh
.
17
. Created by G. J. Sawyer and Viktor Deak; text by Esteban
Sarmiento, G. J. Sawyer, and Richard Milner, with
contributions by Donald C. Johanson, Meave Leakey, and Ian
Tattersall, The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-two Species of
Extinct Humans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
18
. Marten Shariff, S. Psarakos, and D. J. White, “Ring
Bubbles of Dolphins,” Scientific American 275, no. 2 (1996):
82–87. See also Don White, “Mystery of the Silver Rings,”
http://www.earthtrust.org/delrings.html
.
19
. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New
York: Long-mans, 1902),
p. 137
.
20
. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Happy Thought,” in A Child’s
Garden of Verses (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911).
21
. George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1 (New York:
Dover, 1905), ch. 10.
22
. Rupert Brooke to F. H. Keeling, 20–23 September 1910,
quoted by Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography
(London: Faber & Faber, 1964),
pp. 236–38
.
23
. Milne, “Spring Morning.”
24
. Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl, The
Scientist in the Crib (New York: William Morrow, 1999),
p. 85
.
25
. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998),
p. 6
.
26
. Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode (Paris: Flammarion,
1908),
p. 22
(my translation).
Chapter 8 So That Is Who I Am!
1
. As I write, Alison Gopnik has come out with a new book,
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about
Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life (London: Bodley Head,
2009).
2
. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. p. Nidditch, bk. 2 (1690; repr., Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), ch. 32, sec. 15.
3
. When I suggested to the philosopher David Rosenthal
that the problem of “the inverted spectrum” was one that every
intelligent child
discovers for him- or herself, he said he did not believe
this for a moment. Until we have research to establish what is
actually the case—that elusive natural history of
consciousness—I guess it is his call against mine.
4
. James, Principles of Psychology 1:226.
5
. John Lindner, “The Conscious Universe” (1997), physics
course online:
http://www3.wooster.edu/Physics/lindner/FYS/introductio
n.html
.
6
. John La Touche, lyric for “Ballad for Americans” (1939).
7
. Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 324–27.
8
. Thomas Huxley, “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are
Automata, and Its History,” Fortnightly Review 95 (1874):
555–80. For more recent, but essentially similar, accounts of
the feeling of free will, see Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of
Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), and
Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2004).
9
. Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development:
The Emergence of the Mediated Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998),
p. 162
.
10
. A. A. Milne, “In the Dark,” in Now We Are Six. See G.
Miller, “Foreword by a Psychologist,” in Ruth Hirsch Weir,
Language in the Crib (The Hague: Mouton, 1962),
pp. 13–17
.
11
. Proust, Swann’s Way, p. 460.
12
. William Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgement,”
Descriptive Catalogue, in The Complete Writings of William
Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1810; repr., Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1957), p. 617.
13
. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation, Century I.21
(1670; repr., London: Dent, 1908).
14
. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis: The Complete Text, ed.
Vyvyan Holland (1905; repr., New York: Philosophical
Library, 1950),
p.104
.
15
. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), pp. 68–69.
16
. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies: Ninth Elegy,” in
Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman (1922; repr.,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).
17
. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation, Century III.3
(1670; repr., London: Dent, 1908).
Chapter 9 Being Number One
1
. Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy (1878; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
p. 81
.
2
. Peter Abbs, quoted by Anthony Storr, in Solitude
(London: Flamingo, 1988),
p. 80
.
3
. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems
with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
4
. Desmond Tutu, “Reflections on the Divine,” New
Scientist, 29 April 2006.
5
. Douglas Hofstadter, interview, New Scientist, 10 March
2007.
6
. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W.
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 300.
7
. For a sustained attempt at deconstructing notions of
individuality, see Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise
and Fall of Soul and Self (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006).
8
. Steven J. Heine, Cultural Psychology (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2008).
9
. Sherrington, Integrative Action, p. xviii.
10
. Galen Strawson, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary
Metaphysics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Tom
Nagel writes in a review: “What is this subject? As presented in
experience, it must be a single mental thing. (That does not
exclude its also being physical, but phenomenology tells us
nothing about that one way or the other.) However complicated
the contents of my consciousness at any moment—if I am
listening to Schubert, watching the sunset, drinking wine and
trying to remember where I put the car keys—all of it is co-
present to a single subject. If selves exist in reality, according
to Strawson, they must be mental individuals of this kind, for
which he coins the unappealing term sesmet—short for
‘subject-of-experience-as-single-mental-thing.’” Nagel, “The I
in Me,” London Review of Books, November 2009,
pp. 33–34
.
11
. Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, trans. Giovanni
Pontiero (1944; repr., New York: New Directions Publishing,
1990).
12
. Let’s be clear that this is not a reversion to the idea of a
Cartesian Theater. It is more like Bernard Baars’s perfectly
respectable idea of a “global workspace”; see Baars, In the
Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
13
. The most dramatic example is multiple personality
disorder or, as it has been renamed, dissociative identity
disorder. See Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett,
“Speaking for Ourselves: An Assessment of Multiple
Personality Disorder,” Raritan 9 (1989): 68–98.
14
. Proust, Swann’s Way,
p. 5
.
15
. Nicholas Humphrey, “One Self: A Meditation on the Unity
of Consciousness,” Social Research 67, no. 4 (2000): 32–39.
For more on the question of an infant’s selfhood, see Gopnik,
Philosophical Baby.
16
. A revealing example in the musical sphere is the computer-
generated jazz player GenJam, which learns to jam with a
human trumpeter, playing four other instruments, until all five
come together as a united quintet. Al Biles, its creator and
accompanist, writes: “In addition to playing full-chorus
improvised solos, GenJam listens to what I play on trumpet and
responds interactively when we trade fours or eights. It also
engages in collective improvisation, where we both solo
simultaneously and GenJam performs a smart echo of my
improvisation, delayed by anywhere from a beat to a measure.
Finally, it listens to me as I solo and play the ‘head’ of a tune
and breeds my measures with its ideas, which steers its solo on
a tune in the direction of what I’ve just played on that tune” (
http://www.it.rit.edu/~jab/GenJam.html
).
17
. Kundera, Immortality,
p. 225
.
18
. What about the so-called extended mind? The philosopher
Andy Clark has taken the lead in arguing that we should think
of the mind as having a cognitive architecture that extends
beyond the brain to include all sorts of add-ons in the external
world—including other people. (See Clark, Supersizing the
Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension [New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009].) Clark himself,
however, draws the line at the idea of extended consciousness.
In a significant new paper he writes: “In this paper I review a
variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find
them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do
not generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind.”
Clark, “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of
Consciousness Is (Probably) Still in the Head,” Mind 118
(2009): 963–93, p. 963.
19
. James, Principles of Psychology 1:289.
20
. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London:
Bigelow Smith, 1909),
p. 185
.
21
. Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895; repr., London:
Dover, 2000),
p. 50
.
22
. For an early account of the development of theory of mind,
see my book The Inner Eye (London: Faber & Faber, 1986);
for one of the latest, see Gopnik, Philosophical Baby.
23
. Traherne, Centuries of Meditation.
Chapter 10 Entering the Soul Niche
1
. Michel Bitbol, lecture at a conference titled “Science and
Spirituality,” Cortona, Italy, June 2009.
2
. James, Principles of Psychology 1:180–81.
3
. Ibid. The quotations in this and the following paragraph
are from pp. 344–47.
4
. Keith Ward, In Defence of the Soul (Oxford: Oneworld,
1998),
p. 142
.
5
. F. J. Odling-Smee, K. N. Laland, and M. W. Feldman,
Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution,
Monographs in Population Biology 37 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
6
. Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in
Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. D.
Sperber et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.
351–83.
7
. Cabell, Beyond Life, p. 356.
8
. Rock painting at Vilafamés, Valencia, Spain, listed (but
not illustrated) as UNESCO World Heritage Site 874-359
(1998),
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/874
; height 25 cm. The image here is taken from my
photograph, which was then subjected to “contour tracing” by
the CorelDraw software program. I am grateful to Xavier
Allepuz Marzà, archaeologist of the town hall of Vilafamés, for
allowing me access and giving permission to publish this
image.
9
. Humphrey, “The Privatization of Sensation.”
Chapter 11 Dangerous Territory
1
. Susanne Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling,
vol. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982),
p. 103
.
2
. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “People,” in Selected Poems,
trans. Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (1961; repr.,
London: Penguin, 2008),
p. 85
.
3
. Randolph Nesse, “What Good Is Feeling Bad? The
Evolutionary Utility of Psychic Pain,” The Sciences
(November/December 1991): 30–37,
p. 37
.
4
. Sophocles, Antigone, in The Theban Plays, trans. E.
Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1947),
p. 136
, l. 370.
5
. Doctor: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy’s Mom: It’s something he read.
Doctor: Something he read, huh?
Alvy at 9: The universe is expanding.
Doctor: The universe is expanding?
Alvy: Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s
expanding, someday it will break apart and that would
be the end of everything!
Alvy’s Mom: What is that your business? [she turns to
the doctor] Alvy’s Mom: He stopped doing his
homework!
Alvy: What’s the point?
Alvy’s Mom: What has the universe got to do with it?
You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor: It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet,
Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here!
Woody Allen, Annie Hall (1977),
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes
.
6
. Auden and Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin.
7
. Nagel, Mortal Questions,
p. 9
.
8
. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin
O’Brien (1942; repr., New York: Penguin, 1975),
p. 4
.
9
. Santayana, The Life of Reason.
10
. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Essays: Moral, Political
and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller, pt. 1, essay 18 (1742; repr., New
York: Cosimo, 2007),
p. 161
.
11
. Woody Allen, interview with S. Houpt, Globe and Mail,
23 April 2002, R-1.
12
. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber &
Faber, 2001),
p. 5
.
13
. C. J. Jung, The Development of Personality, trans. R.F.C.
Hull (1934; repr., London: Routledge, 1992),
p. 169
.
14
. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, There Is None,” in
Poems, 1918 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918).
15
. Erwin Stengel, Suicide and Attempted Suicide
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969),
p. 37
.
16
. John Milton (1663), Paradise Lost, bk. 10, l. 981.
17
. Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1992),
p. 116
.
18
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, remark to David Pinsent, quoted in
David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker
(London: Faber & Faber, 2001),
p. 155
.
19
. Ann F. Garland and Edward Zigler, “Adolescent Suicide
Prevention,” American Psychologist 48 (1993): 169–82.
20
. If there were no inbreeding, the number would be 2 to the
power 2,000! Of course, in reality many of your ancestors were
related, so the number is much smaller.
21
. Deut. 30:19.
22
. Stanley H. Ambrose, “Late Pleistocene Human Population
Bottlenecks, Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern
Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 34 (1998): 623–51; W.
Amos and J. Hoffman, “Evidence That Two Main Bottleneck
Events Shaped Modern Human Genetic Diversity,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, 7
October 2009.
23
. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans.
Alastair Hannay (1849; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008)
p. 51
.
Chapter 12 Cheating Death
1
. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
trans. Aaron Asher (New York: Viking Penguin, 1980),
pp. 206–7
.
2
. Walter Hagen, The Walter Hagen Story (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1956), ch. 32.
3
. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (1669;
repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966),
pp. 48
, 95.
4
. Frank Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics
(London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1931), p. 291.
5
. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge (1739; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978), bk. 1, pt. 4, sec. 7, p. 269.
6
. Michel Ferrari, “William James and the Denial of
Death,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (2002): 117–40,
p. 134
.
7
. Albert Camus, “Summer in Algiers,” in Lyrical and
Critical Essays,
p. 91
.
8
. Pascal, Pensées,
p. 43
.
9
. BBC 1 TV, 17 September 2003.
10
. See
http://www.beforeyoudie.co.uk/50-Things-To-Do-Before-
You-Die.htm
.
11
. Bertrand Russell: “There was a footpath leading across
fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch
the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit
suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
Autobiography, vol. 1 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967),
p. 43
.
12
. Benjamin Errett, “Australians Debate Ethics of Dying
Boy’s Wish for Sex,” National Post (Canada), 22 December
2001.
13
. Hume, “The Sceptic.”
14
. “List of Texas Inmates’ Last Meals,” now deleted from the
official Texas Web site but subsequently posted at the Memory
Hole:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/deaths/texas-final-
meals.htm
. Several prisoners requested cigarettes, but these were
prohibited because of prison regulations regarding health and
safety.
15
. A. Lin Neumann, “Death Watch: A Night at the Gas
Chamber,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1992.
16
. Samuel Johnson, quoted by Michael Ignatieff, in The
Needs of Strangers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984),
p. 86
.
17
. Pascal, Pensées,
p. 82
.
18
. Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes,” in New and Selected
Poems, 1992 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992),
p. 10
.
19
. Brooke, “The Great Lover.”
20
. Steve Watkins and Clare Jones, Unforgettable Things to
Do before You Die (London: BBC Books, 2005).
21
. John Donne, “Holy Sonnet XIII” (1663).
22
. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other
Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956),
p. 52
.
23
. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social
Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966),
p. 101
.
24
. J. Greenberg, S. Solomon, and T. Pyszczynski, “Terror
Management Theory of Self-Esteem and Cultural World
Views: Empirical Assessments
and Conceptual Refinements,” Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology 29 (1997): 61–139.
25
. Jerry Falwell, on 700 Club, Pat Robertson’s radio chat
show, 13 September 2001, quoted in New York Times, 14
September 2001.
26
. For a recent critique of TMT and a robust reply, see C. D.
Navarrete and D.M.T. Fessler, “Normative Bias and Adaptive
Challenges: A Relational Approach to Coalitional Psychology
and a Critique of Terror Management Theory,” Evolutionary
Psychology 3 (2005): 297–325; and M. J. Landau, S. Solomon,
T. Pyszczynski, and J. Greenberg, “On the Compatibility of
Terror Management Theory and Perspectives on Human
Evolution,” Evolutionary Psychology 5 (2007): 476–519.
27
. David Galin, “The Concepts ‘Self,’ ‘Person,’ and ‘I,’ in
Western Psychology and in Buddhism,” in Buddhism and
Science, ed. B. Allan Wallace,
pp. 107–44
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
28
. George Howison, in a letter dated 18 November 1898,
quoted in William James, Essays in Religion and Morality
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982),
p. 183
, n. 75.2.
29
. Woody Allen, widely attributed but unsourced.
30
. Carl Stumpf, letter dated 26 March 1904, quoted in Ralph
Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James,
vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 342.
31
. William Hamilton, The Metaphysics of Sir William
Hamilton, Collected, Arranged, and Abridged by Francis
Bowen (1836; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2005),
p. 201
.
32
. I may have been the first to revive the term “natural
dualists,” in my book Leaps of Faith (New York: Basic Books,
1995), but the term has independently achieved a wider
currency since then.
33
. Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby (New York: Basic Books,
2004).
34
. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998),
p. 127
.
35
. Paul Broks, “Out of Mind,” Prospect, April 2005,
p. 10
.
36
. Galen Strawson explicitly rejects this view of things,
arguing in Selves that the self that returns after a gap in
consciousness is not the same self that disappeared; I don’t
know about the actual metaphysics, but it is good enough for
me if you still think it’s the same you.
37
. There has recently been a ding-dong battle between
psychologists and anthropologists about the “naturalness” of
afterlife beliefs. Jesse Bering has made a strong pitch for the
beliefs as an evolved adaptation; see Jesse Bering, “The Folk
Psychology of Souls,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25
(2006): 253–498. Rita Astuti and Paul Harris have argued
that they are more of a cultural product; see Rita Astuti and
Paul L. Harris, “Understanding Mortality and the Life of the
Ancestors in Rural Madagascar,” Cognitive Science 32 (2008):
713–40. I am inclined to think both are true.
38
. Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, 7 May 1846, in The
Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
1845–1846, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899),
p. 136
.
39
. That afterlife beliefs can in certain circumstances bring on
death rather than postpone it is made clear by the rare but
apparently genuine cases of individuals who have welcomed
death as a doorway to a better life, notably suicide bombers.
40
. See my discussion of dreaming in
chapter 7
of The Inner Eye.
41
. Paul Bloom, “The Rejection of Soul,” in What Is Your
Dangerous Idea? ed. John Brockman (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2007),
pp. 4–5
.
Envoi
1
. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, p. 435.
2
. William James, Essays in Pragmatism (1970; repr., New
York: Hafner, 1948),
p. 86
.
3
. Maurice Bloch, “Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is
Central,” Philosophical Transactions B. 363 (2008): 2055–61.
4
. Religions, to begin with, will certainly not have involved
belief in a supernatural God. Suppose we tentatively date the
creation of the soul niche to the time of the Upper Paleolithic
revolution, fifty thousand years ago. There is evidence of
ritualized burial, cave painting, music, and shamanism, all
following soon after, but there is no evidence whatever for a
belief in God until about six thousand years ago.
5
. The best scientific appraisal of the functions of religion is
by Robert A. Hinde, Why Gods Persist, 2nd ed. (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2010).
6
. See
http://im-
possible.info/english/art/reutersvard/sketch01.html
.
7
. Reutersvärd’s priority as the inventor was celebrated in
1982 with a series of Swedish postage stamps.
8
Index
Abbs, Peter,
140
afterlife beliefs,
193–202
,
237n.37
Allen, Woody,
168
,
193
,
234n.5
Aristotle: on “now” of sensation,
60
; on self,
90
Armel, Carrie,
112
Astuti, Rita,
237n.37
Auden, W. H.,
99
,
168
Baars, Bernard,
221n.12
Ballad for Americans,
130
Barrett, Elizabeth,
200
Bayes, Thomas,
221n.1
Beaton, Mike,
218n.12
Becker, Ernst,
96
Bekoff, Marc,
84
Berger, Peter,
188
Bering, Jesse,
237n.37
Biles, Al,
232n.16
Bitbol, Michel,
155
Blake, William,
134
blindsight,
223n.2
Bloch, Maurice,
205
Bloom, Paul,
195
,
202
bottlenecks in human evolution,
175
Broks, Paul,
195
Brooke, Rupert,
121
; death of,
94
; The Great Lover,
82
,
94
,
107
,
184
Buddhism,
74
,
107
,
192
Burkhardt, Jakob,
140
Byron, George Lord,
80
Cabell, James Branch,
92
,
161
Camus, Albert: death of,
94
; Nuptials at Tipasa,
82
; on presentism,
180
; on suicide,
169
Cartesian Theater,
33
,
40
Chalmers, David,
11
,
219n.2
children: philosophical questions of,
123
,
126
,
132
,
151
,
229n.3
chimpanzees,
84
; attitude to death,
100
Clark, Andy,
232n.18
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,
72
; his “golden rule,”
224n.4
computational theory of mind,
18
consciousness: defined,
6
; adaptive value of,
14–16
,
70–79
; attribution to others,
151
; cartoon analogy,
16
; grades of,
51
,
76–77
,
83
,
87
,
93
,
119
,
206–12
; “hard problem” of,
4
,
28
,
219n.2
; human uniqueness,
78
,
206
; inessentialism,
11
,
71
; intellectual reflection on,
126
; and language,
21–22
,
27
,
36
,
219n.17
; as magical illusion,
32–33
,
40–41
; as mental representation,
6
,
19–20
,
24
,
29
,
36
; privacy of,
13–15
,
126–28
,
146
; as public observable,
13–15
; as foundation of self,
78
,
89
; as theoretical construct,
17
,
24
,
218n.12
“crib talk,”
132
Crick, Francis,
54
,
65
Dawkins, Richard,
123
De Heem, Jean,
105
,
106
Del Prete, Sandro,
210
delay differential equation (DDE),
57
Dennett, Daniel: on Cartesian theater,
40
; on consciousness as fiction,
220n.8
; on heterophenomenology,
74
,
76
,
218n.10
Descartes, René,
27
,
90
discounting the future,
178
disindividuation,
185
dividualism,
141
dolphins,
119
Donne, John,
129
,
185
dreams,
196
,
201
efference copy,
46
egoism,
148
“endless staircase,”
61
existence, as a goal,
86–88
,
93
,
97
,
178
extended mind,
232n.18
Falwell, Jerry,
191
fear of death,
94–102
; adaptive value of,
96
,
167
; depressing consequences of,
168–176
; in nonhuman animals,
98–102
Ferrari, Michel,
180
Fichte, Johann,
91
Flanagan, Owen,
11
,
71
Fodor, Jerry,
4
,
12
,
71
free will,
131
Frege, Gottlob,
91
Gailey, Paul,
222n.3
galahs,
85
Galin, David,
192
Galsworthy, John,
81
Gell, Alfred,
195
Geller, Uri,
220n.9
GenJam (interactive jazz program),
232n.16
glissando illusion,
61
God,
238n.4
gorillas,
87
Gray, Jeffrey,
11
Gregory, Richard,
5
,
217n.3
Gregundrum,
5
,
33
,
38
,
202
Hacking, Ian,
160
Hagen, Walter,
178
Hamilton, Sir William,
194
Harris, Paul,
237n.37
heterophenomenology,
74
,
218n.10
Hofstadter, Douglas,
61
Holmes, Sherlock,
5
Hopkins, Gerard Manley,
173
Horace (Roman poet),
191
Howison, George,
192
Hume, David,
171
,
179
,
181
,
183
Huxley, Aldous,
117
Huxley, Thomas Henry,
131
immortality,
193–202
; adaptiveness of belief in,
198–202
; doubts about,
199
; evidence for,
194–98
“impossible triangle,”
5
,
33
,
209
individualism,
140
; adaptiveness of,
142
,
148–52
,
167
; and afterlife,
193–94
; dangers of,
166–169
“inessentialism” of consciousness,
11
,
71
intentionality,
37
inverted spectrum,
127
,
229n.3
ipsundrum: as mathematical object,
56–59
; defined,
40
; evolution of,
53
,
103
Jack (Australian teenager),
181
James, William: on affectless world,
120
; on egoism,
149–50
; on group mind,
192
; on privacy of consciousness,
129
; on religion,
204
; on self,
93
; on soul,
156
Johnson, Samuel,
98
Jones, Steve,
66
Jung, Carl,
172
Kandinsky, Wassily,
36
,
105
Keats, John,
81
,
94
Kierkegaard, Søren,
176
Koch, Christof,
54
,
65
,
224n.5
Koran, The,
33
,
220n.7
Kuhn, Thomas,
73
Kundera, Milan,
90
,
146
,
177
Larkin, Philip,
96
last breakfast, ritual of,
182
Last Human, The,
119
,
122
Lindner, John,
129
Lispector, Clarice,
143
Lloyd, Dan,
17
Locke, John,
127
Luckmann, Thomas,
188
Lucretius,
95
Matisse, Henri,
106
Matsuzawa, Tetsuro,
100
McGinn, Colin,
4
,
23
mental time travel,
98
,
226n.36
mescaline,
117
Metzinger, Thomas,
92
Milne, A. A.: crib talk,
133
; Spring Morning,
87
,
122
Milton, John, v,
173
music,
105
Nagel, Thomas: on consciousness,
28
,
203
; on death,
95
,
169
; on self,
231n.10
; on valuing experience as such,
81
natural dualism,
194
Neanderthal,
119
neural correlate of consciousness (NCC),
64
; elusiveness of,
65
neurophenomenological laws,
18
Newton, Natika,
33
niche construction,
160
Nietzsche, Friedrich,
141
Oliver, Mary,
184
other minds, problem of,
127
,
151
pandas,
85
Pascal, Blaise,
179
,
184
; on presentism,
180
Pater, Walter,
105
Penrose, Lionel,
5
,
209
perception: distinguished from sensation,
44
plants: sensitivity of,
45
,
222n.5
Plato’s Cave,
31
Poincaré, Henri,
124
Poole, Steven,
x
presentism,
81
Preuss, Todd,
78
Proust, Marcel: on “divine spark,”
134
; on “patch of yellow wall,”
118
; on waking up,
91
,
145
qualia. See sensations: phenomenology of
Ramachandran, V. S.,
112–14
Ramsey, Frank,
179
reasons to live,
170
,
200
Reid, Thomas,
116
,
227n.7
religion,
204
Reutersvärd, Oscar,
209
Riley, Bridget,
31
,
104
Rilke, Rainer Maria,
136
robot consciousness,
43
,
220n.2
rock art,
163
Roth, Philip,
95
Rothenstein, William,
118
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,
97
rubber hand experiment,
113
Russell, Bertrand,
171
,
186
Sahner, David,
219n.17
Santayana, George,
121
,
171
Scientist in the Crib, The,
123
Schaller, George,
85
Searle, John,
11
,
20
self: core,
89–93
,
103–05
,
126
,
133
,
147–48
,
167
,
207
; dynamical construction of,
145
; as Ego,
143
,
165
; insularity of,
148–49
; post-modern dismissal of,
140
,
148
; and “thick time,”
90
; unity of,
142–45
,
186
sensation: defined,
44
; evolutionary history of,
43–52
,
206
; and bodily expression,
44
,
47
,
222n.7
; as intentional object of consciousness,
39
; as performance,
46–47
,
49
; distinguished from perception,
44
,
227n.7
; non-phenomenal,
51
; phenomenology of,
47
,
51
,
55–56
,
60
; privatization of,
48
; projection of onto objects,
112
,
228n.10
; relation to sentition,
49
; temporal depth of,
60
sentition: defined,
49
Shakespeare, William,
97
,
105
Sherrington, Charles: on “I-doing,”
130
; on self,
91
,
130
,
142
Simpson, Joe,
97
sleep, as death,
99
,
196
“society of selves,”
152
Sontag, Susan,
174
Sophocles,
168
soul,
156
; absence of in animals,
78
; archaeology of,
163
; as culmination of conscious selfhood,
158
; as evolutionary adaptation,
158
; death of,
166
; immortality of,
193
; rejection of,
202
; William James on,
156
soul niche: as adaptive environment,
159
; defined,
158
; human construction of,
159
Sound of Music,
108
Steadman, Philip,
222n.6
Steiner, George,
172
Stevenson, Robert Louis,
120
strange loop,
61
Strathern, Marylyn,
141
Strawson, Galen,
143
,
231
n10,
237n.36
Stumpf, Carl,
193
subjective present. See
“thick time”
suicide,
169
,
173
; bombers,
238n.39
symbolic immortality,
188
,
191
terror management theory,
188
“thick time,”
21
,
60
-
62
,
90
,
211
; and strange loop,
62
Things to Do before You Die (BBC book),
180
,
185
Thomas, Dylan,
98
Touching the Void,
97
Traherne, Thomas,
134
,
138
,
152
Tutu, Desmond,
152
Tylor, Edward,
196
Valéry, Paul,
90
,
91
van Gogh, Vincent,
118
Vilafamés,
163
visual cortex,
78
Voltaire,
99
Ward, Keith,
158
Whitehead, Alfred North,
135
Wilde, Oscar: on self-love,
150
; on sensations,
135
will to live,
86
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,
27
,
174
World Trade Center,
9
/11,
190
zombie, philosophical: defined,
11
; impossibility of,
13
,
17
,
70