(PDF) Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

SOUL DUST

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY

SOUL DUST

The Magic of Consciousness

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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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

1962. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, reprinted by permission.

with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, publishers.

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

. This version of Sandro Del Prete’s drawing (there are

several) is at

http://im-possible.info/english/art/delprete/delprete1.html

.

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

zombie, psychological: Andromedan scientist as,

214

,

223n.2

; defined,

70

; failings of,

70

,

88–89

,

96

,

109

,

120

,

198

; human horror of being,

80

; nonhuman animal as,

76

Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

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