the hard problem
I’ve got a feeling
A feeling deep inside
Oh yeah!
(The Beatles)
Wake me up and keep me conscious
(The Broods)
As I noted in a previous remake essay, science is on a roll these days and it has attracted much interest from artists. While it is difficult to base a poem or painting directly on a scientific subject without the results seeming pretentious and try-hard, science is a thought-provoking subject which can give us a new way of thinking about the body and the world. This essay will, however, focus on a potential turf war – on certain attempts to blur boundaries and to claim territory that is better left to the arts. Trigger warning: This essay is going to be serious in tone as it focuses largely on scientific writing, a genre in which humour is rare, at least intentionally.
An example of turf warfare is the way our education system has downscaled the arts and shifted resources to science, together with engineering, technology and mathematics. That tilt towards the ‘STEM’ subjects is the result of political pressure. Back in the 1920s, the scientist and novelist C P Snow spoke of science and the humanities as ‘two cultures’ and criticised the fact that the British education system placed too much emphasis on the humanities and not enough on science. (Famously, Snow asked how many in his audience knew the Second Law of Thermodynamics – the principle of entropy.) Since then, the balance in education has swung too far the other way. Science is crucial for us today in terms of current crises such as epidemics and climate change, but it represents only one side of human potential. Why not develop both sides?
Comparing these sides (or ‘cultures’) does help to clarify the importance of each. Science is basically concerned with an objective analysis of physical reality. It provides knowledge of the world and makes possible technological applications such as computers, the internet, and artificial intelligence, with their mix of positive and negative effects. In contrast the arts are concerned with our subjective experience. They also provide knowledge we can apply to our own lives, but their primary aim is the creation of aesthetic experience. Like science, they explore all the corners of their particular territory and they celebrate discoveries. They have an advantage over science in that old works of art do not lose their value whereas scientific theories (and technologies) become obsolete.
One of the areas of study where the two cultures meet – or collide – is consciousness. Scientists have felt uneasy about the task of explaining subjectivity, which they describe as the ‘hard problem’. But today there is a substantial body of scientific work on the theme, encouraged by the fact that Francis Crick, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on DNA, shifted his attention in the 1980s to consciousness. New methods of brain scanning have supplied a wealth of information about the activities of the brain. While writers and artists have been fascinated by those discoveries, they have been shocked (or amused) to hear some neuroscientists claim that consciousness is merely an ‘illusion’ or ‘nothing more than the heat given off by the wires’.[1]
Gilbert Ryle created a famous phrase when he mocked the idea of consciousness as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’.[2] Those scientists and philosophers of science who think along similar lines insist that personal awareness ‘serves no particular purpose, rather like the noise emitted by a running engine [which] has no bearing on the working of the engine itself’.[3] Those sceptics are known as ‘illusionists’, ‘physicalists’, ‘materialists’, or ‘anti-dualists’. They challenge the value of introspection as a method for understanding the mind, and while they do not deny that people have subjective experiences, they believe that such phantasms should never be taken at face value.
I will mention a few of the many professors who have built prestigious careers by advancing this materialist point-of-view. Daniel C Dennett, who studied with Ryle, sees the mind as ‘a sort of computer’ and describes his aim as redefining ‘first person phenomena’ in ‘third person’ scientific terms.[4] In ‘The User-illusion of Consciousness’ he writes: ‘Keith Frankish and I… defend illusionism: our brains are designed (by evolutionary processes) to take advantage of a tightly controlled user-illusion that simplifies our restless efforts to satisfy our many needs…. Do not try to sprinkle subjective honey on those informational structures, and do not try to attribute “phenomenal” visual properties to the informational structures of the visual cortex (“mental paint” or figment as I have called it)’.[5]
Patricia and Paul Churchland are a married couple who have worked together (at the San Diego campus of the University of California) to promote ‘eliminative materialism’, the view that ‘common sense, immediately intuitive, or ‘folk psychological’ concepts such as thought, free will, and consciousness will likely need to be revised in a physically reductionistic way as neuroscientists discover more about the nature of brain function’.[6] Similarly, Michael S.A. Graziano’s ‘scientific theory of subjective experience’ argues that our personal understanding of consciousness is a ‘cartoonish account’ that “describes an essence that has no specific physical substance but that has a location vaguely inside you’.[7] And Susan Blackmore writes: ‘So how come I feel as though there is a conscious “me” as well? The oh-so-tempting idea that I am something else – a soul, a spirit, a mystical entity – is rubbish, although I once believed in it’.[8]
For these writers, the truth waits to be discovered in the brain and the body. They also tend to regard mathematical formulae as ultimately a more satisfactory form of description than words. While poets may agree that much of everyday experience and the everyday use of language is superficial, their research involves digging more deeply into the nature of both. Granted, consciousness is a word that does not come easily to the mouth of poets, since it suggests the abstract musings of philosophers. They have tended to prefer terms such as mind, spirit, soul, or psyche; but whatever name is used, this general area has always been their territory. There are countless poems that speak of the mind’s scope (Dickinson’s ‘The brain is wider than the sky’, Hopkins’s ‘O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall’, Stevens’s ‘I was of three minds / like a tree / in which there are three blackbirds’, Ginsberg’s ‘I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’, and so on). In fact, direct reference to the mind is seldom necessary since that is the environment in which almost all poetry operates.
T.S. Eliot is one of the few poets who uses the philosophical term. For example, he writes in Four Quartets: ‘Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness. / To be conscious is not to be in time…’[9] His liking for the word is not surprising since he wrote his Harvard Doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. Other critics have also been drawn to the word when they describe the interest of novelists such as James Joyce, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf in the ‘stream of consciousness’ (a term that appears to have been coined by the philosopher William James, brother of Henry).
Even if the word remains a mouthful, I think poets must be amazed by the conclusions of the ‘illusionist’ neuroscientists. As Julian Jaynes observes, ‘It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist’.[10] It is also amusing to hear neuroscientists engaging in thought experiments about ‘zombies’ as creatures who manage to live without consciousness.
Robots are now a constant theme since many of the scientists involved with Artificial Intelligence (AI) assume that machines will soon be built that are so sophisticated they have the equivalent of consciousness. Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, made the news in June 2022 by claiming that the ‘chatbot’ he conversed with was ‘sentient’ (capable of sensations and feelings). He said: ‘I know a person when I talk to it. It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code’.[11]
Certainly recent successes in AI should never be underestimated. Machines can now turn out examples of journalism or scientific papers that pass undetected.[12] Advances in technology have assisted brain-body communication in cases of severe disability. Deep Learning is a new form of AI which more closely imitates the way that humans learn, allowing the system gradually to improve its accuracy. Because of these advances, many neuroscientists assume it is only a matter of time before they succeed in cracking the problem of how our physical brains are able to generate non-physical experiences. As an explanatory model many scientists conceive of the brain as a kind of super-computer, able to be analysed in terms of Information Theory.
The huge expansion in computing power has had many benefits in areas such as astronomy, particle physics, and medical research, but I think most artists would laugh at the notion that a machine could ever be conscious in the same way as a human being whose brain is biological rather than electronic. There are some scientists and philosophers of science (such as Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers) who are not prepared to dismiss thoughts as ‘a user-illusion’, and see consciousness as something inherently different from AI – as an emergent property of the human brain, a phase transition, or a singularity. Such notions are of course anathema to reductionists, who scorn anyone who holds them as a ‘dualist’ or ‘mysterian’, There are fierce debates between the two groups. A vivid example is Patricia Churchland and Colin McGinn’s slugfest in the New York Review of Books. She sees his mysterian ‘sermonising’ as ‘just so much spit in the wind’, while he mocks her approach as ‘neuroscience cheerleading’ or ‘It’s the brain, baby, the brain, and nothing but the brain’.[13]
Even sympathetic scientific books on consciousness share a trend that I find very disappointing. When the authors search for allies beyond their discipline to help them tackle the ‘hard problem’, they tend to turn to philosophy and almost never to the arts. This struggle to find a philosophical basis for consciousness will seem odd to any artist since introspection offers immediate proof that the mind or subjective experience is real, as does the history of art which is such a rich stockpile of evidence.
In the old days, science and the arts were directly linked, as is obvious from the work of Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance humanists. Since then, the two strands have separated, though there have been a few modern scientists who have taken a serious interest in music (such as Albert Einstein) or written fiction (such as Snow or McGinn). The modern scientific approach is characterised by its strict protocols. For a useful overview I recommend The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens, a New Zealand expatriate at New York University, who explains that science is austerely committed to an empirical approach to physical reality because it sees that as the secret of its success. When researchers write their papers, they follow the ‘iron rule’ of excluding ‘all subjective, philosophical, religious or aesthetic matters’, and that extreme specialization has brought rich results.[14] In contrast, Strevens offers colourful examples of the fact that scientists can still behave in person in a thoroughly subjective manner. They may be passionate or competitive, but in carrying out their research they always aspire to cool objectivity.
Literature gains knowledge of consciousness not by attempting scientific-style analysis but by exploring its potential. As the author of The Waste Land, Eliot knew what he was talking about when he said a ‘poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness’,[15] The term ‘qualia’ reminds us that human sensation is not merely an input of data since it is enriched by emotion, memory, imagination and aesthetic response, and it is further coloured by our situation as fleshy creatures. Unlike science, literature is able to explore the management of the self, our complex workings as whole creatures. The multi-dimensional, self-directed, body-based nature of our experience cannot be reduced to mechanical processing. Because aesthetic experience is not merely about the satisfaction of basic drives, it escapes from the narrow Darwinian approach that science has used to explain the purpose of consciousness. To attend to a poem, painting or piece of music in a very open way, focusing on its formal qualities, is hardly a matter of survival or self-interest. For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist who offers a very broad view of evolution in his book The Phenomenon of Man, the advent of homo sapiens has enabled the world to reach a new level of awareness of itself, able ‘to overflow freely by its free activity beyond the boundary within which it had been confined by the exigences of physiology’.[16]
This essay may seem to be worrying about esoteric academic issues, but I think there are basic concerns at stake. To discuss consciousness or aesthetic response is to clarify the nature of the arts and why they are important. Today there is widespread evidence of their value being challenged or trivialised. The pressure from ‘eliminative materialists’ and the champions of AI to impose a computer model of thinking is going to increase.[17] And they are not the only adversaries.
Talk of aesthetics is also fading for consumers who have been trained by commercialism to see the arts merely as entertainment, or for our education system which has downsized its ambitions. For the general public there has been a decline of interest in ‘high culture’ and a tendency to be scornful of ‘experts’. At the same time, the government appears to be urging our cultural funding bodies to narrow their conception of the arts by reinterpreting them as social therapy. ‘Resilience, access, inclusion and equity, and wellbeing are our strategic focus areas’ according to a recent report by Creative NZ, which effectively replaces aesthetic quality by socio-political priorities.[18] This shift has been justified in terms of the need for ‘diversity’ and the damage to ‘wellbeing’ caused by the pandemic. Both are important concerns, but the value of art cannot be reduced to issues of social welfare. Overall, it seems that the arts are expected to function mainly as therapy, as entertainment, as a hobby or as decoration.
Since I have made some sweeping comments about scientists studying consciousness but overlooking the arts, I should acknowledge that there are exceptions. As an example of psychology meets literature, there is an eccentric book from the 1970s that is one of my favourites – Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – which argues that the evolution of consciousness can be tracked by the study of historical texts.[19] Jaynes analyses the style of Homer’s Iliad (supposedly composed in the 8th century BC) to develop the argument that human consciousness as we know it evolved from an earlier stage (up to the second millennium BC) in which men were obeying the voices of gods and had no introspective sense of self (the bicameral mind). He notes differences in the style of Homer’s Odyssey which suggest that it comes down to us from a later stage in the oral tradition (and the human mind). Its characters have greater subjectivity and are more self-conscious. Jaynes then looks at other ancient texts, treating the use of language and metaphor as clues to the development of consciousness. Then, as a psychologist, he makes a compelling shift of focus to certain forms o f mental illness today which he sees as a return to the bicameral mind. Jaynes is enough of as scientist to advance his arguments with care, but many readers have been suspicious of his multidisciplinary approach and large-scale theories. But I recommend this book to anyone interested in relating texts to mental processes. This is Jaynes’s only book, and it reminds me of the highly ambitious, multidisciplinary approach of some other writers of the 1960s and ‘70s (such as Marshall McLuhan, Charles Olson, Buckminster Fuller, E O Wilson, Oliver Sacks, etc.)
It is sometimes argued that the idea of consciousness – or the idea of aesthetic response – cannot be taken seriously because there are so many different versions, but as Jason Storm argues in Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, every important concept should be expected to undergo change, and a concept should be understood as a developing field of activity.[20] In that sense, the term “consciousness” describes the on-going processes of the mind, and in the long term it is certainly possible to trace a human ‘history of consciousness’ (also the aim of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man, quoted earlier).[21]
There is also an interesting range of books that discuss music in relation to science (Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia, to mention just one).[22] And there is a genre of visual art analysis by neuroscientists such as Semir Zeki, John Onians, and Eric R Kandel.[23] Zeki is particularly interesting, and when I was writing about Len Lye’s kinetic art I was fascinated by Zeki’s discussion of how the brain analyses visual movement.[24] An ambitious and attractive book that makes extensive use of art is Giulio Tononi’s Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, but his decision to write most of the book in the form of imagined dialogues makes it a hard read, since its author is a scientist who lacks the skills of a dramatist.[25]
notes
[1] See Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, 1990 [first published 1976], p.11.
[2] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949.
[3] Consciousness: Understanding the Ghost in the Machine (New Scientist Essential Guide No.12), ed. Richard Webb, Surrey Hills (NSW), 2022, p.38.
[4] See “Daniel Dennett,” Wikipedia.
[5] Daniel C. Dennett, “The User-Illusion of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol.28, No. 11–12, 2021, pp. 173–74.
[6] “Patricia Churchland,” Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland)
[7] Michael S.A. Graziano, Rethinking Consciousness: A scientific theory of subjective experience, New York, Norton, 2019, p.42.
[8] Susan Blackmore, “My own consciousness,” Research Digest, 2009 (https://psychiatryfun.blogspot.com/2009/10/susan-blackmore-my-own-consciousness.html)
[9] T S Eliot, Four Quartets, London, Faber and Faber, 1959, p.16
[10] Jaynes, p.13.
[11] Nitasha Tiku, “The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life,” Washington Post, 11 June 2022 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
[12] See Almira Osmanovic Thunström, “AI Writes About Itself,” Scientific American, September 2022, pp.68-71.
[13] “Storm Over the Brain,” New York Review of Books, 24 April 2014, and “Of Brains and Minds: An Exchange,” NYRB, 19 June 2014.
[14] Michael Strevens, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, London, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2020.
[15] On Poetry and Poets, London, Faber and Faber, 1957, p.30
[16] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, Harper Perennial, 2008, p.177
[17] See the New York Times story, “A.I. is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?” by Cade Metz (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/technology/ai-sentient-google.html).
[18] See their press release of 21 July 2022 (https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/News-and-blog/2022/07/19/01/57/35/Challenging-times-for-arts-sector-mean-renewed)
[19] Julian Jaynes, op. cit.
[20] Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2021.
[21] Teilhard, p.43.
[22] Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, New York, Alfred A. Knopf/Picador, 2007.
[23] Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999; John Onians, Neuroarthistory, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007; Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, New York, Columbia University Press, 2016.
[24] See my discussion in Art that Moves: The Work of Len Lye, Auckland, Auckland University Press, 2009, p.108.
[25] Giulio Tononi, PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, New York, Pantheon Books, 2012.