Thinks...

by David Lodge

  ‘And I suppose these are the Chinese asking the questions and receiving the answers,’ says Helen, pointing to a vast crowd of Asiatic-featured people in Mao suits standing shoulder to shoulder with what look like mobile phones clamped to their ears.

  ‘No, that was somebody else’s thought experiment. It involved equipping the entire population of China with two-way radios to simulate the connections between human brain cells.’

  ‘Why China?’

  ‘Because it’s the biggest population with a common language, I suppose. There are about a billion Chinese, I believe.’

  ‘But the Chinese don’t have a common spoken language,’ Helen objects.

  Ralph laughs. ‘Is that right? I don’t suppose the guy who dreamed up the experiment knew that. But there are about a hundred billion neurons in a single human brain, and more possible connections between them than there are atoms in the universe, so the experiment doesn’t get anywhere near reality anyway.’

  ‘What was the point of it?’

  Ralph shrugs. ‘I forget. Another anti-functionalist argument, I think. Most of these thought experiments are. Here’s an interesting one.’

  It is a picture of another windowless, cell-like room, but crowded with furniture and equipment – a desk, filing cabinets, bookshelves, computers, and a TV set. Everything is painted in black and white or shades of grey, including the young woman who sits at the desk. She wears black gloves, black shoes, opaque black stockings, and a white lab coat. The image on the TV screen is monochrome. But the room is built underground; above the surface, shown in cross-section, is a smiling pastoral landscape, full of brilliant colour.

  ‘That’s Frank Jackson’s Mary, the colour scientist. The idea is that she’s been born and raised and educated in a totally monochrome environment. She knows absolutely everything there is to know about colour in scientific terms – for example, the various wavelength combinations that stimulate the retina of the eye in colour recognition – but she has never actually seen any colours. Notice there are no mirrors in her room, so she can’t see the pigmentation of her own face, eyes, or hair, and the rest of her body is covered. Then one day she’s allowed out of the room, and the first thing she sees is, say, a red rose. Does she have a totally new experience?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘That’s what Jackson says. It’s another argument for qualia being ineffable and irreducible.’

  ‘It seems like a good one to me.’

  ‘Well, it’s better than most. But again the premise asks you to accept an awful lot. If Mary knew absolutely everything there is to know about colour – which is much, much more than we know at the moment – maybe she’d be able to simulate the experience of red in her brain. By taking certain drugs, for example.’

  ‘Who are these people?’ Helen asks, pointing to a group of figures sitting or standing or walking about. ‘There’s something odd about them, though it’s hard to put one’s finger on it.’

  ‘Good for you,’ says Ralph. ‘And good for Karinthy. They’re zombies.’

  ‘Zombies!’

  ‘Yes, we do a lot of work with zombies. Zombies are to philosophers of mind what rats are to psychologists and guinea-pigs to medical biologists. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Zombie Rights Movement somewhere.’

  ‘But they don’t exist!’ Helen exclaims.

  ‘For a novelist you’re very literal-minded,’ Ralph says.

  ‘I’m a realistic novelist.’

  ‘For philosophical purposes, it’s not necessary that zombies should exist, only that their existence is a logical possibility. They’re useful for thought experiments because they’re indistinguishable from human beings in appearance and behaviour, but they have no consciousness in the human sense. These long-haired chaps over here, for instance,’ he says, pointing, ‘are a young philosopher called David Chalmers and his zombie twin. But, as you see, it’s impossible to tell which is which.’

  ‘Talking of animal rights, what’s happening to this cat?’ Helen asks. She has paused in front of a picture painted horizontally across a door belonging to a Professor D.C. Douglass. In a series of frames, like a strip cartoon, a magician is shown placing a somnolent marmalade cat inside a wooden cabinet, followed by a piece of complicated scientific apparatus, and then closing the lid. In the last frame he has disappeared, leaving only the cabinet in view.

  ‘That’s Schrödinger’s Cat, a famous puzzle in quantum physics. The apparatus in the box connects an instrument for measuring an electron’s spin to a lethal injection device. The experiment supposes that the apparatus will kill the cat if the electron’s spin is ‘up’. But according to quantum mechanics the state of an electron is neither up nor down until someone observes it. Therefore the cat is neither alive nor dead until someone opens the cabinet.’

  ‘The magician is Schrödinger?’

  ‘No, that’s Roger Penrose, the mathematician.’

  ‘Any relation to Professor Robyn Penrose?’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘She. She’s coming to give a lecture in the School of English this semester. I had a flier about it.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any connection. This Penrose thinks quantum physics holds the answer to the problem of consciousness. Consciousness as the collapse of the wave function. Quantum collapses in microtubules.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ says Helen.

  ‘Well, it’s not easy to explain,’ says Ralph. ‘It’s been said that anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics is either mad or lying.’

  At this moment the door opens and a smallish man, clutching a sheaf of papers, appears on the threshold. He stops short, startled to find them in his way, and blinks at them through thicklensed spectacles. His greying hair suggests he is middle-aged, but his face is boyish.

  ‘Ah, here’s Duggers!’ says Ralph. ‘Duggers will explain it to you better than I can.’

  ‘Explain what?’ says the man.

  ‘Quantum mechanics,’ says Ralph. ‘This is Helen Reed, she’s a writer, teaching in the School of English this semester.’ To Helen he says, ‘This is my colleague Douglas C. Douglass, known to one and all as Duggers.’

  ‘I have never approved that nickname,’ says Duggers sourly.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Professor Douglass,’ says Helen, extending her hand. His frosty expression thaws a degree or two.

  ‘Did you want to see me, Messenger?’ he asks Ralph.

  ‘No, I was showing Helen the mural,’ says Ralph. ‘We had just got to Schrödinger’s Cat when you popped out of your office like a quantum effect.’

  ‘It’s very interesting,’ Helen says, gesturing at the art work.

  ‘It would be whitewashed over, if I had my way,’ says Douglass.

  ‘Oh dear, why?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s frivolous. And confusing to visitors.’

  ‘Helen is confused about quantum theory, Duggers. Won’t you explain it to us?’

  ‘Not just now, if you don’t mind. I’ve got some photocopying to do.’

  He locks the door of his office and, with a curt nod, moves off.

  ‘Then I’ll have to try and explain it myself,’ says Ralph, with a sigh.

  But before he can do so, the door of the lift opens and one of the secretaries from the General Office steps out, calling, ‘Professor Messenger!’ She click-clacks up to them in her high heels, a little out of breath, her eyes wide with the importance of her message. ‘Oh, Professor Messenger – Stuart Phillips has been trying to find you. Captain Haddock has crashed.’

  Ralph grimaces. ‘Oh dear.’ He turns to Helen. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Helen.

  ‘Captain Haddock is our Email server. If we don’t get it fixed before the end of the afternoon my staff will begin to suffer from withdrawal symptoms.’ He smiles faintly to show this is a joke, but perhaps not entirely a joke.

  ‘It’s time I was going, anyway,’ Helen
says. ‘But thank you very much. It was most interesting.’

  ‘Good. I hope you’ll come again,’ Ralph says. ‘Shall we go down together?’ He gestures towards the lift.

  4

  ONE, TWO, THREE, testing, testing . . . [belches] Pardon me! It’s, what, 6.51 p.m. on Wednesday 26th February . . . I’m still in my office, instead of at home, warming my bum in front of the fire and enjoying the first drink of the day, because we have a problem in the Brain . . . I got a message this afternoon that Captain Haddock had crashed, but it seems to be a hardware failure or possibly wiring . . . there are technicians and sparks crawling all over the place at the moment trying to locate the source of the trouble and I don’t feel like going home until I know that it’s been fixed . . . the thought of an electrical fire breaking out in the Brain in the middle of the night is scary, unlikely as it is . . . So I called Carrie to say I’d be late and settled down to do some work on staff assessment I’ve been putting off . . . so many fucking forms these days . . . but when I unlocked the filing cabinet where I keep confidential material my eye fell on the old Pearlcorder and I couldn’t resist listening to the tape I recorded last Sunday morning . . . Haven’t got round to transcribing it yet . . . I really need one of those gadgets that audiotypists use with earphones and a footpedal to stop and start the tape . . . I know they’ve got one in the office downstairs but I feel shy about borrowing it, they’d wonder why I didn’t give them the tape to transcribe . . . I’ve ordered a speech recognition software package called Voicemaster which I gather is the best on the market, but it hasn’t come yet, and you have to train it to recognize your pronunciation before you can use it . . . Anyway, I played back the tape on the Pearlcorder just now, and I must say it was absolutely riveting . . . though of doubtful experimental value, alas . . . It’s not just that the experiment itself partly determines the direction and content of your thoughts . . . it’s that by articulating them . . . however informally . . . by articulating them in speech you’re already at one remove from the phenomenon of consciousness itself . . . because . . . well because every phrase I utter, however fragmentary and inconsequential it may seem, is the output of a complex interaction . . . consultation . . . competition . . . between different parts of my brain . . . It’s like a bulletin, an agreed text hammered out behind closed doors after a nanosecond’s intense editorial debate, and then released to the speech centres of the brain for onward transmission . . . And that editing process is impossible to record or observe, except as a pattern of electro-chemical activity between millions of neurones, a pretty picture on a scanner . . . Never mind, it might be worth persevering with for a bit, the taping, something useful may emerge, perhaps about the nature of attention . . . not that I’ll ever be able to quote much of it in a paper, it’s far too personal, too revealing, not to say raunchy at times . . . but it was fascinating to . . . to as it were eavesdrop on one’s own thoughts . . . I was almost sorry when the tape ended, when I was interrupted, or rather distracted, by the sight of Helen Reed wandering across the campus in the rain like a lost soul . . . It turns out that she went into the chapel, she was there all the time I was looking for her, she told me over lunch today . . . I happened to bump into her in the Staff House and we had lunch together . . . must have been the sauce on that pasta that’s given me this indigestion . . . apparently she’s a Catholic, or brought up as one . . . doesn’t believe any more but can’t bring herself to dismiss the whole boiling, still hankers after the idea of personal immortality, like so many otherwise intelligent people . . . even scientists . . . Some of Darwin’s closest associates for instance whored after spiritualism . . . Wallace, Galton, Romanes, they all went to seances, consulted mediums . . . as if having destroyed the credibility of the Christian religion they were desperate to find some substitute for the Christian heaven . . . Galton even persuaded Darwin himself, it was in that biography I reviewed, to sit in on a seance once . . . but to his credit the old man walked out, left them sitting round the table holding hands in the dark, curtains drawn against the daylight, waiting for the spooks to do their stuff . . . George Eliot and her sidekick, whatsisname, Lewes, they were there too, I seem to remember, old horseface, she who pronounced God what was it . . . God inconceivable and immortality unbelievable, or the other way round . . . even she was prepared to give spiritualism a whirl . . . Having killed off God they started to panic at the consequences, even Darwin . . . incidentally, is that perhaps the second best known sentence in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ . . . ? Even Darwin . . . wasn’t his chronic ill-health psychosomatic? He was healthy and vigorous as a young man, how else could he have survived the voyage of the Beagle? But as soon as he gets hold of the idea of evolution, as soon as he writes The Origin of Species and begins to see the consequences it’s going to have for religion, he develops all kinds of symptoms – boils, flatulence, vomiting, shivering, fainting . . . piles . . . tinnitus . . . dots before the eyes . . . every damn thing you can think of . . . none of his doctors could explain or cure any of it . . . one of them said it was suppressed gout, more like suppressed guilt . . . and he tried all kinds of quack remedies that no serious scientist should have contemplated for a moment . . . like, what was it, tying himself up in chains made of brass and zinc wire . . . drenching himself in vinegar . . . sucking the juice of two lemons a day . . . plunging into freezing cold baths . . . all to no avail . . . Wasn’t all that nonsense a kind of self-punishment for having dealt a death-blow to religion . . . ? Though it wasn’t evolution, it was the death of his beloved little Annie that did for his own belief in God . . . One has to remember there was a lot of death about in those days, much more than now, ordinary childhood illnesses could be fatal, childbirth too . . . it wasn’t so much a desire for their own immortality that led Galton and Co. to spiritualism, it was the longing to meet their dead loved ones again, especially if they died young . . . No doubt that’s why Helen Reed was drawn to the chapel last Sunday, she’s still grieving for her husband . . . I tried a little shock therapy on her, refusing to be conventionally sympathetic when she played the bereavement card in conversation over lunch, and I thought for a moment she was going to walk away in a huff, but she kept her cool . . . and we had quite a lively conversation about dualism, consciousness, AI etc. . . . I brought her over here afterwards to show her the Karinthy mural . . . She’s smart, good-looking too, the figure that was largely concealed by the frock she was wearing on Saturday night was more in evidence today, under sweater and trousers, and distinctly shapely . . . also her skin is remarkably fine for a woman well past the bloom of youth . . . There’s something melancholy about her though, she looks to me as if she badly needs a good seeing to, I shouldn’t think she’s had it since her husband died, she gives off a kind of aura of vowed chastity, like a nun . . . I wonder how long I would abstain from sex if Carrie were to die suddenly, not long I suspect, well I know it wouldn’t be . . . It’s rather shocking but . . . if I imagine Carrie dying the first thought that comes into my head is not a picture of myself distraught and grieving, but of being free to fuck other women, Marianne or Helen Reed or anybody else who might be available, without any qualms of conscience or fear of discovery . . . Of course I’m sure I’d be genuinely distraught and grief-stricken if it actually happened, and perhaps I might lose all interest in sex for a while, though I doubt it . . . more likely to go the other way, seek relief in another woman’s arms, ‘Please stay the night, I just want somebody to hold me,’ what a line, irresistible . . . And of course I’d inherit at least some of Carrie’s money, I would be rich as well as free, no use pretending that doesn’t occur to me too if I imagine her dying . . . It’s a good example of what we were talking about this afternoon, the privacy of consciousness, the secrecy of thought, it’s the filing cabinet to which only we ourselves have the key, and thank Christ for that . . . Carrie would be devastated if she knew I was thinking these thoughts now, she’d never forgive me . . . and yet for all I know she has similar fanta
sies about me dying suddenly, painlessly . . . imagines herself finding a new partner, falling in love again, perhaps someone younger, more romantic than me . . . Does that idea bother me? No, not really, because I don’t really believe it, it’s all hypothetical, I can’t inhabit her fantasies as I do my own [recording stops]

  Just had a phone call to say they found the cause of the problem . . . a mouse . . . not a computer mouse, a real mouse, with four legs and whiskers . . . it bit through a wire and electrocuted itself – they found the corpse. I’m off.

  5

  THURSDAY 27TH FEB. I ran into Ralph Messenger in the Staff House yesterday, at lunch time. Well, to be strictly truthful (and why not, since this is for no one’s eyes but mine) I saw him through the plate glass windows, striding up the steps to the entrance, as I came out of the Ladies, and I loitered in front of some ghastly pictures on exhibition in the foyer in the hope that he might notice me when he came in – which he did, so we had lunch together. He mentioned that he had seen me from his office last Sunday morning, wandering about the campus in the rain – information I found disconcerting. I wondered how I had appeared to him. Bedraggled? Depressed? Deranged?

  After lunch he showed me round his Centre, which proved unexpectedly interesting, especially something called the Karinthy mural – a kind of cycloramic wall painting on the second floor, illustrating various theories and ‘thought experiments’ about consciousness. Consciousness is apparently the sort of thing cognitive scientists study – indeed the thing at the moment, for scientists of all kinds. They have decided that consciousness is a ‘problem’ which has to be ‘solved’.

  This was news to me, and not particularly welcome. I’ve always assumed, I suppose, that consciousness was the province of the arts, especially literature, and most especially the novel. Consciousness, after all, is what most novels, certainly mine, are about. Consciousness is my bread and butter. Perhaps for that reason, I’ve never seen anything problematic about it as a phenomenon. Consciousness is simply the medium in which one lives, and has a sense of personal identity. The problem is how to represent it, especially in different selves from one’s own. In that sense novels could be called thought experiments. You invent people, you put them in hypothetical situations, and decide how they will react. The ‘proof’ of the experiment is if their behaviour seems interesting, plausible, revealing about human nature. Seems to whom? To ‘the reader’ – who is not Mr Cleverdick the reviewer, or Ms Sycophant the publicist, or your fond mother, or your jealous rival, but some kind of ideal reader, shrewd, intelligent, demanding but fair, whose persona you try to adopt as you read and re-read your own work in the process of composition. I sort of resent the idea of science poking its nose into this business, my business. Hasn’t science already appropriated enough of reality? Must it lay claim to the intangible invisible essential self as well?