Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  The current stir of scientific interest in consciousness is usually traced back to a 1990 paper by Francis Crick and Cristof Koch announcing that it was time to make human consciousness the subject of empirical study.6 But several earlier developments had encouraged such a move. For example: the discovery in quantum physics that an event is ultimately inseparable from its observation, undermining the assumption that science is absolutely objective and impersonal. For example: the discovery of DNA, which put biology in the driving seat of the physical sciences; the development of new brain-scanning techniques in medicine; and the surge of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory in the 1970s and 1980s, disseminated by brilliant popular science writers like Dawkins, which offered a comprehensive materialist account of human nature. For example: advances in computing power and miniaturisation, and the development of neural networks in programming, which opened up new possibilities in Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are connections between these various developments. Neural networks, for instance, are based on an evolutionary model. AI starts with the assumption that the mind or consciousness is like software to the brain’s hardware, a virtual machine running on the material machine of the brain, and tries to design architectures on which the operation of the human brain might be simulated. There is no hope of doing this with a linear program, only one step of which needs to fail for the whole system to crash. Neural networks are programs which evolve on their own and imitate the multitudinous connections between the neurons in the human brain. It has to be said that so far this remains a utopian aim rather than an achieved goal, perhaps because there are more possible connections between the neurons in a human brain than there are atoms in the universe.7

  At the same time, some philosophers began to ask whether the dismissive catch-phrase “the Ghost in the Machine” really disposed of all the questions raised by the phenomenon of consciousness. Joseph Levine published an influential paper in 1983 entitled “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.” Qualia, plural of the Latin quale, is a key term in consciousness studies, meaning the specific nature of our subjective experience of the world.

  Examples of qualia are the smell of freshly ground coffee or the taste of pineapple; such experiences have a distinctive phenomenological character which we have all experienced but which, it seems, is very difficult to describe. (The Oxford Companion to the Mind)

  Levine was drawing attention to the failure of purely materialistic theories of mind to explain this phenomenon. A decade later the philosopher David Chalmers agreed: “It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behaviour should be accompanied by a subjective inner life.”8 Chalmers’s solution in his book The Conscious Mind is a highly technical one, but he admits it is a kind of property dualism. Even the physicist James Trefil concedes that “no matter how my brain works, no matter how much interplay there is between my brain and my body, one single fact remains . . . I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from somewhere inside my skull . . . this is not simply an observation, but the central datum with which every theory of consciousness has to grapple. In the end the theory has to go from the firing of neurons to this essential perception.”9

  The more bullish neuroscientists and AI researchers reject this line of argument. The distinguished neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, for instance, says that “the barrier between mind and matter is only apparent and arises as a result of language.” Qualia are produced by the same pattern of neuronal activity in any subject, as brain scans reveal. They only seem uniquely subjective when reported in natural language. “If you could bypass verbal language and transfer your neural perception of red to a colourblind person’s brain by wire you would reproduce the qualia of your perception of red in that person.”10

  Daniel Dennett also denies that qualia present a serious problem to materialist explanations of consciousness. Either they don’t exist, or they are not a special category of phenomena requiring special explanation. Basically Dennett’s position—and it is very persuasively and intelligently argued—is that consciousness is a kind of illusion or epiphenomenon. It is something man has done with the enormous brain power he possesses above and beyond his evolutionary needs for survival. The fact that it seems as if we experience the world as a self that is centered somewhere inside our heads, absorbing and cataloguing and remembering and linking up all the information coming to us from the external world through our senses—the fact that this seems to be the case is perfectly understandable, and pragmatically may be necessary if we are to function as human beings, but that doesn’t mean that it actually is the case, or that we have to posit the existence of any nonmaterial factor or process. In the words of another evolutionary materialist, Steven Pinker, the mind is “a machine, nothing but the on-board computer of a robot made of tissue.”11

  What has all this to do with literature in general and the novel in particular? I think there are two kinds of connection to be made, both of which help to explain why literature exists, why we need it, and why we value it, and help us also to understand better the ways literature uses to do what it does. One kind of connection emphasises the differences between literary and scientific discourse about consciousness. The other emphasises points of agreement.

  When Stuart Sutherland said that nothing worth reading had been written about consciousness he was articulating a rather dismissive judgement of published work in the professional field of psychology, but unintentionally (at least I hope it was unintentionally) he was dismissing the entire corpus of the world’s literature—because literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have. Lyric poetry is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe qualia. The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.

  There are some thinkers in cognitive science, or on the fringes of it, who have acknowledged as much. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has said: “It is quite possible . . . that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”12 The reason is that science tries to formulate general explanatory laws which apply universally, which were in operation before they were discovered, and which would have been discovered sooner or later by somebody. Works of literature describe in the guise of fiction the dense specificity of personal experience, which is always unique, because each of us has a slightly or very different personal history, modifying every new experience we have; and the creation of literary texts recapitulates this uniqueness (that is to say, Jane Austen’s Emma, for example, could not have been written by anybody else, and never will be written by anyone else again, but an experiment demonstrating the second law of thermodynamics is and must be repeatable by any competent scientist).

  The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has some interesting things to say on this topic in his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. He begins with what sounds like an arrogant prediction: “We are at the beginning of the neuroscientific revolution. At the end we should know how the mind works, what governs our nature, and how we know the world.”13 But as the book proceeds he acknowledges the limitations of this project. There is, for instance, the problem of qualia. “The dilemma is that phenomenal experience is a first person matter, and this seems, at first glance, to prevent the formulation of a completely objective or causal account.” Science, of course, is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper, Edelman says, it would be edited out. But a scientific study of consciousness cannot ignore qualia. His proposed solution is to accept that other people as well as oneself do experience qualia, to collect their first-person accounts, and correlate them to establish what they have in common, bearing in mind that these reports are inevitably “partial, imprecise and relative to . . . personal context.”14

  The method of lyric poetry is different. It is to use language in such a way that the description of qual
ia does not seem partial, imprecise, and only comprehensible when put in the context of the poet’s personal life. My heroine Helen Reed in Thinks . . . makes this point to a cognitive science conference, quoting from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden”:

  The Luscious Clusters of the Vine

  Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine;

  The Nectaren, and curious Peach,

  Into my hands themselves do reach;

  Stumbling on Melons, as I pass,

  Insnar’d with Flow’rs, I fall on Grass.

  Helen says: “Let me point to a paradox about Marvell’s verse, which applies to lyric poetry in general. Although he speaks in the first person, Marvell does not speak for himself alone. In reading this stanza we enhance our own experience of the qualia of fruit and fruitfulness. We see the fruit, we taste it and smell it and savour it with what has been called ‘the thrill of recognition’ and yet it is not there, it is the virtual reality of fruit, conjured up by the qualia of the poem which I could try to analyse if there were world enough and time, to quote another poem of Marvell’s—but there is not” (see here).

  There are lyrical descriptions of qualia in prose fiction as well as verse. Many are to be found in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces—not surprisingly, since she is a distinguished poet. On the page following the passage about the soul of the baby Tomas, for example, there is a brilliant description of a city street after a heavy snowfall.

  The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it’s very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights. (See here)

  This illustrates one of the primary means by which literature renders qualia—through metaphor and simile. Whiteness is white, coldness is cold. There is no literal, referential description of such things that is not tautological. But in literature, by describing each quale in terms of something else that is both similar and different—“a salt cave,” “a theatre of whiteness,” “like frozen waves”—the object and the experience of it are vividly simulated. One sensation is invoked to give specificity to another. The nonverbal is verbalised. “My task, which I am trying to achieve,” Joseph Conrad wrote in the Preface to one of his tales, “is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”15

  Later in his book Edelman makes an interesting distinction between science and history: “Science has emerged within history, and it attempts to describe . . . the boundaries of the world—its constraints and its physical laws. But these laws . . . do not and cannot exhaust experience or replace history or the events that occur in the actual courses of individual lives. Events are denser than any possible scientific description.”16

  These statements seem to me profoundly true, but they place obvious limits on scientific knowledge about, to quote Edelman’s introduction again, “what governs our nature and how we know the world.” History conceived as the sum total of individual human lives is of course unknowable: there is simply too much data. Historiography can give us selective accounts of events in selected human lives, but the more scientific its method—the more scrupulous it is in basing all its assertions on evidence—the less able it is to represent the density of those events as consciously experienced. That is, however, something that narrative literature, and especially the novel, can do. It creates fictional models of what it is like to be a human being, moving through time and space. It captures the density of experienced events by its rhetoric, and it shows the connectedness of events through the devices of plot.

  A good deal of the recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essentially narrative character. Antonio Demasio, for instance, in his book The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness, lays great emphasis on this. What happens when an organism interacts with an object is, he says, “a simple narrative without words. It [has] characters. It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning, a middle and an end. The end is made up of reactions that result in a modified state of the organism.”17 As the word “organism” implies, Demasio is not talking about exclusively human experience here. The process also occurs in animals. But, he says, “The imagetic representation of sequences of brain events, which occurs in brains simpler than ours, is the stuff of which stories are made. A natural preverbal occurrence of storytelling may well be the reason why we ended up creating drama and eventually books.”18 (By “books” he must mean novels.) “Telling stories,” he says, in a striking formulation, “is probably a brain obsession . . . I believe the brain’s pervasive ‘aboutness’ is rooted in the brain’s storytelling attitude.”19

  Human consciousness, as Demasio makes clear, is self-consciousness. We not only have experiences, we are conscious of ourselves having them, and of being affected by them. He draws attention to the paradox noted by William James, that “the self in our stream of consciousness changes continuously as it moves forward in time, even as we retain a sense that the self remains the same while our existence continues.”20 Demasio calls the self that is constantly modified the “core” self, and the self that seems to have a kind of continuous existence the “autobiographical” self, suggesting that it is like a literary production. Daniel Dennett says something very similar. As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories. “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are.”21 To Dennett, however, all these stories, and the selves they construct, are illusions, epiphenomena: to suppose otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of dualism. Demasio’s position is more conservative, and to a humanist more congenial. He places himself in the tradition of thinkers as diverse as Locke, Brentano, Kant, Freud, and William James, “all of whom believed that consciousness is ‘an inner sense.’” “Whether we like the notion or not,” he says, “something like the sense of self does exist in the human mind as we go about knowing things . . . the human mind is constantly being split . . . between the part that stands for the known and the part that stands for the knower.”22 In now discredited models of the mind the knower was figured as a kind of homunculus, a little brain person who received and collated all the information coming into the brain from the senses and issued orders for action. The scientific rejection of this model should not, Demasio maintains, entail the total rejection of the idea of the self. “There are limits to the unified, continuous, single self,” he admits, “and yet the tendency toward one single self and its advantage to the healthy mind are undeniable.”23 I find the use of the word “healthy” in this context very interesting. It bypasses the usual opposition in the consciousness debate between “true” and “false.” If the self is a fiction, it may perhaps be the supreme fiction, the greatest achievement of human consciousness, the one that makes us human.

  The title of this section contains an allusion to C. P. Snow’s celebrated lecture of 1959, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” His argument was that in Britain the potential of science to transform the world for the greater good was being impeded by ignorance of science among the political establishment, most of whom had been educated exclusively in the humanities. It elicited an equally famous riposte from the critic F. R. Leavis, who argued that the only kind of culture that matters doesn’t need Snow’s “technologico-Benthamism.” As Patricia Waugh observed in a recent essay,24 such debates are most intense when one form of knowledge lays claim to the exclusive title to all knowledge. The contest is unnecessary. Literature constitutes a kind of knowledge about consciousness which is complementary to scientific knowledge. The philosopher Nicholas Maxwell calls this kind of knowledge “personalistic,” and argues that it must be combined with scientific knowledge if we are to attain true “wisdom.” “Personalistic explanations seek t
o depict the phenomenon to be explained as something that one might oneself have experienced, done, thought, felt.”25 That sounds very like what is involved in writing and reading literary fiction. Even when the ostensible subject of fiction is science itself, it is always a “personalistic” kind of knowledge that we obtain from it.

  I thought it might be worth looking at C. P. Snow’s own fiction in this context, and I chose for this purpose to reread his novel The New Men (1954). It belongs to a sequence of eleven novels with the general title of Strangers and Brothers, which presents a number of linked characters in a romanfleuve, their individual fortunes illustrating broad social and historical processes, in the tradition of Galsworthy, Trollope, and Balzac. But it differs from those models in having a first-person narrator with a fairly obvious resemblance to the real author; and in that respect it owes something to the very different example of Marcel Proust. There is in fact an explicit allusion to Proust in The New Men. The narrator, Lewis Eliot, is a senior civil servant during the Second World War who is concerned with government policy with regard to the attempt to build an atomic bomb. His brother Martin is a nuclear physicist involved in the British effort, which in due course is overtaken by developments in America, but this provides a story through which to explore the various political and moral issues which the possibility of nuclear weapons presented. After many setbacks, Martin’s team succeeds in extracting plutonium from uranium, and he lets his brother feel a bag in which this precious substance is contained. It is hot to the touch, and the sensation revives in Lewis the memory of an earlier occasion with Martin and his wife Irene, when they were sitting on the ground on a warm summer night.