Joe

by Michael Blastland

  So though we had our reasons for sending him to a residential school, none was meaningful or communicable to Joe. He sits next to me, sometimes chirpy, sometimes singing to himself or laughing irresistibly, sometimes quiet, at times sad, sometimes holding the hand I rest on the gearstick, all the while an ocean apart. What sense does he make of it all? Precious little, I guess. It must seem random, pointless, inexplicable. One day I live there, the next they put me here. Events come along, no point, no reason.

  He’s laughing now, out of the blue, bent by spasms of giggles, then relaxing into an expression of pure mischief, about what I’ll never know, though who cares if only this mood would see the day out.

  … Take a chance, take a chance

  Take a chaka-chan-chance.

  If you change your mind,

  I’m the first in line

  Honey I’m still free …

  Children packed off to boarding school are at least told it’s doing them good. Disagree though they might, they’re offered a reason. Joe in this respect is less like the reluctant boarder than a diminutive Joseph K from Kafka’s Trial: he doesn’t know and never could understand the case against him. In The Trial, the reader’s sense that society should function through cause and effect, through behaviour based on motives and reasons, rebels against a mysterious case lacking all evidence. For Joe, other people’s behaviour must often have the flavour of absurdity; the wonder is he rebels so seldom.

  And so to his imagined question: ‘Mummy, Daddy – Mee and Dee – what’s it all about, this business of a new school?’ I can make, to his mind, no meaningful answer. It is beyond explanation. Moreover, he would never expect one; he would never think to ask. As far as Joe can see, precious little lies beneath the surface of my actions, for when it comes to other people surface is often all there is. To find an answer would be to know my motivation, and motivation is a concept belonging in my psychology, a psychology he seems to conceive only in fragments, if at all. In the trial of our Joe, from his point of view, there is no case, simply a world of instant verdicts known only when sentence is carried out. Sending him away must be one example among thousands daily that the world is arbitrary in the extreme.

  Joe’s surprisingly patient bewilderment at this despotic state of affairs invites a question: how do the rest of us make sense of the human activity raging about us? The short answer is that we are, as he is not, instinctive mind-readers who supply motivation to almost everything we see.

  Our antennae are normally remarkably well tuned to other people’s intentions. Such is this knack of ours for guessing other people’s inner experience that the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has described it as our defining characteristic, and names us ‘Homo psychologicus’. We are, he says, born psychologists:

  Human beings … had to become sensitive to other people’s moods and passions, appreciative of their waywardness or stubbornness, capable of reading the signs in their faces and equally the lack of signs, capable of guessing what each person’s past experience holds hidden in the present for the future. They had above all to make sense of the ghost in the machine.

  The philosopher Daniel Dennett writes similarly:

  We use folk psychology all the time to explain and predict each other’s behaviour; we attribute beliefs and desires to each other and with confidence – and quite unselfconsciously – and spend a substantial portion of our waking lives formulating the world – not excluding ourselves – in these terms … it is a theory of great generative power and efficiency. For instance, watching a film with a highly original and un-stereotyped plot, we see the hero smile at the villain and we all swiftly and effortlessly arrive at the same complex theoretical diagnosis: ‘Aha!’ we conclude (but perhaps not consciously). ‘He wants her to think he doesn’t know she intends to defraud her brother.’

  Is he right? Can we really, reliably presume to know what other people are thinking?

  We’re all aware of occasions when we’ve misjudged others, perhaps because, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, there is no means of objective verification, and thus another person’s consciousness is ultimately unknowable. It is, he argued, a beetle in a box:

  Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.

  Wittgenstein didn’t mean his metaphor to be used in this way, but it works; I can never know for sure if your beetle is like mine. Yet for all practical purposes we assume otherwise, that our beetles are much alike, and this subjective tendency passes a practical test. Dennett and Humphrey do not propose an infallible mechanism, but one usually so dependable that we wince on the rare occasions it fails us.

  But philosophy isn’t done with us, and has another hurdle to place in the way of folk psychology. It is overwhelmingly the view of philosophers and neuropsychologists that there is, there can be, no ghost in the machine. The intellectual fashion in the study of philosophy of mind is materialist, and our perception of a ghost, alive and well and very much in charge, is held to be merely an illusion. How could there be such stuff as consciousness, seeming to exist independently of matter, they ask, and yet also having sensory awareness of matter as it registers the world beyond us and even, in the movement of our own limbs, able to control matter? Is it separate and different, or not? It is not, they say: consciousness must be material and there is no separate and immaterial ghost.

  In an odd way, Joe takes them at their word. Research published in 2004 from the University of Washington used brain scans to suggest that people with autism look at faces as if they were objects, people as if they were machines. Normal adults use a separate part of the brain to process faces and objects; those with autism usually don’t seem to distinguish between the two, treating faces in the same fashion as cars, excepting only their mothers’. I sometimes imagine Joe as a scientist who looks upon any human scene, and in order to understand what is going on around him, without resorting to such debunked notions as ghosts in the machine, has to calculate the movement of every single particle, plot its course and, under known laws, determine how one particle will affect another and so how the scene will unfold. Of course, he fails; our illogical perceptions serve us far better.

  It matters not for our purposes whether our psychological sense of a commanding self-consciousness is an illusion; the perception remains a far more effective shortcut to an understanding of what’s going on in other people than doing the materialist calculation properly. The psychologist Paul Bloom says we are all, psychologically speaking, instinctive upholders of the separation of a ghostly mind from a material body, paid-up Cartesian dualists, whatever the view of science and philosophy of mind. If the materialists are right, it is, as the philosopher Galen Strawson points out, a fact that our instinct finds impossible to accept, one of those beliefs that are completely involuntary for us, that cannot be deflected by reason or argument. We can see something of the extent to which the rest of us depend on this extraordinary and deeply ingrained human capacity, this audacious presumption about other people’s thoughts and intentions, whether logically fallible or not, by watching what happens in someone who lacks it, someone who appears to act as Wittgenstein would require: Joe. So banal has this talent become to most of us, that when we find such an example we glimpse a mind of mythical curiosity.

  While reading one evening, when Joe was about seven, I came across a Chinese proverb: ‘The wise man points to the moon; the fool looks at the finger.’ An awful unwelcome knowing, a hateful, hard-hearted truth, set me musing about where Joe would look if I pointed to the moon. I half knew already, and sat vacant for ten minutes.

  A few nights later in a strange spirit of masochistic fatalism, I took him out on a clear evening. The moon was about half full, bright and attention-seeking in the night sky. We stepped onto th
e front lawn where Joe, at a loss to what was in store for him following this unusual excursion from routine, waited for the next move.

  ‘Hey, look, Joe!’ I say, and point. ‘The moon. Beautiful … Joe, look!’

  He turns to my voice, sees me with arm raised, and looks away.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ his disdainful expression suggests, ‘but what are we doing here? What’s next? Car? Mummy? Swimming? Shop? Resume a routine I know, if you please.’

  ‘Joe, Joe, up there, Joe. Look up! Up, Joe! The moon.’

  He turns again to look at me, silently ignores the arm, which he’s already judged pointless, and looks away again.

  ‘Nagh!’

  I walk over and try to lift his chin, still pointing: ‘Up, Joe, look up!’

  But his eyes are like water in a glass and swivel stubbornly horizontal, earth-bound. He wriggles free.

  ‘Naagh!’

  I turn over my left hand, stretch out its index finger, watch the thumb instinctively unfold, linger over the shape and see that the lesson is crueller still. For the proverbial fool is halfway there: when he looks at the finger, he understands at least that the finger is the purpose of the hand’s contortion. His attention is informed, if ultimately wrong. My son seems to know not even this. I have no idea if it’s the finger he noticed, or the whole hand, or some part of it, or the arm. My pointing hand did not, for him, have any obvious significance, not in the pointing finger’s direction, not even in the finger. What does Joe think when he sees me point? ‘This man moves his arm, puts his hand into an odd shape,’ I guess, using Occam’s razor to ill-effect: the simplest explanation being that what is placed most immediately in front of you is the intended object of attention. But the pointed finger, of course, by convention, by necessity, is not itself the point. It’s supposed to refer, to direct elsewhere, not to keep us here but to lead our attention over there. How can I lead Joe’s gaze along the invisible line from my fingertip to that somewhere? A thing perceived in isolation with no relevance to the rest of creation communicates nothing. It is a signpost aimed at itself. Unless information shifts us from one place to another, connects here with there, this with that, so what? Alone and irrelevant, inert, uninteresting, the pointing finger is only its senseless self. Thus the big struggle with Joe, to find a way of acquainting him with the simplest of notions: that the pointing finger points.

  We go back inside, out of the cold. In, out, no rhyme, no reason, more absurdity. Poor Joe simply didn’t know what I meant. That night, a hard night, I sit for hours, jaws clenched, grinding teeth on piety, feeding rancour in a remembered line from Martin Amis’s autobiography as he watched his father Kingsley fume over some cruelty in life, and says how he observed a man ‘hating God’.

  Joe is no fool, of course. Fool is a word for those we hold in contempt and contempt is altogether inappropriate for Joe’s precipitous difficulty. We might feel mystification, or horror, perhaps, but contempt would be the emotion of a fool.

  For most of us, the point of pointing is normally transparent. Why? Seeing Joe’s mystification it isn’t obvious to me from our actions alone that it is at all clear what we’re up to with this spontaneous flicking-finger gesture. Something must supplement the movement in order to turn it into understanding and, indeed, Homo psychologicus finds it easy. The trick, as we all instinctively know but Joe does not, is to follow the eye and the mind at least as closely as the line of the finger.

  The evidence from academic studies of autism is slightly ambiguous. It suggests, contrary to my night on the lawn with Joe, that autistic children do understand gestures designed to make them perform a task, so-called instrumental gestures such as beckoning or a finger pressed to the lips for quiet. But researchers have also found that these children lack a critical ability known as shared or joint attention. This is the common tendency to look where another is looking or pointing and to take cues from the attitude of these other observers. The striking thing about this (it is easily observed in parents and normal young children) is that the children are interested not only in the object pointed to, but what the adult thinks about it, and seem capable of absorbing this unspoken feeling. It’s a behaviour also known as social referencing. Children typically glance first at the face, then at the hand. In other words, children following a pointed finger are also mind-reading, identifying an object and simultaneously understanding the parent’s attitude towards it.

  Shared attention, which depends on facial signals of emotion, is absent in children with autism. Simon Baron-Cohen screened thousands of children aged eighteen months, including a test for shared attention, that is whether the children paid heed to the parent’s gaze. By forty-two months nearly every child who had failed the tests was diagnosed with autism. Attempting to play the Chinese wise man, I hoped to convey wonder at the moon, and failed. The wonder is that the rest of you would know how I felt from a jutting digit and a tone of voice.

  Joe does now respond perfectly well to the instruction ‘point to’ – provided, obviously, that he also recognises and understands the name of the thing to which you’ve asked him to point – but he had to be laboriously taught. For many months we ground through a teaching programme that involved coercing him into jabbing at pictures or objects as we named them, initially by holding his finger and doing it for him. His hand, index finger crooked, now gestures easily towards the picture in the book that you’re after.

  ‘Point to the sheep, Joe.’

  ‘Peep,’ he says, pointing correctly.

  But Joe knows his own intentions – and his own pointed finger has an objective that he already understands. When the rest of us point something out to Joe, I suspect he’s lucky if he grasps half our meaning, and if it’s argued that he sometimes points voluntarily, we soon see that this is usually to get something he wants, it is instrumental, an action with a machinelike effect: namely, Daddy sorts it. His pointing is not to share any feeling, for how could he, when it seems there is no other mind with which to share?

  Full-grown chimpanzees in the wild compare well on many skills with human infants, but do not point. Attempts to teach them have not been altogether successful. Clearly, pointing is not the trivial skill we assume it to be, but part of a sophisticated social repertoire, exploiting the capacity for mind-reading that makes us qualitatively superior communicators.

  Being mindful of Joe’s inability to discern intention, I began to think I could anticipate its effects, but so pervasively do we deploy these mentalising skills, this knack for guessing the thoughts and intentions of others, that he surprised me on countless mundane occasions. At home, I’d sometimes drift into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. Coming in after me and seeing the cheese filling, Joe would object:

  ‘Nnaghh!’

  His assumption seems to be that any sandwich made is a sandwich made for him. Now there are at least two explanations for making a sandwich: I want a sandwich and intend it for me, or someone else wants a sandwich. Joe understands cause and effect well enough. If I push this button here, the tape will play. If I tip this cup, the milk will flow onto the carpet. If I hit Caitlin, Dee makes funny faces.

  Understanding desire is harder, ranking in difficulty somewhere between mechanical cause and effect and the monstrous problem of deciphering human intention. Joe’s instinct is to assume that only he wants, that only he is capable of wanting. Only through patient explanation does he begin to see that the world might be otherwise, a lesson he then seems to forget easily. And so if he doesn’t want, what’s going on? We can only guess his reasoning:

  ‘What’s this? A sandwich. A cheese sandwich? But I don’t want a cheese sandwich. Dee, the thing that makes things for me, must be malfunctioning. Why is Dee making a sandwich when I don’t want one? It will be given to me as all sandwiches made for me are given to me. This must be stopped. I shall say so:

  ‘Nnaghh!’

  What someone else might want wouldn’t be an instinctive question, for Joe doesn’t presume that they want, full stop. I d
on’t mean that they ‘don’t want anything for the time being, thank you’, that they’re satisfied just now; I mean that they never want, never have wants, unless those wants are clearly, precisely articulated.

  ‘Not for you, Joe.’

  ‘Naaggh!’

  ‘It’s for me.’

  ‘Ngaaagh!’

  ‘Sandwich for Daddy.’

  A blank look.

  ‘Daddy wants sandwich. Daddy eat sandwich. Joe no sandwich! Daddy sandwich. For Daddy.’

  A puzzled look, and then an abrupt loss of interest, at which point calm is restored. Joe, in Joe’s world, is unique in being motivated by desires, fears, passions. If he didn’t want a sandwich then ordinarily no sandwich could be wanted, and it’s a surprise for him to discover otherwise.

  Once I’d made my sandwich, another odd thing happened: Joe stood in the way. He saw me walk towards him – there was only one way out of the kitchen and he was in it – but made no movement to step aside, come in properly or turn round and go out. I shifted to one side so that we could edge past one another, as you do. Joe stood still. It wasn’t a confrontational stance: on the contrary, he wasn’t actively doing anything, just standing there with no sense of what standing still implied. It implied, because I knew where I was going, that I was going to bump into him. Where I was going was obvious to anyone, except Joe. Seeing me walk towards a door, you would assume I wanted to go through it. Not so Joe.