To quote an eminent ethologist, W. H. Thorpe:
The evidence suggests that at the lower levels of the evolutionary scale consciousness, if it exists, must be of a very generalized kind, so to say unstructured; and that with the development of purposive behaviour and a powerful faculty of attention, consciousness associated with expectation will become more and more vivid and precise. [2]
However, it is essential to realize that these gradations in the 'structuring, vividness and precision' of consciousness are found not only along the evolutionary ladder, and in members of the same species at different stages of their ontogeny, but also within adult individuals when confronted by different situations. I am referring to the deceptively trivial fact that one and the same activity -- driving a car -- can be either performed automatically, without conscious awareness of one's own actions, or accompanied by varying degrees of awareness. Driving along a familiar road with little traffic on it, I can hand over to the 'automatic pilot' in my nervous system and think about something else. In other words, the task of controlling and coordinating my driving performance has been shifted from a higher to a lower level in my mental hierarchy. Vice versa, overtaking another car requires an upward shift of control to the level of semi-conscious routine; and overtaking in a tricky situation requires a further shift to full awareness of what I am doing.
There are several factors which determine how much, if any, conscious attention is paid by a person to the activity in which he is engaged. The most important of these factors in the present context is habit-formation. While learning a skill we must concentrate on every detail of what we are doing. We learn laboriously to recognize and name the printed letters of the alphabet, to ride a bicycle, to hit the right key on the piano or typewriter. But with increasing mastery and practice, the typist can let his fingers 'look after themselves'; we read, write, drive 'automatically', which is another way of saying that the rules which govern the exercise of the skill are now applied unconsciously. This condensation of learning into habit may be looked upon as a process which transforms mental into mechanical activities -- mind-processes into machine -- processes. It starts with infancy and never stops.
This tendency towards the progressive automatization of habits has a positive side: it conforms to the principle of parsimony. By manipulating the wheel of the car mechanically, I am able to carry on a conversation; and if the rules of grammar and syntax did not operate automatically I could not attend to meaning. But on the other hand the progressive mechanization of habits and routines threatens to turn us into automata. Man is not a machine, but most of the day we behave like machines -- or sleepwalkers, without mentally attending to the activities we are engaged in. This applies not only to manipulative routines -- wielding knife and fork at table, lighting a cigarette, or signing a letter -- but also to mental activities: one can read a whole paragraph in a boring book 'absent-mindedly' without taking in a single word. Karl Lashley once quoted a colleague of his, a professor of psychology, who told him: 'When I have to give a lecture I turn 'my mouth loose and go to sleep.'
Thus consciousness may be described, somewhat perversely, as that special attribute of an activity which decreases in direct proportion to habit formation. The condensation of learning into habit is accompanied by a dimming of the lights of awareness. We expect therefore that the opposite process will take place when routine is disturbed by running into some unexpected obstacle or problem: that this will cause an instantaneous switch from 'mechanical' to 'minding' or 'mindful' behaviour. Let a kitten suddenly cross the road on which you have been driving absent-mindedly, and your previously absent mind will return in a flash to take over control, i.e., to make an instant decision whether to run over the kitten or risk the safety of your passengers by slamming on the brakes. What happens in such a crisis is a sudden transfer of control of an ongoing activity to a higher level of the multilevelled hierarchy, because the decision to be made is beyond the competence of the automatic pilot and must be referred to 'higher quarters'. In the present theory this sudden shift of the control of behaviour from a lower to a higher level of the hierarchy -- analogous to the physicist's quantum jump -- is the essence of conscious decision-making and of the subjective experience of free will.
The opposite process, as we have seen, is the mechanization of routines, the enslavement to habit. We thus arrive at a dynamic view of a continuous two-way traffic up and down the mind-body hierarchy. The automatization of habits and skills implies a steady downward motion as on a moving escalator, thus making room in the upper strata for more sophisticated activities -- but also threatening to turn us into automata. Each downward step is a transition from the mental to the mechanical; each upward shift in the hierarchy produces more vivid and structured states of consciousness.
These alternations between robot-like and luminous behaviour are, as I said, a matter of everyday experience. On some rare occasions, however, creative people experience a quick oscillation -- a reculer pour mieux sauter -- from the over-articulated, over-specialized strata in the cognitive hierarchy down to more primitive and fluid levels, and up again to a re-structured upper level.
2
Classical dualism knows only a single mind-body barrier. The holarchic approach on which the present theory is based implies a pluralistic instead of a dualistic view: the transformation of physical events into mental events, and vice versa, is effected not by a single leap over a single barrier, but by a whole series of steps up or down through the swing-gates of the multi-levelled hierarchy.
As a concrete example, let us remember (Chapter I, 6) how we convert air-waves arriving at the ear-drum, which are physical events, into ideas, which are mental events. It isn't done 'in one go'. In order to decode the message which the air-pulsations carry the listener must perform a rapid series of 'quantum jumps' from one level of the language hierarchy to the next higher one: phonemes have no meaning and can only be interpreted on the level of morphemes; words must be referred to their context, sentences to a larger frame of reference. Active speech -- the spelling out of a previously unverbalized idea or image -- involves the reverse process: it converts mental events into the mechanical motions of the vocal cords. This again is achieved by a whole intermediate series of rapid but distinct steps, each of which triggers off linguistic routines of a more and more automatized type: the structuring of the intended message into a linear sequence, processing it according to the silent dictates of grammar and syntax; and lastly, innervating the entirely mechanical motion-patterns of the organs of speech. Noam Chomsky's psycholinguistic hierarchy was anticipated in A Midsummer Night's Dream:
As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Let me repeat: each downward step in the stepwise conversion of airy nothings into the physical motions of the vocal cords entails a transfer of control to more automatized automatisms; each step upward leads to more mentalistic processes of mentation. Thus the mind-body dichotomy is not localized along a single boundary or interface, as in classical dualism, but is present on every intermediary level of the hierarchy.
On this view, the categorical distinction between mind and body fades away, and instead of it 'mental' and 'mechanical' become complementary attributes of processes on every level. The dominance of one of these attributes over the other -- whether the activity of knotting my tie is performed mindfully or mechanically -- depends on the flow of traffic in the hierarchy, whether the shifts of control proceed in an upward or downward direction through the swing-gates. Thus even the lower, visceral reaches of the hierarchy, regulated by the autonomic nervous system, can apparently be brought under mental control through Yoga practices or biofeedback methods. And vice versa -- to say it once more -- when I am sleepy or bored, I can perform the supposedly mental activity of reading a paper -- without 'taking in' a single word.
We are in the habit of talking of 'mind' as if it were a thing, whic
h it is not -- nor is matter, for that matter. Mentating, thinking, remembering, imagining are processes in a reciprocal or complementary relationship to mechanical processes. At this point of the argument modern physics provides us with a pertinent analogy: the so-called 'Principle of Complementarity', which is fundamental to its whole theoretical structure. It states, put into non-technical language, that the elementary constituents of matter -- electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. -- are ambiguous, Janus-faced entities which under certain conditions behave like solid corpuscles, but under other conditions behave like waves in a non-substantial medium. Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate and one of the pioneers in sub-atomic physics, commented:
The concept of Complementarity is meant to describe a situation in which we can look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference. These two frames mutually exclude each other, but they also complement each other, and only the juxtaposition of these contradictory frames provides an exhaustive view . . . What we call Complementarity accords very neatly with the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind. [3]
Although this refers to classical dualism and not to the plurality of levels proposed here, the analogy retains its attractiveness. The knowledge that an electron will behave as a particle or a wave, depending on the experimental set-up, makes it easier to accept that man too will, according to circumstances, function as an automaton or a conscious being.
Another Nobel laureate, Wolfgang Pauli, thought along similar lines:
The general problem of the relationship between mind and body, between the inward and the outward, cannot be said to have been solved . . . Modern science has perhaps brought us nearer to a more satisfactory understanding of this relationship by introducing the concept of complementarity into physics itself. [4]
One might add to these quotations almost any amount of similar pronouncements by the pioneers of contemporary physics. It is evident that they regard the parallel between the two types of complementarity -- body/mind and corpuscle/wave -- as more than a superficial analogy. It is, in fact, a very deep analogy, but in order to appreciate what it implies, we must try to get some inkling of what the physicist means by the 'waves' which constitute one of the two aspects of matter. Commonsense, that treacherous counsellor, tells us that to produce a wave, there must be something that waves -- a vibrating piano -- string, or undulating water, or air in motion. But the conception of 'matter-waves' excludes by definition any medium with material attributes as a carrier of the wave. Thus we are faced with the task of imagining the vibration of a string but without the string, or the grin of the Cheshire cat but without the cat. We may, however, derive some comfort from the analogy between the two complementarities. The contents of consciousness that pass through the mind, from the perception of colour to thoughts and images, are un-substantial 'airy nothings', yet they are somehow linked to the material brain, as the unsubstantial 'waves' of physics are somehow linked to the material aspects of the sub-atomic particles.
It seems that the dual aspect of man reflects the dual aspect of the ultimate constituents of the universe.
3
The 'spelling out' of an intention -- whether it is the verbal articulation of an idea or just the stubbing out of a cigarette -- is a process which triggers successive sub-routines into action -- functional holons from arithmetical skills down to mechanical muscle-contractions: in other words, it is a process of particularizations of a general intent. Vice versa, the referring of decisions to higher levels is an integrative process which tends to produce a higher degree of coordination and wholeness of the experience. How does the problem of free will fit into this schema?
We have seen that all our bodily and mental skills are governed by fixed rules and more or less flexible strategies. The rules of chess define the permissible moves, strategy determines the choice of the actual move. The problem of free will then boils down to the question how such choices are made. The chess player's choice may be called 'free' in the sense that it is not determined by the rules. But though his choice is free in the above sense, it is certainly not random. On the contrary, it is guided by considerations of a much greater complexity -- involving a higher level of the hierarchy -- than the simple rules of the game. Compare the game of noughts and crosses with the game of chess. In both cases my strategic choice of the next move is 'free' in the sense of not being determined by the rules. But noughts and crosses offer only a few alternative choices guided by relatively simple strategies, whereas the chess player is guided by considerations on a much higher level of complexity with an incomparably larger variety of choices -- that is, more degrees of freedom.* Moreover, the strategic considerations which guide his choice again form an ascending hierarchy. On the lowest level are tactical precepts such as occupying the centre squares of the chessboard, avoiding loss of material, protecting the king -- precepts which every duffer can master, but which the master is free to overrule by shifting his attention to higher levels of strategy where material may be sacrificed and the king exposed in an apparently crazy move which, however, is more promising from the viewpoint of the game as a whole. Thus in the course of the game, decisions have to be constantly referred to higher echelons with more degrees of freedom, and each shift upward is accompanied by a heightening of awareness and the experience of making a free choice. Generally speaking, in these sophisticated domains the constraining code of rules (whether of chess or of the grammar of speech) operates more or less automatically, on unconscious or preconscious levels, whereas the strategic choices are aided by the beam of focal awareness.
* The term 'degrees of freedom' is used in physics to denote the number of independent variables defining the state of a system.
To repeat: the degrees of freedom in the hierarchy increase with ascending order, and each upward shift of attention to higher levels, each handing over of a decision to higher echelons, is accompanied by the experience of free choice. But is it merely a subjective experience fraught with illusion? I do not think this is the case. After all, freedom cannot be defined in absolute, only in relative terms, as freedom from some specific constraint. The ordinary prisoner has more freedom than one in solitary confinement; democracy allows more freedom than tyranny; and so on. Similar gradations are found in the multilevelled hierarchies of thought and action, where with each step upwards to a higher level the relative importance of the constraints decreases and the number of choices increases. But this does not mean that there is a highest level free from all constraints. On the contrary, the present theory implies that the hierarchy is open-ended towards infinite regress, both in the upward and downward direction. We tend to believe that the ultimate responsibility rests with the apex of the hierarchy -- but that apex is never at rest, it keeps receding. The self eludes the grasp of its own awareness. Facing downward and outward, a person is aware of the task in hand, an awareness that fades with each step down into the dimness of routine, the darkness of visceral processes, the various degrees of unawareness of the growing cabbage and the falling stone, and finally dissolves in the ambiguity of the Janus-faced electron. But in the upward direction the hierarchy is also open-ended and leads into the infinite regress of the self. Looking upwards, or inwards, man has a feeling of wholeness, of a solid core to his personality from which his decisions emanate, and which in Penfield's words, 'controls his thinking and directs the searchlight of his attention'. But this metaphor of the great neuro-surgeon is deceptive. When a priest chides a penitent for indulging in sinful thoughts, both priest and penitent tacitly assume that behind the agency which switches on the sinful thoughts, there is another agency which controls the switchboard, and so on ad infinitum. The ultimate culprit, the self which directs the searchlight of my attention, can never be caught in its focal beam. The experiencing subject can never fully become the object of his experience; at best he can achieve successive approximations. If learning and knowing consist in making oneself a private model of the universe, it follows that the model can never include a complete mo
del of itself, because it must always lag one step behind the process which it is supposed to represent. With each upward-shift of awareness towards the apex of the hierarchy -- the self as an integrated whole -- it recedes like a mirage. 'Know thyself' is the most venerable and the most tantalizing command. Total awareness of the self, the identity of the knower and the known, though always in sight is never achieved. It could only be achieved by reaching the peak of the hierarchy, which is always one step removed from the climber.
This is an old conundrum, but it seems to blossom into new life in the context of the open-ended holarchy. Determinism fades away not only on the sub-atomic quantum level, but also in the upward direction, where on successively higher levels the constraints diminish, and the degrees of freedom increase, ad infinitum. At the same time the nightmarish concept of predictability and predestination is swallowed up in the infinite regress. Man is neither a plaything of the gods, nor a marionette suspended on his chromosomes. To put it more soberly, similar conclusions are implied in Sir Karl Popper's proposition that no information-processing system can embody within itself an up-to-date representation of itself, including that representation. [5] Somewhat similar arguments have been advanced by Michael Polanyi [6] and Donald MacKay. [7]
Some philosophers dislike the concept of infinite regress because it reminds them of the little man inside the little man inside the little man. But we cannot get away from the infinite. What would mathematics, what would physics be without the infinitesimal calculus? Self-consciousness has been compared to a mirror in which the individual contemplates his own activities. It would perhaps be more appropriate to compare it to a Hall of Mirrors where one mirror reflects one's reflection in another mirror, and so on. Infinity stares us in the face, whether we look at the stars or search for our own identities. Reductionism has no use for it, but a true science of life must let infinity in and never lose sight of it.
Janus: A Summing Up Page 26
