The Ghost in the Machine (31 page)

The Concept of Mind
(1949) Professor Gilbert Ryle,
an Oxford philosopher of strong Behaviourist leanings, attacked the
customary distinction made between physical and mental events by calling
the latter ('with deliberate abusiveness', as he said) the 'ghost in the
machine'. Subsequently in a BBC broadcast, he elaborated his metaphor,
and the ghost in the machine became a horse in a locomotive. [9]
Professor Ryle is a prominent representative of the so-called Oxford
School of Philosophy, which, in the words of one of its critics, 'treats
genuine thought as a disease' (Gellner [10]). This curious philosophical
aberration is now on the wane * and to hark back to it would arouse the
indignant protests of the S.P.C.D.H. (see
Appendix
Two
). Regardless of the verbal acrobatics of Behaviourists and their
allies, the fundamental problems of mind and matter, of free will versus
determinism, are still very much with us, and have acquired a new urgency
-- not as a subject of philosophical debate, but because of their direct
bearing on political ethics and private morals, on criminal justice,
psychiatry, and our whole outlook on life. By the very act of denying
the existence of the ghost in the machine -- of mind dependent on, but
also responsible for, the actions of the body -- we incur the risk of
turning it into a very nasty, malevolent ghost.

 

* See, inter alia, Smythies [11], John Beloff [12], Gellner [13]
and Kneale [14].

 

Before the advent of Behaviourism, it was the psychologists and logicians
who insisted that mental events have special characteristics which
distinguish them from material events, whereas the physiologists were by
and large inclined to take the materialist view that all mental events
can be reduced to the operation of the 'automatic telephone exchange'
in the brain. During the last fifty years, however, the situation has
been almost reversed. While Oxford dons kept snickering about the horse
in the locomotive, those men whose life work was devoted to the anatomy,
physiology, pathology and surgery of the brain became increasingly
converted to the opposite view. It could be summed up in a sigh of
resignation: 'Oh, Brain is Brain, and Mind is Mind, and we don't know how
the twain meet.' Let me give an illustration of the type of experiment
which led them to that conclusion.

 

 

One of the greatest living neurosurgeons is Wilder Penfield of McGill
University, who has evolved new techniques of experimenting on the exposed
brain of consenting patients undergoing an operation. The patient is
conscious; the experiments -- which are painless -- consist in applying
low-voltage currents to selected points on the surface of the cerebral
cortex. As the cortex is insensitive, the patient is unaware of the
stimulating current, but he is aware of the movements which the current
causes him to execute. Penfield reports:

 

When the neurosurgeon applies an electrode to the motor area of the
patient's cerebral cortex causing the opposite hand to move, and when
he asks the patient why he moved the hand, the response is: 'I didn't
do it. You made me do it.' . . . It may be said that the patient
thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.
Once when I warned such a patient of my intention to stimulate
the motor areas of the cortex, and challenged him to keep his hand
from moving when the electrode was applied, he seized it with the
other hand and struggled to hold it still. Thus, one hand, under
the control of the right hemisphere driven by an electrode, and the
other hand, which he controlled through the left hemisphere, were
caused to struggle against each other. Behind the 'brain action'
of one hemisphere was the patient's mind. Behind the action of the
other hemisphere was the electrode. [15]

 

Penfield concluded his memorable paper:*

 

There are, as you see, many demonstrable mechanisms [in the brain].
They work for the purposes of the mind automatically when called
upon. . . . But what agency is it that calls upon these mechanisms,
choosing one rather than another? Is it another mechanism or is there
in the mind something of different essence? . . . To declare that
these two things are one does not make them so. But it does block
the progress of research. [16]
* Delivered at the 'Control of the Mind' Symposium at the University
of California Medical Centre in San Francisco, 1961.

 

It is interesting to compare the reaction of Penfield's patients with
the reaction of subjects who are made to carry out a post-hypnotic
suggestion -- changing chairs, or touching their ankles, or saying
'February' when they hear the word 'three'. In both cases the subject's
actions have been caused by the experimenter; but whereas the subject who
does not know that he is obeying a post-hynoptic command automatically
finds a more or less plausible rationalisation why he touched his ankle,
Penfield's patients realise that they are obeying a physical compulsion:
'I never had a patient say, "I just wanted to do that anyway!"' One is
tempted to say that the hypnotist imposes his will on the subject's mind
-- the surgeon merely on his brain.

 

 

Two recent symposia on "Control of the Mind" (1961) [17] and "Brain and
Conscious Experience" (1966) [18] were impressive demonstrations of the
swing of the pendulum. Sir Charles Sherrington, perhaps the greatest
neurologist of the century, was no longer alive, but his approach to
the mind-body problem was repeatedly invoked as a kind of leitmotiv:
'That our being should consist of
two
fundamental elements offers, I
suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one
only. . . . We have to regard the relation of mind to brain as still not
merely unsolved, but still devoid of a basis of its very beginning.' [19]

 

 

 

The Stage and the Actors

 

 

However, if the flat-earthers have signally failed to demonstrate their
contention that the mind-body problem is a pseudo-problem, it would be
equally foolish to go to the other extreme and revert to crass Cartesian
dualism. Nor would there be much point in going over once more the various
theories which have been put forward to bridge the gulf -- interaction,
parallelism, epiphenomenalism, identity-hypothesis, and so forth.* Let
us inquire instead whether the conception of the open-ended hierarchy
can shed any new light on this very old problem.

 

* Apart from the symposia mentioned previously, which approach the
problem from the neurophysiological point of view, an excellent
philosophical symposium has recently been edited by J.R. Smythies,
Brain and Mind (1965).

 

The first, and at the same time decisive, step is to break away from
thinking in terms of a two-tiered mind-matter dichotomy, and start
thinking in terms of a multi-levelled hierarchy. Matter is no longer
a unitary concept; the hierarchy of macroscopic, molecular, atomic,
subatomic levels trails away without hitting rock-bottom, until matter
dissolves into patterns of energy-concentration, and then perhaps into
tensions in space. In the opposite direction we are faced with the same
situation: there is an ascending series of levels, leading from automatic
and semi-automatic reactions, through awareness and self-awareness,
to the self's awareness of its awareness of itself, and so on, without
hitting a ceiling.

 

 

The Cartesian tradition to identify 'mind' with 'conscious thinking' is
deeply engrained in our habits of thought, and makes us constantly forget
the obvious, trivial fact that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing
affair but a
matter of degrees
. There is a continuous scale of
gradations which extends from the unconsciousness that results from
being hit on the head, through the restricted forms of consciousness
in dreamless sleep, dreaming, day-dreaming, drowsiness, epileptic
automatisms, and so on, up to bright, wide-awake states of arousal. These
are the general states of consciousness which determine the amount
of lighting -- darker or brighter -- of the stage on which the mental
activity takes place. But the lower end of the scale extends far below
the human level: ethologists who spend their lives observing animals
refuse to draw a lower limit for consciousness, while neurophysiologists
talk of 'spinal consciousness' in lower animals, and biologists of the
'protoplasmic consciousness' of protists.* Bergson even asserted that
'the unconsciousness of a falling stone is something different from the
unconsciousness of a growing cabbage'.

 

* Such as the foraminifera, mentioned before (Chapter XI),
which construct microscopic houses out of spicules of dead sponges --
houses which Hardy calls 'marvels of engineering skill, as if built
to a plan'. Yet these single-called creatures have of course no
nervous system.

 

The states of consciousness in man are easily influenced by drugs which
alter the overall functioning of the brain; but also by the type of
activity that goes on on the stage -- whether, lying in bed, I am thinking
of the coming holidays, or counting sheep. Thus we have the paradoxical
situation of a feedback loop where the actor's activities automatically
brighten or darken the stage-lights -- which in turn influence the
actions of the actors. Dreaming and other 'games of the underground'
obey rules of acting different from those of the fully lit stage.

 

 

We must distinguish, however, between these
general states of
consciousness
-- degrees of wakefulness, fatigue, intoxication --
and the degree of
awareness of a specific activity
. The first
refers to 'being conscious', the second to 'being conscious
of
something'. The first corresponds to the overall lighting of the stage,
the second to the beam concentrated on a particular actor. That the two
are interrelated we have already seen. But awareness of a particular
ongoing activity has its own variable scale. In man, this scale extends
from the silent, self-regulating activities of viscerae and glands,
of physiological processes of which we are normally unaware, through
perceptions on the fringes of awareness, to automatised routines which
we perform mechanically like a robot; and finally up to concentrating
on a problem by directing on it the beam of focal awareness -- one actor
singled out on the stage, the rest of which is plunged into darkness.

 

 

 

Shifts of Control

 

 

But now we come to an important point. We have seen
(in
Chapter VIII
) that one and the same activity
-- driving a car, for instance -- can be, according to circumstances,
either carried out automatically without conscious awareness of one's
own actions, or accompanied by varying degrees of awareness. Driving on
a familiar quiet road, I can hand over to the 'automatic pilot' in my
nervous system, and think about something else. Overtaking other cars
on a motorway is mostly a kind of semi-conscious routine; overtaking in
a tricky situation requires full awareness of what I am doing. These
alternative possibilities apply not only to sensory-motor skills such
as driving, bicycling, typing, playing the piano, but also to cognitive
skills such as adding up a column of numbers, or 'turning one's mouth
loose' to give a lecture -- as
Lashley's friend
did (
Chapter II
).

 

 

There seem to be several factors which determine how much, if any,
conscious attention is to be paid to an ongoing activity. First,
the acquisition of a skill by learning requires a high degree of
concentration, whereas with increasing mastery and practice it can be
left 'to look after itself'; which is another way of saying that the
rules which govern rule-governed behaviour -- the canon of the skill --
function unconsciously; and this again applies equally to manipulative,
perceptual and cognitive skills. The process of condensation of learning
into habit goes on all the time, and amounts to a continual transformation
of 'mental' into 'mechanical' activity -- of 'mind-processes' into
'machine-processes'.

 

 

Thus consciousness may be described in a negative way as the
quality accompanying an activity
which decreases in proportion
to habit-formation
. The transformation of learning into routine
is accompanied by a dimming of the lights of awareness. We expect,
therefore, that the opposite process will take place when routine is
disturbed: that it will cause a change from 'mechanical' to 'mindful'
behaviour. Everyday-experience confirms this; but what are the
implications?

 

 

Habits and skills are functional holons, each with a fixed canon of
rules and flexible strategies. Flexible strategies imply choices
between several alternatives. The question is how these choices
are made. Automatised routines are self-regulating in the sense
that their strategy is automatically guided by feedbacks from their
environments, without the necessity of referring decisions to higher
levels. They operate by closed feedback loops, like servo-mechanisms
or radar-controlled aeroplane landing devices. I have mentioned
(
p. 99
) the boy on his bicycle and the
tightrope-walker keeping his balance with the aid of a bamboo stick, as
examples of such 'kinetic homeostasis'. The tightrope-walker certainly
executes very supple, flexible manoeuvres, but they do not require
conscious decisions; the visual and kinaesthetic feedback provides all
the guidance needed. The same applies to driving a car -- so long as
nothing unexpected happens, such as a kitten crossing the road. At
that moment, a strategic choice has to be made which is beyond the
competence of automatised routine,* and must be referred to 'higher
quarters'.
This shift of control
of an ongoing activity from one
level to a higher level of the hierarchy -- from 'mechanical' to 'mindful'
behaviour -- seems to be of the essence of conscious decision-making
and of the subjective experience of free will. It is what the patient on
the operating table experiences when he consciously tries with his left
hand to restrain the machine-like motion of his right hand -- and which,
as Penfield says, makes him 'think of himself as having an existence
separate from his body'.