The Ghost in the Machine (32 page)

 

* In computer language we would have to say: 'for which it has not
been programmed'.

 

 

The Serial View

 

 

But at this point we risk once more falling back into simple two-tiered
Cartesian dualism. The patient with his brain exposed is, of course,
an exceptional and extreme case. The driver, who has to make a fast
decision whether to run over the kitten or risk the safety of his
passengers, does not think of his ego as leading 'an existence separate
from his body'. What happens in the moment of crisis is a sudden shift
to a higher level in a many-levelled hierarchy, from a semi-automatic
to a more conscious performance which is a relative, not an absolute,
affair. And, whatever the conscious decision, its execution -- the
'spelling-out process' -- must still rely on the automatised sub-skills
(braking, swerving, etc.) on lower levels.

 

 

'Consciousness', to quote Thorpe, 'is a primary datum of existence and
as such it cannot be fully defined. . . . [20] The evidence suggests
that at the lower levels [of the evolutionary scale] consciousness, if
it exists, must be of a very generalised 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.' [21]

 

 

What I am suggesting is that such gradings of 'structuring, vividness
and precision' are found not only along the ladder of evolution, but
also among members of the same species, and within the same individual
at different stages of development and in different situations. Each
'upward' shift in the hierarchy leads to more vivid and structured
conscious states, each downward shift has the opposite effect. Let me
briefly elaborate on this.

 

 

Only a fraction of the sensory input to the cerebral cortex reaches
consciousness, and again only a fraction of this is highlighted by
focal awareness. But inputs which become conscious at all have already
been processed and transformed: certain ranges of electro-magnetic
waves have taken on the subjective qualities of colours, airwaves the
qualities of pitch, and so forth. This is the first step in the serial
process of promoting 'physical events' into 'mental events', and some
philosophers regard it as the basic mystery, while others are unable to
see the problem, and point out that bees, too, for instance, perceive
patterns and colours, and dogs have their private universes of smell. I
shall deliberately evade this deadlocked controversy, because the same
problem arises with each shift upward in the hierarchies of perceiving,
doing, knowing. Air vibrations do not become music in one single, magic
transformation from the physical to the mental, but by a whole series
of operations, of abstracting patterns in time and assembling them into
more comprehensive patterns on higher levels of the hierarchy. The
conscious appreciation of music depends on this, and the degree of
'musical awareness' corresponds to the degree of integration of melodic,
harmonic, contrapuntal patterns into a coherent whole.

 

 

As another example, reverting to the
discussion in
Chapter II
, consider how we convert variations of air pressure into
ideas, and back again. Understanding language depends on a constantly
repeated series of 'quantum jumps', so to speak, from one level of the
speech hierarchy to the next higher one: phonemes can only be interpreted
on the level of morphemes, words must be referred to context, sentences
to the larger context; and behind the meaning stands the intention,
the unverbalised idea, the train of thoughts. But trains need pointsmen
to guide them on their course. The pointsmen need instructions. And
so on. Infinite regress is not an invention of philosophers. In one
of Alfred Hayes' short stories* the heroine reflects on the chain of
events which led to the accidental death of her child:

 

'Because we always think of things as happening in some sort of
succession. And then we say: because. Thinking the because
explains. And then you examine the because, as I've done, oh, so many
times since, and it opens up and inside there's another because,
smaller, a because inside the other because, and you keep opening
them and they keep disclosing other becauses. . . . '
* The Beach at Ocean View.

 

Classical dualism knows only a single mind-body barrier. The hierarchic
approach implies
a serialistic instead of a dualistic view
.
Each in the series of upward shifts in assimilating music or language
amounts to the crossing of a barrier from lower to higher states of
awareness. The 'spelling out' of an idea is the reverse process: it
converts 'airy nothings' into the mechanical motion of the organs of
speech. This too is done by a series of steps, each of which triggers
off pre-set neural 'mechanisms' of a more and more automatised type. The
unverbalised image or idea which sets the process going pertains to a more
'mentalistic', ethereal level than its embodiment in speech; the invisible
sentence-generating machinery works unconsciously, automatically, and
can be thrown out of gear by damage to well-defined areas of the cortex;
and the last step of articulating the sounds of speech is performed by
entirely mechanised muscle contractions. Each step downward entails a
handing-over of responsibility to more automatised automatisms; each
step upward to more mentalistic processes of mentation. The mind-machine
dichotomy is not localised along a single boundary between ego and
environment, but is present on every level of the hierarchy. It is,
in fact, a manifestation of our old friend, the two-faced god Janus.

 

 

To put it in a different way: the 'spelling out' of an intent -- whether
it is a verbal intent or just the lighting of a cigarette -- is a process
of
particularisation
, of setting sub-routines into motion, functional
holons of a subordinate, autonomous part-character. On the other hand,
the referring of decisions to higher levels, as well as the
interpretation and generalisation of inputs, are integrative processes
which tend to establish a higher degree of unity and
wholeness
of experience. Thus every upward shift or 'quantum jump' in the
hierarchy would represent a quasi-holistic move, every downward shift a
particularistic move, the former characterised by heightened awareness and
mentalistic attributes, the latter by dimming awareness and mechanistic
attributes.

 

 

Consciousness in this view is an
emergent
quality, which evolves
into more complex and structured states in phylogeny, as the ultimate
manifestation of the Integrative Tendency towards the creation of order
out of disorder, of 'information' out of 'noise'. To quote another
outstanding neurophysiologist of our time, R.W. Sperry (his italics):

 

Prior to the first appearance of conscious awareness in evolution,
the entire cosmic process, science tells us, was only, as someone
has phrased it, 'A play before empty benches', colourless and silent
at that because, according to our present physics, prior to the
advent of brains there was no colour and no sound
in the universe, nor was there any flavour or aroma and probably
rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the
universe was also free of pain and anxiety. . . . There is no more
important quest in the whole of science probably than the attempt to
understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains
worked out that special trick that enabled them to add to the cosmic
scheme of things: colour, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other
facets of mental experience. [22]

 

 

The Flatworm's Ego

 

 

Looking upward -- or inward -- every man has the feeling that there
is in him a personality-core, or apex, 'which controls his thinking
and directs the searchlight of his attention' (Penfield), a feeling of
wholeness. Looking outward or downward he is only aware of the task at
hand, a partial kind of awareness which fades, in descending order,
into the dimness of routine, the unawareness of visceral processes,
of the growing cabbage and the falling stone.

 

 

But in the upward direction the hierarchy is equally open-ended.
The self which directs the searchlight of my attention can never
be caught in its focal beam. Even the operations which generate
language include processes which cannot be expressed by language
(
p. 33
). It is a paradox as old as Achilles and the
Tortoise, that 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
model 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 tantalising command.

 

* See Craik, The Nature of Explanation (1943),
one of the cornerstones of modern communication theory.

 

On the other hand, even man's limited, incomplete capacity for
self-awareness puts him into a category apart from other living
beings. Animals as lowly as the flatworm apparently show signs of
attentiveness and expectancy which could be called primitive forms of
awareness; primates and domestic pets may also have the rudiments of
self-awareness; but man nevertheless occupies a lone peak.

 

 

Now we have seen (
Chapter IV
) that if a flatworm
is cut transversely into six segments, each of them is capable of
regenerating into a complete animal, so that the classical dualist
would have to assume that its mind or soul has split into six 'solons'
(
p. 68
).
In the present theory, however, the self or mind is not regarded as a
discrete entity, a whole in an absolute sense; but each of its functional
holons in the many-levelled hierarchy -- from visceral regulations to
cognitive habits -- is regarded as having a measure of individuality,
with the Janus-faced attributes of partness and wholeness; and the
degree of their integratedness into a unified personality varies with
circumstances, but is never absolute. Total awareness of selfhood, the
identity of the knower and the known, though always in sight, is never
achieved. It could only be achieved at the peak of the hierarchy which
is always one step removed from the climber.

 

 

From this point of view, it is no longer absurd to assume that the
flatworm's fragments, whose tissues have reverted to the condition of
the growing embryo, have started all over again to build up a mind-body
hierarchy, perhaps even with its concomitant dim awareness of selfhood. If
consciousness is an emergent quality, the ugly paradox of the 'solon'
-- implicit in all Eastern and Platonic philosophy -- ceases to exist.

 

 

The slow emergence of awareness in phylogeny is reflected to some
extent in ontogeny. In the preceding chapter I quoted Piaget and
Freud on the newborn infant's fluid world of experience, which knows
as yet no boundaries between self and not-self. In a series of classic
studies Piaget has shown that the establishment of that boundary is a
gradual process, and that only around the age of seven or eight does
the average child become fully conscious of its own, separate, personal
identity. 'That particular ingredient of the ego [self-awareness] must
be built up by experience', Adrian commented. [23] But there is no end
to that building process.

 

 

 

A Road to Freedom

 

 

I have compared its successive stages to an infinite mathematical series
converging towards unity,* or to a spiral curve converging towards a
centre which it will only reach after an infinite number of involutions.

 

* The simplest series of this kind is:
S = (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + . . . 1/n),
where n has to approach infinity for the sum S to approach unity.

 

But the quest for the self is a rather abstract pastime for philosophers
and depth-psychologists; for ordinary mortals it assumes importance only
where moral decisions or the feeling of responsibility for one's past
actions -- in other words, the problem of free will -- is involved. The
puzzle concerning the agency which directs one's thinking, and of the
agency behind that agency, bothers one only when one feels guilty about
one's silly, or sinful, or idle thoughts -- or actions.

 

 

I like to imagine a dialogue at high table at an Oxford college,
between an elderly don of strictly deterministic persuasion, and a young
Australian guest of uninhibited temperament.

 

The Australian exclaims:
'If you go on denying that I am free in my decisions,
I'll punch your nose!'
The old man gets red in his face: 'I deplore your unpardonable
behaviour.'
'I apologise. I lost my temper.'
'You really ought to control yourself.'
'Thank you. The experiment was conclusive.'

 

It was indeed. 'Unpardonable', 'ought to', and 'control yourself'
are all expressions which imply that the Australian's behaviour was
not determined by heredity-cum-environment, that he was free to choose
whether to be polite or rude. Whatever one's philosophical convictions,
in everyday life it is impossible to carry on without the implicit belief
in personal responsibility; and responsibility implies freedom of choice.

 

 

If I may quote what I wrote much earlier on -- when I was still primarily
interested in the political implications of the problem: