What Is Life (Canto Classics) Page 10

  It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful, while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the facts upon which the plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls.

  Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official Western creeds. Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naïve idea of plurality of souls, but ‘remedy’ it by declaring the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies?

  The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.

  There are, of course, elaborate ghost-stories fixed in our minds to hamper our acceptance of such simple recognition. E.g. it has been said that there is a tree there outside my window but I do not really see the tree. By some cunning device of which only the initial, relatively simple steps are explored, the real tree throws an image of itself into my consciousness, and that is what I perceive. If you stand by my side and look at the same tree, the latter manages to throw an image into your soul as well. I see my tree and you see yours (remarkably like mine), and what the tree in itself is we do not know. For this extravagance Kant is responsible. In the order of ideas which regards consciousness as a singulare tantum it is conveniently replaced by the statement that there is obviously only one tree and all the image business is a ghost-story.

  Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as ‘I’ What is this ‘I’?

  If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. ‘The youth that was I’, you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore.

  Nor will there ever be.

  NOTE TO THE EPILOGUE

  The point of view taken here levels with what Aldous Huxley has recently – and very appropriately – called The Perennial Philosophy. His beautiful book (London, Chatto and Windus, 1946) is singularly fit to explain not only the state of affairs, but also why it is so difficult to grasp and so liable to meet with opposition.

  MIND AND MATTER

  The Tarner Lectures

  delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge,

  in October 1956

  To

  my famous and

  beloved friend

  HANS HOFF

  in deep devotion

  CHAPTER 1

  The Physical Basis of Consciousness

  THE PROBLEM

  The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simpler: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?

  A rationalist may be inclined to deal curtly with this question, roughly as follows. From our own experience, and as regards the higher animals from analogy, consciousness is linked up with certain kinds of events in organized, living matter, namely, with certain nervous functions. How far back or ‘down’ in the animal kingdom there is still some sort of consciousness, and what it may be like in its early stages, are gratuitous speculations, questions that cannot be answered and which ought to be left to idle dreamers. It is still more gratuitous to indulge in thoughts about whether perhaps other events as well, events in inorganic matter, let alone all material events, are in some way or other associated with consciousness. All this is pure fantasy, as irrefutable as it is unprovable, and thus of no value for knowledge.

  He who accepts this brushing aside of the question ought to be told what an uncanny gap he thereby allows to remain in his picture of the world. For the turning-up of nerve cells and brains within certain strains of organisms is a very special event whose meaning and significance is quite well understood. It is a special kind of mechanism by which the individual responds to alternative situations by accordingly alternating behaviour, a mechanism for adaptation to a changing surrounding. It is the most elaborate and the most ingenious among all such mechanisms, and wherever it turns up it rapidly gains a dominating role. However, it is not sui generis. Large groups of organisms, in particular the plants, achieve very similar performances in an entirely different fashion.

  Are we prepared to believe that this very special turn in the development of the higher animals, a turn that might after all have failed to appear, was a necessary condition for the world to flash up to itself in the light of consciousness? Would it otherwise have remained a play before empty benches, not existing for anybody, thus quite properly speaking not existing? This would seem to me the bankruptcy of a world picture. The urge to find a way out of this impasse ought not to be damped by the fear of incurring the wise rationalists’ mockery.

  According to Spinoza every particular thing or being is a modification of the infinite substance, i.e. of God. It expresses itself by each of his attributes, in particular that of extension and that of thought. The first is its bodily existence in space and time, the second is – in the case of a living man or animal – his mind. But to Spinoza any inanimate bodily thing is at the same time also ‘a thought of God’, that is, it exists in the second attribute as well. We encounter here the bold thought of universal animation, though not for the first time, not even in Western philosophy. Two thousand years earlier the Ionian philosophers acquired from it the surname of hylozoists. After Spinoza the genius of Gustav Theodor Fechner did not shy at attributing a soul to a plant, to the earth as a celestial body, to the planetary system, etc. I do not fall in with these fantasies, yet I should not like to have to pass judgment as to who has come nearer to the deepest truth, Fechner or the bankrupts of rationalism.

  A TENTATIVE ANSWER

  You see that all the attempts at extending the domain of consciousness, asking oneself whether anything of the sort might be reasonably associated with other than nervous processes, needs must run into unproved and unprovable speculation. But we tread on firmer ground when we start in the opposite direction. Not every nervous process, nay by no means every cerebral process, is accompanied by consciousness. Many of them are not, even though p
hysiologically and biologically they are very much like the ‘conscious’ ones, both in frequently consisting of afferent impulses followed by efferent ones, and in their biological significance of regulating and timing reactions partly inside the system, partly towards a changing environment. In the first instance we meet here with the reflex actions in the vertebral ganglia and in that part of the nervous system which they control. But also (and this we shall make our special study) many reflexive processes exist that do pass through the brain, yet do not fall into consciousness at all or have very nearly ceased to do so. For in the latter case the distinction is not sharp; intermediate degrees between fully conscious and completely unconscious occur. By examining various representatives of physiologically very similar processes, all playing within our own body, it ought not to be too difficult to find out by observation and reasoning the distinctive characteristics we are looking for.

  To my mind the key is to be found in the following well-known facts. Any succession of events in which we take part with sensations, perceptions and possibly with actions gradually drops out of the domain of consciousness when the same string of events repeats itself in the same way very often. But it is immediately shot up into the conscious region, if at such a repetition either the occasion or the environmental conditions met with on its pursuit differ from what they were on all the previous incidences. Even so, at first anyhow, only those modifications or ‘differentials’ intrude into the conscious sphere that distinguish the new incidence from previous ones and thereby usually call for ‘new considerations’. Of all this each of us can supply dozens of examples out of personal experience, so that I may forgo enumerating any at the moment.

  The gradual fading from consciousness is of outstanding importance to the entire structure of our mental life, which is wholly based on the process of acquiring practice by repetition, a process which Richard Semon has generalized to the concept of Mneme, about which we shall have more to say later. A single experience that is never to repeat itself is biologically irrelevant. Biological value lies only in learning the suitable reaction to a situation that offers itself again and again, in many cases periodically, and always requires the same response if the organism is to hold its ground. Now from our own inner experience we know the following. On the first few repetitions a new element turns up in the mind, the ‘already met with’ or ‘notal’ as Richard Avenarius has called it. On frequent repetition the whole string of events becomes more and more of a routine, it becomes more and more uninteresting, the responses become ever more reliable according as they fade from consciousness. The boy recites his poem, the girl plays her piano sonata ‘well-nigh in their sleep’. We follow the habitual path to our workshop, cross the road at the customary places, turn into side-streets, etc., whilst our thoughts are occupied with entirely different things. But whenever the situation exhibits a relevant differential – let us say the road is up at the place where we used to cross it, so that we have to make a detour – this differential and our response to it intrude into consciousness, from which, however, they soon fade below the threshold, if the differential becomes a constantly repeated feature. Faced with changing alternatives, bifurcations develop and may be fixed in the same way. We branch off to the University Lecture Rooms or to the Physics Laboratory at the right point without much thinking, provided that both are frequently occurring destinations.

  Now in this fashion differentials, variants of response, bifurcations, etc., are piled up one upon the other in unsurveyable abundance, but only the most recent ones remain in the domain of consciousness, only those with regard to which the living substance is still in the stage of learning or practising. One might say, metaphorically, that consciousness is the tutor who supervises the education of the living substance, but leaves his pupil alone to deal with all those tasks for which he is already sufficiently trained. But I wish to underline three times in red ink that I mean this only as a metaphor. The fact is only this, that new situations and the new responses they prompt are kept in the light of consciousness; old and well practised ones are no longer so.

  Hundreds and hundreds of manipulations and performances of everyday life had all to be learnt once, and that with great attentiveness and painstaking care. Take for example a small child’s first attempts in walking. They are eminently in the focus of consciousness; the first successes are hailed by the peformer with shouts of joy. When the adult laces his boots, switches on the light, takes off his clothes in the evening, eats with knife and fork …, these performances, that all had to be toilsomely learnt, do not in the least disturb him in the thoughts in which he may just be engaged. This may occasionally result in comical miscarriages. There is the story of a famous mathematician, whose wife is said to have found him lying in his bed, the lights switched off, shortly after an invited evening party had gathered in his house. What had happened? He had gone to his bedroom to put on a fresh shirt-collar. But the mere action of taking off the old collar had released in the man, deeply entrenched in thought, the string of performances that habitually followed in its wake.

  Now this whole state of affairs, so well known from the ontogeny of our mental life, seems to me to shed light on the phylogeny of unconscious nervous processes, as in the heart beat, the peristalsis of the bowels, etc. Faced with nearly constant or regularly changing situations, they are very well and reliably practised and have, therefore, long ago dropped from the sphere of consciousness. Here too we find intermediate grades, for example, breathing, that usually goes on inadvertently, but may on account of differentials in the situation, say in smoky air or in an attack of asthma, become modified and conscious. Another instance is the bursting into tears for sorrow, joy or bodily pain, an event which, though conscious, can hardly be influenced by will. Also comical miscarriages of a mnemically inherited nature occur, as the bristling of the hair by terror, the ceasing of secretion of saliva on intense excitement, responses which must have had some significance in the past, but have lost it in the case of man.

  I doubt whether everybody will readily agree with the next step, which consists in extending these notions to other than nervous processes. For the moment I shall only briefly hint at it, though to me personally it is the most important one. For this generalization precisely sheds light on the problem from which we started: What material events are associated with, or accompanied by, consciousness, what not? The answer that I suggest is as follows: What in the preceding we have said and shown to be a property of nervous processes is a property of organic processes in general, namely, to be associated with consciousness inasmuch as they are new.

  In the notion and terminology of Richard Semon the ontogeny not only of the brain but of the whole individual soma is the ‘well memorized’ repetition of a string of events that have taken place in much the same fashion a thousand times before. Its first stages, as we know from our own experience, are unconscious – first in the mother’s womb; but even the ensuing weeks and months of life are for the greatest part passed in sleep. During this time the infant carries on an evolution of old standing and habit, in which it meets with conditions that from case to case vary very little. The ensuing organic development begins to be accompanied by consciousness only inasmuch as there are organs that gradually take up interaction with the environment, adapt their functions to the changes in the situation, are influenced, undergo practice, are in special ways modified by the surroundings. We higher vertebrates possess such an organ mainly in our nervous system. Therefore consciousness is associated with those of its functions that adapt themselves by what we call experience to a changing environment. The nervous system is the place where our species is still engaged in phylogenetic transformation; metaphorically speaking it is the ‘vegetation top’ (Vegetationsspitze) of our stem. I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how (Können) is unconscious.

  ETHICS

  Even without this last generalization, which to me is very
important but may still seem rather dubious to others, the theory of consciousness that I have adumbrated seems to pave the way towards a scientific understanding of ethics.

  At all epochs and with all peoples the background of every ethical code (Tugendlehre) to be taken seriously has been, and is, self-denial (Selbstüberwindung). The teaching of ethics always assumes the form of a demand, a challenge, of a ‘thou shalt’, that is in some way opposed to our primitive will. Whence comes this peculiar contrast between the ‘I will’ and the ‘thou shalt’? Is it not absurd that I am supposed to suppress my primitive appetites, disown my true self, be different from what I really am? Indeed in our days, more perhaps than in others, we hear this demand often enough mocked at. ‘I am as I am, give room to my individuality! Free development to the desires that nature has planted in me! All the shalls that oppose me in this are nonsense, priests’ fraud. God is Nature, and Nature may be credited with having formed me as she wants me to be.’ Such slogans are heard occasionally. It is not easy to refute their plain and brutal obviousness. Kant’s imperative is avowedly irrational.

  But fortunately the scientific foundation of these slogans is worm-eaten. Our insight into the ‘becoming’ (das Werden) of the organisms makes it easy to understand that our conscious life – I will not say shall be, but that it actually is necessarily a continued fight against our primitive ego. For our natural self, our primitive will with its innate desires, is obviously the mental correlate of the material bequest received from our ancestors. Now as a species we are developing, and we march in the front-line of generations; thus every day of a man’s life represents a small bit of the evolution of our species, which is still in full swing. It is true that a single day of one’s life, nay even any individual life as a whole, is but a minute blow of the chisel at the ever unfinished statue. But the whole enormous evolution we have gone through in the past, it too has been brought about by myriads of such minute chisel blows. The material for this transformation, the presupposition for its taking place, are of course the inheritable spontaneous mutations. However, for selection among them, the behaviour of the carrier of the mutation, his habits of life, are of outstanding importance and decisive influence. Otherwise the origin of species, the ostensibly directed trends along which selection proceeds, could not be understood even in the long spaces of time which are after all limited and whose limits we know quite well.