The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

1 Jorge Luis Borges Borges and I[2]

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteen-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Reflections

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer, has a deserved international reputation, which creates a curious effect. Borges seems to himself to be two people, the public personage and the private person. His fame magnifies the effect, but we all can share the feeling, as he knows. You read your name on a list, or see a candid photograph of yourself, or overhear others talking about someone and suddenly realize it is you. Your mind must leap from a third-person perspective—“he” or “she”—to a first-person perspective—“I.” Comedians have long known how to exaggerate this leap: the classic “double-take” in which say, Bob Hope reads in the morning newspaper that Bob Hope is wanted by the police, casually comments on this fact, and then jumps up in alarm: “That’s me!”

While Robert Burns may be right that it is a gift to see ourselves as others see us, it is not a condition to which we could or should aspire at all times. In fact, several philosophers have recently presented brilliant arguments to show that there are two fundamentally and irreducibly different ways of thinking for ourselves. (See “Further Reading” for the details.) The arguments are quite technical, but the issues are fascinating and can be vividly illustrated.

Pete is waiting in line to pay for an item in a department store, and he notices that there is a closed-circuit television monitor over the counter—one of the store’s measures against shoplifters. As watches the jostling crowd of people on the monitor, he realizes that the person on the left side of the screen in the overcoat carrying the large paper bag is having his pocket picked by the person behind him. Then, as he raises his hand to his mouth in astonishment, he notices that the victim’s hand is moving to his mouth in just the same way. Pete suddenly realizes that he is the person whose pocket is being picked! This dramatic shift is a discovery; Pete comes to know something he didn’t know a moment before, and of course it is important. Without the capacity to entertain the sorts of thoughts that now galvanize him into defensive action, he would hardly be capable of action at all. But before the shift, he wasn’t entirely ignorant, of course; he was thinking about “the person in the overcoat” and seeing that the person was being robbed, and since the person in the overcoat is himself, he was thinking about himself. But he wasn’t thinking about himself as himself; he wasn’t thinking about himself “in the right way.”

For another example, imagine someone reading a book in which a descriptive noun phrase of, say, three dozen words in the first sentence of a paragraph portrays an unnamed person of initially indeterminate sex who is performing an everyday activity. The reader of that book, on reading the given phrase, obediently manufactures in his or her mind’s eye a simple, rather vague mental image of a person involved in some mundane activity. In the next few sentences, as more detail is added to the description, the reader’s mental image of the whole scenario comes into a little sharper focus. Ten at a certain moment, after the description has gotten quite specific, something suddenly “clicks,” and the reader gets an eerie sense that he or she is the very person being described! “How stupid of me not to recognize earlier that I was reading about myself!” the reader muses, feeling a little sheepish, but also quite tickled. You can probably imagine such a thing happening, but to help you imagine it more clearly, just suppose that the book involved was The Mind’s I. There now—doesn’t your mental image of the whole scenario come into a little sharper focus? Doesn’t it all suddenly “click”? What page did you imagine the reader as reading? What paragraph? What thoughts might have crossed the reader’s mind? If the reader were a real person, what might he or she be doing right now?

It is not easy to describe something of such special self-representation. Suppose a computer is programmed to control the locomotion and behaviour of a robot to which it is attached by radio links. (The famous “Shakey” at SRI International in California was so controlled.) The computer contains a representation of the robot and its environment, and as the robot moves around, the representation changes accordingly. This permits the computer program to control the robot’s activities with the aid of up-to-date information about the robot’s “body” and the environment it finds itself in. Now suppose the computer represents the robot as located in the middle of an empty room, and suppose you are asked to “translate into English” the computer’s internal representation. Should it be “It (or he or Shakey) is in the centre of an empty room” or “I am in the centre of an empty room”? This question resurfaces in a different guise in Part IV of this book.

D.C.D.

D.R.H.

2 D. E. Harding On Having No Head[3]

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so the speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

It was about eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of minds are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, and odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination, and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, and all that could be called mine. It was if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far beyond them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was after all, quite literally breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of “me,” unsustained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dram, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse; it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, and end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face—my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

As the wonder of my Himalayan discovery began to wear off, I started describing it to myself in some such words as the following.

Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two round windows at the world. Now I find it isn’t really like that at all. As I gaze into the distance, what is there at this moment to tell me how many eyes I have here—two, or three, or hundreds, or none? In fact, only one window appears on this side of my façade and that is wide open and frameless, with nobody looking out of it. It is always the other fellow who has eyes and a face to frame them; never this one.

There exist, then, two sorts—two widely different species—of man. The first, of which I note countless specimens, evidently carries a head on its shoulders (and by “head” I mean a hairy eight inch ball with various holes in it) while the second, of which I note only this one specimen, evidently carries no such thing on its shoulders. And till now I had overlooked this considerable difference! Victim of a prolonged fir of madness, of a lifelong hallucination (and by “hallucination” I mean what my dictionary says: apparent perception of an object not actually present), I had invariably seen myself as pretty much like other men, and certainly never as a decapitated but still living biped. I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed—to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded charity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is—rather than contains—all things. For however carefully I attend, I fail to find here even so much as a blank screen on which they are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through which they are viewed—still less a soul or a mind to which they are presented, or a viewer (however shadowy) who is distinguishable from the view. Nothing whatever intervenes, not even that baffling and elusive obstacle called “distance”: the huge blue sky, the pink-edged whiteness of the snows, the sparkling green of the grass—how can these be remote when there’s nothing to be remote from? The headless void here refuses all definition and location: it is not round, or small, or big, or even here as distinct from there. (And even if there were a head here to measure outwards from, the measuring-rod stretching from it to the peak of Everest would, when read end-on—and there’s no other way for me to read it—reduce to a point, to nothing.) In fact, those colored shapes present themselves in all simplicity, without any such complications as near or far, this or that, mine or not mine, seen-by-me or merely given. All twoness—all duality of subject and object—has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.

Such were the thoughts which followed the vision. To try to set down the first-hand, immediate experience in these or any other terms, however, is to misrepresent it by complicating what is quite simple: indeed the longer the postmortem examination drags on the further it gets from the living original. At best. These descriptions can remind one of the vision (without the bright awareness) or invite a recurrence of it; but the most appetizing menu can taste like the dinner, or the best book about humour enable one to see a joke. On the other hand, it is impossible to stop thinking for long, and some attempt to relate the lucid intervals of one’s life to the confused backgrounds is inevitable. It could also encourage, indirectly, the recurrence of lucidity.

In any case, there are several commonsense objections which refuse to be put off any longer, questions which insist on reasoned answers, however inconclusive. It becomes necessary to “justify” one’s vision, even to oneself; also one’s friends may need reassuring. In a sense this attempt at domestication is absurd, because no argument can add to or take from an experience which is as plain and incontrovertible as hearing middle-C or tasting strawberry jam. In another sense, however, the attempt has to be made, if one’s life is not to disintegrate into two quite alien, idea-tight compartments.

My first objection was that my head may be missing, but not its nose. Here it is, visibly preceding me wherever I go. And my answer was: if this fuzzy, pinkish, yet perfectly transparent cloud suspended on my right, and this other similar cloud suspended on my left, are noses, then I count two of them and not one; and the perfectly opaque single protuberance which I observe so clearly in the middle of your face is not a nose: only a hopelessly dishonest or confused observer would deliberately use the same name for such utterly different things. I prefer to go by my dictionary and common usage, which oblige me to say that, whereas nearly all other men have a nose apiece, I have none.

All the same, if some misguided skeptic, overanxious to make his point, were to strike out in this direction, aiming midway between these two pink clouds, the result would surely be as unpleasant as if I owned the most solid and punchable of noses. Again, what about this complex of subtle tensions, movements, pressures, itches, tickles, aches, warmths and throbbings, never entirely absent from this central region? Above all, what about these touch-feelings which arise when I explore here with my hand? Surely these findings add up to massive evidence for the existence of my head right here and now, after all?

They do nothing of the sort. No doubt a great variety of sensations are plainly given here and cannot be ignored, but they don’t amount to a head, or anything like one. The only way to make a head out of them would be to throw in all sorts of ingredients that are plainly missing here—in particular, all manner of coloured shapes in three dimensions. What sort of head is it that, though containing innumerable sensations, is observed to lack eyes, mouth, hair, and indeed all bodily equipment which other heads are observed to contain? The plain fact is that this place must be kept clear of all such obstructions, of the slightest mistiness or colouring which could cloud my universe.

In any case, when I start groping round for my lost head, instead of finding it here I only lose my exploring hand as well; it too, is swallowed up in the abyss at the centre of my being. Apparently this yawning cavern, this unoccupied base of all my operations, this magical locality where I thought I kept my head, is in fact more like a beacon-fire so fierce that all things approaching it are instantly and utterly consumed, in order that its world-illuminating brilliance and clarity shall never for a moment be obscured. As for these lurking aches and tickles and so on, they can no more quench or shade that central brightness than these mountains and clouds and sky can do so. Quite the contrary: they all exist in its shining, and through them it is seen to shine. Present experience, whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent head. For here and now my world and my head are incompatibles, they won’t mix. There is no room for both at once on these shoulders, and fortunately it is my head with all its anatomy that has to go. This is not a matter of argument, or of philosophical acumen , or of working oneself up into a state, but of simple sight—LOOK-WHO’S-HERE instead of THINK-WHO’S-HERE. If I fail to see what I am (and especially what I am not) it is because I am too busily imaginative, too “spiritual,” too adult and knowing, to accept the situation exactly as I find it at the moment. A kind of alert idiocy is what I need. It takes an innocent eye and an empty head to see their own perfect emptiness.

Probably there is only one way of converting the skeptic who still says I have a head here, and that is to invite him to come here and take a look for himself; only he must be an honest reporter, describing what he observes and nothing else.

Starting off on the far side of the room, he sees me as a full-length man-with-a-head. But as he approaches he finds half a man, then a head, ten a blurred cheek or eye or nose; then a mere blur and finally (at the point of contact) nothing at all. Alternatively, if he happens to be equipped with the necessary scientific instruments; he reports that the blur resolves itself into tissues, then cell groups, then a single cell, a cell-nucleus, giant molecules … and so on, till he comes to a place where nothing is to be seen, to space which is empty of all solid or material objects. In either case, the observer who comes here to see what it’s really like finds what I find here—vacancy. And if, having discovered and shared my nonentity here, he were to turn round (looking out with me instead of in at me) he would again find what I find—that this vacancy is filled to capacity with everything imaginable. He, too, would find this central Point exploding into an Infinite Volume, this Nothing into the All, this Here into Everywhere.

And if my skeptical observer still doubts his senses, he may try his camera instead—a device which, lacking memory and anticipation, can register only what is contained in the place where it happens to be. It records the same picture of me. Over there, it takes a man, midway, bits and pieces of a man; here, no man and nothing—or else, when pointed the other way round, the universe.

So this head is not a head, but a wrong-headed idea. If I can still find it here, I am “seeing things,” and ought to hurry off to the doctor. It makes little difference whether I find a human head, or an ass’s head, a fried egg, or a beautiful bunch of flowers: to have any topknot at all is to suffer from delusions.

During my lucid intervals, however, I am clearly headless here. Over there, on the other hand, I am clearly far from headless: indeed, I have more heads than I know what to do with. Concealed in my human observers and in cameras, on display in picture frames, pulling faces behind shaving mirrors, peering out of door knobs and spoons and coffeepots and anything which will take a high polish, my heads are always turning up—though more-or-less shrunken and distorted, twisted back-to-front, often the wrong way up, and multiplied to infinity.

But there is one place where no head of mine can ever turn up, and that is here “on my shoulders,” where it would blot out this Central Void which is my very life-source: fortunately nothing is able to do that. In fact, these loose heads can never amount to more than impermanent and unprivileged accidents of that “outer” or phenomenal world which though altogether one with the central essence, fails to affect it in the slightest degree. So unprivileged, indeed, is my head in the mirror, that I don’t necessarily recognize myself in the glass, and neither do I see the man over there, the too-familiar fellow who lives in that other room behind the looking-glass and seemingly spends all his time staring into this room—that small, dull, circumscribed, particularized, ageing, and oh-so-vulnerable gazer—as the opposite to every way of my real Self ere. I have never been anything but this ageless, adamantine, measureless, lucid, and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have been confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here and now and forever.

Film directors… are practical people, much more interested in the telling re-creation of experience than in discerning the nature of the experience; but in fact the one involves some of the other. Certainly these experts are well aware (for example) how feeble my reaction is to a film of a vehicle obviously driven by someone else, compared with my reaction to a film of a vehicle apparently driven by myself. In the first instance I am a spectator on the pavement, observing two similar cars swiftly approaching, colliding, killing the drivers, bursting into flames—and I am mildly interested. In the second, I am the driver—headless of course, like all first-person drivers, and my car (what little there is of it) is stationary. Here are my swaying knees, my foot hard down on the accelerator, my hands struggling with the steering wheel, the long bonnet sloping away in front, telegraph poles whizzing by, the road snaking this way and that, the other cars, tiny at first, but looming larger and larger, coming straight at me, and then the crash, a great flash of light, and an empty silence… I sink back onto my seat and get my breath back. I have been taken for a ride.

How are they filmed, these first person experiences? Two ways are possible: either a headless dummy is photographed, with the camera in place of the head, or else a real man is photographed, with his head held far back, or to one side to make room for the camera. In other words, to ensure that I shall identify myself with the actor, his head is got out of the way; he must be my kind of man. For a picture of me-with-a-head is no likeness at all, it is the portrait of a complete stranger, a case of mistaken identity.

It is curious that anyone should go to the advertising man for a glimpse into the deepest—and simplest—truths about himself; odd also that an elaborate modern invention like the cinema should help rid anyone of an illusion which very young children and animals are free of. But human capacity for self-deception has surely never been complete. A profound though dim awareness of the human condition may well explain the popularity of many old cults and legends of loose and flying heads, of one eyed or headless monsters and apparitions, of human bodies with non-human heads and martyrs who (like King Charles in the ill-punctuated sentence) walked and talked after their heads were cut off —

Fantastic pictures, no doubt, but nearer than common sense ever gets to a true portrait of this man.

But if I have no head or face or eyes here (protests common sense) how on Earth do I see you, and what are eyes for, anyway? The truth is that the verb to see has two quite opposite meanings. When we observe a couple conversing, we say they see each other, though their faces remain intact and some feet apart, but when I see you your face is all, mine nothing. You are the end of me. Yet (so Enlightenment-preventing is the language of common sense) we use the same little word for both operations: and of course, the same word has to mean the same thing! What actually goes on between third persons as such is visual communication—that continuous and self-contained chain of physical processes (involving light waves, eye-lenses, retinas, the visual area of the cortex, and so on) in which the scientist can find no chink where “mind” or “seeing” could be slipped in, or (if it could) would make any difference. True seeing, by contrast, is first person and so eyeless. In the language of the sages, only the Buddha Nature, or Brahman, or Allah, or God, sees or hears or experiences anything at all.

Reflections

We have been presented with a charmingly childish and solipsistic view of the human condition. It is something that, at an intellectual level, offends and appalls us; can anyone sincerely entertain such notions without embarrassment? Yet to some primitive level in us it speaks clearly. That is the level at which we cannot accept the notion of our own death. In many of use, that level has been submerged and concealed for so long that we forget how incomprehensible is the concept of personal nonexistence. We can so easily—it seems—extrapolate from the nonexistence of others to the potential nonexistence, one day, of ourselves. Yet how can it be a day when I die? After all, a day is a time with light and sounds; when I die, there will be none of those. “Oh, yes, there will be,” protests an inner voice. “Just because I won’t be there to experience them doesn’t mean they won’t exist! That’s so solipsistic!” My inner voice, coerced by the power of a simple syllogism, has reluctantly overridden the notion that I am a necessary ingredient of the universe. That syllogism is, roughly, this:

But for the substitution of “I” for “Socrates” this is the most classical of all syllogisms. What kind of evidence is there for the two premises? The first premise presumes an abstract category, the class of human beings. The second premise is that I too belong to that class, despite the seemingly radical difference between myself and every other member of that class (which Harding is so fond of pointing out).

The idea of classes about which general statements can be made is not so shocking, but it it seems to be a rather advanced property of intelligence to be able to formulate classes beyond those that are part of an innate repertoire. Bees seem to have the class “flower” down pretty well, but it is doubtful that they can formulate a concept of “chimney” or “human.” Dogs and cats seem to be able to manufacture new classes, such as “food dish,” “door,” “toy,” and so on. But people are by far the best at the piling up of new category upon new category. This capacity is at the core of human nature and is a profound source of joy. Sportscasters and scientists and artists all give us great pleasure in their formulation of new kinds of concepts that enter our mental vocabulary.

The other part of the first premise is the general concept of death. That something can vanish or be destroyed is a very early discovery. The food in the spoon vanishes, the rattle falls off the high chair. Mommy goes away for a while, the balloon pops, the newspaper in the fireplace burns up, the house a block down the street is razed and so on. All very shocking and disturbing, certainly—but still acceptable. The swatted fly, the sprayed mosquitoes these build on the previous abstractions, and we come to the general concept of death. So much for the first premise.

(Patricks note.. In view of this, why do we insist in still thinking that WE are special and that WE and only WE live after death????)))

The second premise is the tricky one. As a child I formulated the abstraction “human being” by seeing things outside of me that had something in common—appearance, behaviour and so on. That this particular class could then “fold back” on me and engulf me—this realization necessarily comes at a later stage of cognitive development, and must be quite a shocking experience, although probably most of us do not remember it happening.

The truly amazing step, though, is the conjunction of the two premises. By the time we’ve developed the mental power to formulate them both, we also have developed a respect for the compelling of simple logic. But the sudden conjunction of these two premises slaps us in the face unexpectedly. It is an ugly, brutal blow that sends us reeling—probably for days, weeks, months. Actually, for years—for our whole lives! But somehow we suppress the conflict and turn it in other directions.

Do higher animals have the ability to see themselves as members of a class? Is a dog capable of (wordlessly) thinking the thought, “I bet I look like those dogs over there”? Imagine the following gory situation. A ring is formed of, say, twenty animals of one sort. An evil human repeatedly spins a dial and walks over to the designated animal and knifes it to death in front of the remaining ones. Is it likely that each one will realize its impending doom, will think, “That animal over there is just like me, and my goose may soon be cooked just as his was. Oh, no!”? ((Patrick’s note.. YES, animals do know, cows at the abattoir know they are going to be slaughtered… smack one dog and my others know they had better go hide....)

This ability to snap oneself onto others seems to be the exclusive property of members of higher species. (it is the central topic of Thomas Nagel’s article, “What is it like to be a Bat?” reprinted in selection 24.) One begins by making partial mappings: “I have feet, you have feet; I have hands, you have hands; hmm.. “ These partial mappings then can induce a total mapping. Pretty soon, I conclude from your having a head that I too have one, although I can’t see mine. But this stepping outside myself is a gigantic and, in some ways, self-denying step. It contradicts much direct knowledge about myself. It is like Harding’s two distinct types of verb “to see”—when applied to myself it is quite another thing than when it applies to you. The power of this distinction gets overcome, however, by the sheer weight of too many mappings all the time, establishing without doubt my membership in a class that I formulated originally without regard to myself.

So logic overrides intuition. Just as we could come to believe that our Earth can be round—as is the alien moon—without people falling off, so we finally come to believe that the solipsistic view is nutty. Only a powerful vision such as Harding’s Himalayan experience can return us to that primordial sense of self and otherness, which is at the root of the problems of consciousness, soul, and self.

Do I have a brain? Will I actually die? We all think about such questions many times during our lives. Occasionally, probably every imaginative person thinks that all of life is a huge joke or hoax—perhaps a psychology experiment—being perpetrated by some inconceivable superbeing, seeing how far it can push us into believing obvious absurdities (the idea that sounds that I can’t understand really mean something. The idea that someone can hear Chopin or eat chocolate ice-cream without loving it, the idea that light goes at the same speed in any reference frame, the idea that I am made of inanimate atoms, the idea of my own death, and so on). But unfortunately (or fortunately), that “conspiracy theory” undermines itself, since it postulates another mind—in fact a superintelligence and therefore inconceivable one—in order to explain away other mysteries.

There seems to be no alternative to accepting some sort of incomprehensible quality in existence. Take your pick. We all fluctuate delicately between a subjective and objective view of the world, and this quandary is central to human nature.

D.R.H.

3 Harold J. Morowitz Rediscovering the Mind[4]

Something peculiar has been going on in science for the past 100 years or so. Many researchers are unaware of it, and others won’t admit it even to their own colleagues. But there is strangeness in the air.

What has happened is that biologists, who once postulated a privileged role for the human mind in nature’s hierarchy, have been moving relentlessly toward the hard-core materialism that characterized nineteenth-century physics. At the same time, physicists, faced with compelling experimental evidence, have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events. It is as if the two disciplines were on two fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks.

This role reversal by biologists and physicists has left the contemporary psychologist in an ambivalent position. From the perspective of biology, the psychologist studies phenomena that are far removed from the core of certainty, that is, the submicroscopic world of atoms and molecules. From the perspective of physics, the psychologist deals with “the mind,” and undefined primitive that seems at once essential and impenetrable. Clearly both views embody some measure of truth—and a resolution of the problem is essential to deepening and extending the foundations of behavioural science.

The study of life at all levels, from the social to molecular behaviour, has in modern times relied on reductionism as the chief explanatory concept. This approach to knowledge tries to comprehend one level of scientific phenomena in terms of concepts at a lower and presumably more fundamental level. In chemistry, large-scale reactions are accounted for by examining the behaviour of molecules. Similarly, physiologists study the activity of living cells in terms of processes carried out by organelles and other subcellular entities. And in geology, the formations and properties of minerals are described using the features of the constituent crystals. The essence of these cases is seeking explanation in underlying structures and activities.

Reductionism at the psychological level is exemplified by the viewpoint in Carl Sagan’s best-selling book The Dragons of Eden. He writes: “My fundamental premise about the brain is that all its workings—what we sometimes call ‘mind’—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more.” As a further demonstration of this trend of thought, we note that Sagan’s glossary does not contain the words mind, consciousness, perception, awareness, or thought, but rather deals with entries such as synapse, lobotomy, proteins, and electrodes.

Such attempts to reduce human behaviour to its biological basis have a long history, beginning with early Darwinians and their contemporaries working in physiological psychology. Before the nineteenth-century, the mind-body duality, which was central to Descartes’ philosophy, had tended to place the human mind outside the domain of biology. Then the stress that the evolutionists placed on our “apeness” made us subject to biological study by methods appropriate to nonhuman primates and, by extension, to other animals. The Pavlovian school reinforced that theme, and it became a cornerstone of many behavioural theories. While no general agreement has emerged among psychologists as to how far reductionism should be carried, most will readily concede that our actions have hormonal, neurological, and physiological components. Although Sagan’s premise lies within a general tradition in psychology, it is radical in aiming at complete explanation in terms of the underlying level. This goal I take to be the thrust of his phrase “and nothing more.”

At the time various schools of psychology were attempting to reduce their science to biology, other life scientists were also looking for more basic levels of explanation. Their outlook can be seen in the writings of a popular spokesman of molecular biology, Francis Crick. In his book, Of Molecules and Men, a contemporary attack on vitalism—the doctrine that biology needs to be explained in terms of life forces lying outside the domain of physics—Crick states: “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.” He goes on to say that by physics and chemistry he refers to the atomic level, where our knowledge is secure. By use of the italicized all, he expresses the position of radical reductionism that has been the dominant viewpoint among an entire generation of biochemists and molecular biologists.

If we now combine psychological and biological reductionism and assume they are going to overlap, we end up with a sequence of explanation going from mind to anatomy and physiology, to cell physiology, to molecular biology, to atomic physics. All this knowledge is assumed to rest on a firm bedrock of understanding the laws of quantum physics, the newest and most complete theory of atomic structures and processes. Within this context, psychology becomes a branch of physics, a result that may cause some unease among both groups of professionals.

This attempt to explain everything about human beings in terms of the first principles of physical science is not a new idea and had reached a definitive position in the views of the mid-nineteenth-century European physiologists. A representative of that school, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, set forth his extreme opinions in the introduction to an 1848 book on animal electricity. He wrote that “if our methods only were sufficient, an analytical mechanics [Newtonian physics] of general life processes would be possible and fundamentally would reach even to the problem of the freedom of the will.”

There is a certain hubris in the words of these early savants that was picked up by Thomas Huxley and his colleagues in their defense of Darwinism and, even today, echoes in the theories of modern reductionists who would move from the mind to the first principles of atomic physics. It is most clearly seen at present in the writings of the sociobiologists, whose arguments animate the contemporary intellectual scene. In any case, Du Bois-Reymond’s views are consistent with modern radical reductionists, except that quantum mechanics has now replaced Newtonian mechanics as the underlying discipline.

During the period in which psychologists and biologists were steadily moving toward reducing their disciplines to the physical sciences, they were largely unaware of perspectives emerging from physics that cast an entirely new light on their understanding. Toward the close of the last century, physics presented a very ordered picture of the world, in which events unfolded in characteristic, regular ways, following Newton’s equations in mechanics and Maxwell’s in electricity. These processes moved inexorably, independent of the scientist, who was simply a spectator. Many physicists considered their subject as essentially complete.

Starting with the introduction of the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905, this neat picture was unceremoniously upset. The new theory postulated that observers in different systems moving with respect to each other, would perceive the world differently. The observer thus became involved in establishing physical reality. The scientist was losing the spectator’s role and becoming an active participant in the system under study.

With the development of quantum mechanics, the role of the observer became an even more central part of physical theory, an essential component in defining an event. The mind of the observer emerged as a necessary element in the structure of the theory. The implications of the developing paradigm greatly surprised early quantum physicists and led them to study epistemology and the philosophy of science. Never before in scientific history, to my knowledge, had all the leading contributors produced books and papers expounding the philosophical and humanistic meaning of their results.

Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of the new physics, became deeply involved in the issues of philosophy and humanism. In Philosophical Problems of Quantum Physics, he wrote of physicists having to renounce thoughts of an objective time scale common to all observers, and of events in time and space that are independent of our ability to observe them. Heisenberg stressed that the laws of nature are no longer dealt with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles—that is, with the contents of our minds. Erwin Schrödinger, the man who formulated the fundamental equation of quantum mathematics, wrote an extraordinary little book in 1958 called Mind and Matter. In this series of essays, he moved from the results of the new physics to a rather mystical view of the universe that he identified with the “perennial philosophy” of Aldous Huxley. Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav.

The problem faced by quantum theorists can best be seen in the famous paradox. “Who killed Schrödinger’s cat?” In a hypothetical formulation, a kitten is put in a closed box with a jar of poison and a triphammer poised to smash the jar. The hammer is activated by a counter that records random events, such as radioactive decay. The experiment lasts just long enough for there to be a probability of one-half that the hammer will be released. Quantum mechanics represents the system mathematically by the sum of a live-cat and a dead-cat function, each with a probability of one-half. The question is whether the act of looking (the measurement) kills or saves the cat, since before the experimenter looks in the box both solutions are equally likely.

This lighthearted example reflects a deep conceptual difficulty. In more formal terms, a complex system can only be described by using a probability distribution that relates the possible outcomes of an experiment. In order to decide among the various alternatives, a measurement is required. This measurement is what constitutes an event, as distinguished from the probability which is a mathematical abstraction. However, the only simple and consistent description physicists were able to assign to a measurement involved an observer’s becoming aware of the result. Thus the physical event and the content of the human mind were inseparable. This linkage forced many researchers to seriously consider consciousness as an integral part of the structure of physics. Such interpretations moved science toward the idealist as contrasted with the realist conception of philosophy.

The views of a large number of contemporary physical scientists are summed up in the essay “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question” written by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. Wigner begins by pointing out that most physical scientists have returned to the recognition that thought—meaning the mind—is primary. He goes on to state: “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum physics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.” And he concludes by noting how remarkable it is that the scientific study of the world led to the content of consciousness as an ultimate reality.

A further development in yet another field of physics reinforces Wigner’s viewpoint. The introduction of information theory and its applications to thermodynamics has led to the conclusion that entropy, a basic concept of that science, is a measure of the observer’s ignorance of the atomic details of the system. When we measure the pressure, volume, and temperature of an object, we have a residual lack of knowledge of the exact position and velocity of the component atoms and molecules. The numerical value of the amount of information we are missing is proportional to the entropy. In earlier thermodynamics, entropy had represented, in an engineering sense, the energy of the system unavailable to perform external work. In the modern view, the human mind enters once again, and entropy relates not just to the state of the system but to our knowledge of that state.

The founders of modern atomic theory did not start out to impose a “mentalist” picture on the world. Rather, they began with the opposite point of view and were forced to the present-day position in order to explain experimental results.

We are now in a position to integrate the perspectives of three large fields: psychology, biology and physics. By combining the positions of Sagan, Crick, and Wigner as spokesmen for the various outlooks, we get a picture of the whole that is quite unexpected.

First, the human mind, including consciousness and reflective thought, can be explained by activities of the central nervous system, which, in turn, can be reduced to the biological structure and function of that physiological system. Second, biological phenomena at all levels, can be totally understood in terms of atomic physics, that is, through the action and interaction of the component atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so forth. Third, and last, atomic physics, which is now understood most fully by means of quantum mechanics, must be formulated with the mind as a primitive component of the system.

We have thus, in separate steps, gone around an epistemological circle—from the mind, back to the mind. The results of this chain of reasoning will probably lead more aid and comfort to Eastern mystics than to neurophysiologists and molecular biologists; nevertheless, the closed loop follows from a straightforward combination of the explanatory processes of recognized experts in the three separate sciences. Since individuals seldom work with more than one of these paradigms, the general problem has received little attention.

If we reject this epistemological circularity, we are left with two opposing camps: a physics with a claim to completeness because it describes all of nature, and a psychology that is all-embracing because it deals with the mind, our only source of knowledge of the world. Given the problems in both of these views, it is perhaps well to return to the circle and give it more sympathetic consideration. If it deprives us of firm absolutes, at least it encompasses the mind-body problem and provides a framework within which individual disciplines can communicate. The closing of the circle provides the best possible approach for psychological theorists.

The strictly reductionist approach to human behaviour so characteristic of sociobiology also runs into trouble on more narrowly biological grounds. For it includes an assumption of continuity in evolution from early mammals to man, which implies that the mind, or consciousness, was not a radical departure. Such an assumption is hardly justified when one considers the dramatic instances of discontinuity in evolution. The origin of the universe itself, the “big bang,” is a cosmic example of a discontinuity. The beginning of life, while less cataclysmic, is certainly another example.

The encoding of information in genetic molecules introduced the possibility of profound disturbances in the laws that governed the universe. Before the coming of genetic life, for example, fluctuations in temperature or noise were averaged out, giving rise to precise laws of planetary evolution. Afterward however, a single molecular event at the level of thermal noise could lead to macroscopic consequences. For if the event were a mutation in a self-replicating system, then the entire course of biological evolution could be altered. A single molecular event could kill a whale by inducing a cancer or destroy an ecosystem by generating a virulent virus that attacks a key species in that system. The origin of life does not abrogate the underlying laws of physics, but it adds a new feature: large scale consequences of molecular events. This rule change makes evolutionary history indeterminate and so constitutes a clear-cut discontinuity.

A number of contemporary biologists and psychologists believe that the origin of reflective thought that occurred during primate evolution is also a discontinuity that has changed the rules. Again, the new situation does not abrogate the underlying biological laws, but it adds a feature that necessitates novel ways of thinking about the problem. The evolutionary biologist Lawrence B. Slobodkin has identified the new feature as an introspective self-image. This property he asserts, alters the response to evolutionary problems and makes it impossible to assign major historical events to cause inherent in biological evolutionary laws. Slobodkin is claiming that the rules have changed and man cannot be understood by laws applicable to other mammals whose brains have a very similar physiology.

This emergent feature of man has, in one form or another, been discussed by numerous anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists. It is part of the empirical data that cannot be shelved just to preserve reductionist purity. The discontinuity needs to be thoroughly studied and evaluated, but first it needs to be recognized. Primates are very different from other animals, and human beings are very different from other primates.

We now understand the troublesome features in a forceful commitment to uncritical reductionism as a solution to the problem of the mind. We have discussed the weaknesses of that position. In addition to being weak, it is a dangerous view, since the way we respond to our fellow human beings is dependent on the way we conceptualize them in our theoretical formulations. If we envision our fellows solely as animals or machines, we drain our interactions of humanistic richness. If we seek our behavioural norms in the study of animal societies, we ignore those uniquely human features that so enrich our lives. Radical reductionism offers very little in the area of moral imperatives. Further, it presents the wrong glossary of terms for a humanistic pursuit.

The scientific community has made notable progress in understanding the brain, and I share the enthusiasm for neurobiology that characterizes modern-day research. Nevertheless, we should be reluctant to let that élan generate statements that go beyond science and lock us into philosophical positions that impoverish our humanity by denying the most intriguing aspect of our species. To underrate the significance of the appearance and character of reflective thought is a high price to pay in order to honour the liberation of science from theology by our reductionist predecessors several generations back. The human psyche is part of the observed data of science. We can retain it and still be good empirical biologists and psychologists.

Reflections

It is an attractive notion that the mysteries of quantum physics and the mysteries of consciousness are somehow one. The epistemological loop that Morowitz describes has just about the proper amounts of hard science, beauty, weirdness, and mysticism to “sound right.” However, it is an idea that in many ways opposes an important theme of this book, which is that nonquantum-mechanical computational models of mind (all that goes along with mind) are possible in principle. But right or wrong—and it is too early to say—the ideas that Morowitz presents are worth thinking about, for there is a certainly no question that the problem of the interaction of subjective and objective viewpoints is a conceptual difficulty at the heart of quantum mechanics. In particular, quantum mechanics as it is usually cast accords a privileged causal status to certain systems known as “observers” without spelling out precisely what observers are (in particular, without spelling out whether consciousness is a necessary ingredient of observer status). To clarify this point we must present a quick overview of the “measurement problem” in quantum mechanics, and we will invoke the metaphor of the “quantum wave faucet” for that purpose.

Imagine a faucet with two knobs—hot and cold—each of which you can twist continuously. Water comes streaming out of the faucet, but there is a strange property to this system. The water is always totally hot or totally cold—no in-between. These are called the “two temperature eigenstates” of the water. The only way you can tell which eigenstate the water is in is by sticking your hand in and feeling it. Actually, in orthodox quantum mechanics it is trickier than that. It is the act of putting your hand under the water that throws the water into one or the other eigenstate. Up until that very instant, the water is said to have be in a superposition of states (or more accurately, a superposition of eigenstates).

Depending on the setting of the knobs, the likelyhood of cold water will vary. Of course, if you turn on only the “H” tap, then you’ll get hot water always, and if you turn on only “C,” then you’ll get cold water for sure. If you open both valves, however, you’ll create a superposition of states. By trying it over and over again with one setting, you can measure the probability that you’ll get cold water with that setting. After that, you can change the setting and try again. There will be some crossover point where hot and cold are equally likely. It will be like flipping a coin. (This quantum water faucet is sadly reminiscent of many a bathroom shower.) Eventually you can build up enough data to draw a graph of the probability of cold water as a function of the knobs’ settings.

Quantum phenomena are like this. Physicists can twiddle knobs and put systems into superpositions of states analogous to our hot-cold superpositions. As long as no measurement is made of the system, the physicists cannot know which eigenstate the system is in. Indeed it can be shown that in a very fundamental sense the system itself does not “know” which eigenstate it is in, and that it decides—at random—only at the moment the observer’s hand is put in to “test the water,” so to speak. The system, up till the moment of observation, acts as if it were not in an eigenstate. For all practical purposes, for all theoretical purposes—in fact for all purposes—the system is not in an eigenstate.

You can imagine doing a lot of experiments on the water coming out of a quantum water faucet to determine if its is actually hot or actually cold without sticking your hand in (we’re of course assuming that there are no telltale clues such as steam). For example, run your washing machine on the water from the faucet. Still, you won’t know if your wool sweater has shrunk or not until the moment you open the washing machine (a measurement made by a conscious observer). Make some tea with water from the faucet. Still, you won’t know if you’ve got iced tea or not, until you taste it (interaction with a conscious observer again). Attach a recording thermometer just under the water faucet. Until you yourself see the reading on the thermometer or the ink marks on its record, you can’t know the temperature. You can’t be any surer that the ink is on the paper than you are that the water has a definite temperature. The critical point here is that the sweater and the tea and the thermometer, not having conscious-observer status themselves, have to play along with the gag and, just as the water did, enter their own superpositions of states—shrunk and nonshrunk, iced-tea-and-hot-tea, ink-high-and-ink-low.

This may sound as if it has nothing to do with physics per se but merely with ancient philosophical conundrums such as “Does a tree in a forest make a noise when it falls if there’s no one there to hear it?” But the quantum-mechanical twist on such riddles is that there are observation consequences that are diametrically opposite to the consequences that would occur if a seemingly mixed state were in reality always a true eigenstate, merely hiding its identity from observers until the moment of measurement. In crude terms, a stream of maybe-hot-maybe-cold water would act differently from a stream of water that is actually hot or actually cold, because the two alternatives “interfere” with each other in the sense of overlapping waves (as when part of a speedboat’s wake momentarily cancels another part reflected of a jetty, or when a skipped rock’s successive bounces send out ripples that crisscross and create shimmering patterns on a still lake surface). It turns out that such interference effects are only statistical, so the effect would become manifest only after a large number of sweater-washings or tea-makings. Interested readers should consult the beautiful exposition of this difference in The character of Physical law by Richard Feynman.

The plight of Schrödinger’s cat carries this idea further—that even a cat could be in a quantum-mechanical superposition of states until a human observer intervened. One might object, and say, “Wait a minute! Isn’t a live cat as much of a conscious observer as a human being is?” Probably it is—but notice that this cat is possibly a dead cat, which is certainly not a conscious observer. In effect, we have created, in Schrödinger’s cat, a superposition of two eigenstates one of which has observer status, the other of which lacks it! Now what shall we do? The situation is reminiscent of a Zen riddle (recounted in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps) posed by the master Kyōgen:

To many physicists the distinction between systems with observer status and those without has seemed artificial, even repugnant. Moreover, the idea that an observer’s intervention causes a “collapse of the wave function”—a sudden jump into one randomly chosen pure eigenstate—introduces caprice into the ultimate laws of nature. “God does not play dice” (“Der Herrgott würfelt nicht”) was Einstein’s lifelong belief.

A radical attempt to save both continuity and determinism in quantum mechanics is known as the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics, first proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III. According to this very bizarre theory, no system ever jumps discontinuously into an eigenstate. What happens is that the superposition evolves smoothly with its various branches unfolding in parallel. Whenever necessary, the state sprouts further branches that carry the various new alternatives. For instance, there are two branches in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, and they both develop in parallel. “Well, what happens to the cat? Does it feel itself to be alive, or dead?” one must wonder. Everett would answer, “It depends which branch you look at. On one branch it feels itself alive, and on the other there’s no cat to feel anything.” With intuition beginning to rebel, one then asks, “Well, what about a few moments before the cat on the fatal branch died? How did the cat feel then? Surely the cat can’t feel two ways at once! Which of the two branches contains the genuine cat?”

The problem becomes even more intense as you realize the implications of this theory as applied to you, here and now. For every quantum mechanical branch in your life (and there have been billions upon billions), you have split into two or more yous, riding along parallel but disconnected branches of one gigantic “universal wave function.” At the critical spot in his article where this difficulty arises, Everett calmly inserts the following footnote:

All said with a poker face. The problem of how it feels subjectively is not treated; it is just swept under the rug. It is probably considered meaningless.

And yet, one simply has to wonder, “Why, then, do I feel myself to be in just one world?” Well, according to Everett’s view, you don’t—you feel all the alternatives simultaneously, it’s just this you going down this branch who doesn’t experience all the alternatives. This is completely shocking. The vivid quotes with which we opened our reflection come back and penetrate deeply. The ultimate question is this: “Why is this me in this branch, then? What makes me—I mean this me—feel itself—I mean myself—unsplit?”

The sun is setting one evening over the ocean. You and a group of friends are standing at various points along the wet sand. As the water laps at your feet, you silently watch the red globe drop nearer and nearer to the horizon. As you watch, somewhat mesmerized, you notice how the sun’s reflection on the wave crests forms a straight line composed of thousands of momentary orange-red glints—a straight line pointing right at you! “How lucky that I am the one who happens to be lined up exactly with that line!” you think to yourself. “Too bad not all of us can stand here and experience this perfect unity with the sun.” And at the same moment, each of your friends is having precisely the same thought… or is it the same?

Such musings are at the heart of the “soul-searching question.” Why is this soul in this body? (Or on this branch of the universal wave function?) Why, when there are so many possibilities, did this mind get attached to this body? Why can’t my “I-ness” belong to some other body? It is obviously circular and unsatisfying to say something like “You are in that body because that was the one made by your parents.” But why were they my parents, and not someone else? Who would have been my parents if I had been born in Hungary? What would I have been like if I had been someone else? Or if someone else had been me? Or—am I someone else? Am I everyone else? Is there only one universal consciousness? Is it an illusion to feel oneself as separate, as an individual? It is rather eerie to find these bizarre themes reproduced at the core of what is supposedly our stablest and least erratic science.

And yet in a way it is not so surprising. There is a clear connection between the imaginary worlds in our minds and the alternate worlds evolving in parallel with the one we experience. The proverbial young man picking apart the daisy and muttering, “She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not” is clearly maintaining in his mind (at least) two different worlds based on two different models for his beloved. Or would it be more accurate to say that there is one mental model of his beloved that is in a mental analogue of a quantum-mechanical superposition of states?

And when a novelist simultaneously entertains a number of possible ways of extending a story, are the characters not, so to speak metaphorically, in a mental superposition of states? If the novel never gets set to paper, perhaps the split characters can continue to evolve their multiple stories in their author’s brain. Furthermore, it would even seem strange to ask which story is the genuine version. All the worlds are equally genuine.

And in like manner, there is a world—a branch of the universal wave function—in which you didn’t make that stupid mistake you now regret so much. Aren’t you jealous? But how can you be jealous of yourself? Besides which, there’s another world in which you made yet stupider mistakes, and are jealous of this very you, here and now in this world!

Perhaps one way to think of the universal wave function is as the mind—or brain, if you prefer—of the great novelist in the sky, God, in which all possible branches are being simultaneously entertained. We would be mere subsystems of God’s brain, and these versions of us are no more privileged or authentic than our galaxy is the only genuine galaxy. God’s brain, conceived in this way, evolves smoothly and deterministically, as Einstein always maintained. The physicist Paul Davies, writing on just this topic in his recent book Other Worlds, says: “Our consciousness weaves a route at random along the ever-branching evolutionary pathway of the cosmos, so it is we, rather than God, who are playing dice.”

Yet this leaves unanswered the most fundamental riddle that each of us must ask: “Why is my unitary feeling of myself propagating down this random branch rather than down some other? What law underlies the random choices that pick out the branch I feel myself tracing out? Why doesn’t my felling of myself go along with the other me’s as they split off, following other routes? What attaches me-ness to the viewpoint of this body, evolving down this branch of the universe at this moment in time?” The question is so basic that it almost seems to defy clear formulation in words. And the answer does not seem to be forthcoming from quantum mechanics. In fact, this is exactly the collapse of the wave function reappearing at the far end of the rug as it was shoved under by Everett. It turns it into a problem of personal identity, no less perplexing than the original problem it replaces.

One can fall even more deeply into the pit of paradox when one realizes that there are branches of this one gigantically branching universal wave function on which there is no evidence for quantum mechanics whatsoever, branches on which there is no Everett or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are branches on which this entire Reflection got written exactly as you see it here, except that ended with a different flutzpah.

D.R.H.