Ur-Story: Models of Consciousness

Roger Scruton is a smart man, a philosopher. Here, he casts the problem of atheism vs. theism rightly, but draws an unwarranted conclusion. He says:

This strange universe of black holes and time warps, of event horizons and non-localities, somehow becomes conscious of itself. And it becomes conscious of itself in us. This fact conditions the very structure of science. The rejection of Newton’s absolute space, the adoption of the space-time continuum, the quantum equations – all these are premised on the truth that scientific laws are instruments for predicting one set of observations from another. The universe that science describes is constrained at every point by observation. According to quantum theory, some of its most basic features become determinate only at the moment of observation. The great tapestry of waves and particles, of fields and forces, of matter and energy, is pinned down only at the edges, where events are crystallised in the observing mind.

Consciousness is more familiar to us than any other feature of our world, since it is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects – a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the ‘subject of consciousness’, the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside. But these traditional ‘solutions’ merely duplicate the problem. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by re-describing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus – be it a soul, a mind or a self. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery.

Being conscious of our own consciousness, knowing that we know, does increase our yearning for transcendence. Sets us apart from the world. After all, isn't this the true basis of existential alienation? How can we reconcile this 'awareness mechanism' we perceive ourselves to be with the objective world of tables and chairs, moons and stars, atoms and quarks, etc.? Scruton believes this question obviates the scientific answers and necessitates the religious ones (even if those religions themselves remain primitive and uncivilized and un-Enlightened).

We, on the other hand (from our avowed agnostic POV), find the search for the understanding of consciousness to be at the heart of our Ur-story theme. Think back to the Gilgamesh: his great grief over the death of his boon companion, Enkidu, led him to embark on his epic quest for immortality. This is the hero quest for the 'why' of existence. Why are we born to have happiness and love and adventure only to suffer loss and, eventually, our own death? What happens to us, emotionally, when we become conscious of our own extreme mortality? How can anything in this life (this mortal veil, this natural world) explain something so profound as coming to consciousness and its ultimate extinction? [This is a question Godel modeled from a logical point of view about the foundational axioms of mathematics, as did the later Wittgenstein with respect to languages in general.] But, more than this, this is the great Ur-story of fiction (as it has come down to us from epic poetry and tragedy).

Agreed, then. Consciousness makes no sense in the scientific scheme of things. Yet, that does not necessarily imply the religious answer Scruton proffers. Fiction creates models of consciousness for our delectation; recall this:

"..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about..."[Wm. H. Gass, "The Book as a Container of Consciousness," in Finding a Form, pp. 348,351]

What's more, 'realistic' fiction attempts to preserve a semblance of the world as we found it—accurate depiction assists in isolating and modeling consciousness for our inspection (though 'magical realism' and other forms of experimental fiction provide alternate inroads to an understanding and modeling of consciousness the value of which we make no pretense to evaluate here).

And, perhaps, this answers the somewhat inflammatory question from our previous post about the value of criticism: criticism on our Ur-story model would be the enterprise of comprehending and evaluating the metes and bounds of the various models of consciousness set forth in the works of fiction under scrutiny: a consciousness of consciousness, if you will. Somewhat nobler an enterprise—more attractive, say—than the double-parasite model, eh?

Perception, Emotion, Consciousness

[Insert Emotion Here]

We have, then, the following levels and types of emotions:

1. Emotions toward characters: (a) sharing the emotion of a character by identification, (b) reacting to the emotion of a character.

2. Emotions toward the 'implied author,' the sense of life embodied in the text as a whole: (a) sharing that sense of life and its emotions through empathy, (b) reacting to it, either sympathetically or criticially. These emotions operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

3. Emotions toward one's own possibilities. These, too, are multiple and operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

All of these emotional responses (with the exception of those that involve a rejection of the work) are built into the work itself, into its literary structures. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions p. 242.

The creation of a fictional character is not simple. As noted in our previous post, it involves inhabiting and portraying the consciousness of a fictive being through the use of empathy and imagination. But the portrayal of simple perception is insufficient: human consciousness has an emotional content drawing from, among other things, memory, aspiration, and attitudes. The written depiction of perception must also bring this emotional content into play—whether through metaphor or simile or other form of figurative language or outright assertion. Fictional characters must be portrayed as inhabiting their bodies (as perceptual mechanisms) and as having a passably human range of emotional responses to their world (which Nussbaum does not address).

Failure to bring perceptual content into play—a flaw we've noted in the analyses of both James Wood and Jill Lepore—renders fiction a mechanical thing, an intellectual exercise; no different in form than history. Distant. Imprecise.

Failure, at the next level, to imbue perception with emotional content is a prescription for sterile fiction.

"What is it like to be a bat?"

"Sympathy and Complexity" is the title of the seventh chapter of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood tells us fiction works by allowing us to put ourselves in another's shoes (as the cliche goes) and to ask complex moral and philosophical questions. He refers us to the work of two contemporary philosophers, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams.

Nagel, in a famous 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?," argues that because bats are so radically alien from us, we cannot very well imagine what it would be like to be one. This is en route to arguing that 'consciousness' or 'mind' cannot be reduced (as we attempted in our previous post) to mere neuronal activity. Wood uses a rather glib recounting of this argument as a straw man which he promptly swats down with a quote from J.M. Coetzee's alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, to the effect that that is, after all, simply what it means to be a novelist. It is a deft, but pointless move. He leaves his 'ghost' again to ramble about in his fictional 'machine', neither of which concept, as we've noted in previous posts, he fully examines.

When we read fiction, we are not searching to find out what it is like to be any other sort of animal than the human one. Even John Hawkes in his marvelous Sweet William: A Memoir of an Old Horse, told entirely from the POV of an old racehorse, is engaged in the ultimate humanist question: "What is like to be a human being?" and "What does it mean to be human?" This, after all, is where our true sympathies lie. There are many other—and less interesting—examples. The point being: in fiction, we do not read to understand what it is like to be some sort of radically different being, we read to understand what it is like to be human. And that is something we share in common.

[It bears noting here that Nagel's 1974 understanding of neurophysiology is radically different from a more contemporary understanding. Again making it puzzling why Wood chooses him as an example.]

Wood brings in Bernard Williams to highlight the moral subtlety and complexity that novelists have brought to our understanding of what it means to be an individual human being. He states: "Of course, the novel does not provide philosophical answers (as Chekhov said, it only needs to ask the right questions). Instead, it does what Williams wanted moral philosophy to do—it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric."

Here, Wood's humanism seems properly placed, if, like Williams's, highly individualistic in bias—though I can't be sure yet whether he has taken out a promissory note with respect to the place of 'morality' and 'moralizing' in fiction that, in the cashing, would lead us to further serious disagreement about the aims of fiction, no matter its precise mechanisms. Wood provides examples from Ian MacEwan and Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf.

Fiction works by allowing us to get a feeling for what it would be like to be in another specific 'character's' shoes in the middle of a particular situation, to truly sympathize with his/her individual plight as he/she responds and acts given his/her specific capabilities and limitations, and to get a grasp of the [moral] complexity of being just such a human and at the mercy of competing principles and desires. Stated this way (with an appropriately agnostic skew on 'character' and bracketing the concept of morality for the time being), I find myself, as writer, quite in agreement.

The Ghost in the Wood(s)

In "A Brief History of Consciousness," the sixth chapter of How Fiction Works, James Wood traces the evolution of fictional characterization from King David in the Old Testament to Shakespeare's Macbeth to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The differences lie in their respective audiences: David—the god, to whom the psalms and prayers are addressed; Macbeth—the audience, to whom the soliloquies; Rasky—the readers, to whom his interior is revealed over the course of the book. It is, in other words, a descent into subjectivity.

I return to Wm. Gass. In his book Finding a Form, in the essay "The Book as a Container of Consciousness" he explains:

..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about...[pp. 348,351]

The notion of "character" is at the bottom of Wood's inquiries in this book. He believes they have some 'reality', some 'truth' somehow. Clearly, he doesn't believe that fictional characters are flesh-and-blood entities and he doesn't believe we should judge them by whether we would want to have them as friends—that may be the case with memoir and autobiography, those popularity contests that now predominate the booklists. Obversely, he doesn't believe they are merely 'men made out of words'; their reality is more substantive somehow.

Maybe, they're zombies. Maybe not, since zombies, by all accounts, seem to have bodies. They're more akin to ghosts: identities without bodies. Disembodied consciousnesses. These are the sorts of things you have to believe in if you hold any sort of religious belief. The idea of the 'soul' as some sort of eternally-existing individuated entity is fundamental to the religious delusion. The 'soul delusion' necessarily precedes the 'god delusion'.

If, like this blog, you take an agnostic approach to such matters, you find yourself in disagreement with a fundamental philosophical position of Wood. The mechanistic view of 'soul' or 'mind' is that there is no such thing absent the 'body' or the 'brain'. They are functions of complex neuronal activity, which itself is a function of genetic attributes, etc., etc. And it is the utmost hubris to assume either of the former [soul, mind] exists absent the platform provided by the latter [body, brain]. By analogy, it would seem folly to assume that the consciousness or the character or the reality or the truth of fiction—as Wood would have it—can exist apart from the form of fiction or apart from the textual words in which they are presented.

I don't want to get too analytical here, but I think it bears exploring. Now, we can say of the current President of the U.S.: "George Bush has beady eyes." All good fiction readers know how to interpret the connotations of such a statement and may or may not agree. And anyone who knows what beady eyes look like can then go to a picture of President Bush, or indeed examine the man himself, and determine for themselves whether it is true. There may be disagreement in the interpretation, but we have a way of testing that statement's truth or falsity, or at least a common ground for argument.

However, if I say of the fictional Thane of Caldor "Macbeth has beady eyes," there's no real way to verify or falsify that statement—short of a pronouncement to that effect in the Shakespearean text. The only thing we can know about Macbeth is what we are given. But, that begs the question of realism here. What is it, in fact, that we are given?

What we are given is something like a model. This model is presented to us in the same words and language we would use to describe a real flesh-and-blood person's character. It's just that the flesh-and-blood part doesn't exist. The language fools us. Indeed, it deludes us (however usefully). It makes us believe this character is real and elicits responses from us as if this character were real. We see the character in action, we see the character carrying out his/her routines, we see the character responding to certain situations, we see the character making certain decisions. Often, depending on the book's POV, we see the character's limitations, we understand his/her current state of knowledge, we recognize his/her flaws. And, with certain exceptions, we see the changes the character goes through over a period of time (or their refusal to change). That is art.

And the question of how this art works is the question Wood is proposing to answer in his book. Yet, I don't see how he can quite accomplish what he sets out to do if he truncates his analysis at the purported middle-ground of 'realism' or 'truth'. His analysis does not give us an account of the forms of fiction, of narrative (in the technical sense), of dialogue, of action, of story, of plot, or, for that matter, of dramatic structure. He stops short of showing us how these tools and techniques work together to achieve this illusion of reality, this illusion of character, this illusion of truth to which he stubbornly clings.