In the present theory this directive factor is called the Integrative Tendency. I have tried to show that it is inherent in the concept of hierarchic order, and manifested on every level, from the symbiosis of organelles in the cell, to ecological communities and human societies. Every living holon has the dual tendency to preserve and assert its individuality, such as it is, but at the same time to function as an integrated part of an existing whole, or an evolving whole.
This much, I think, one can say with some confidence. Beyond that, the beginnings of the evolutionary story are hidden behind the big bang with which the universe started, if it started that way, or behind the continuous creation of matter out of nothing, if that is the way it is. Evolution, as the cliché goes, is a journey of unknown origin to an unknown destination, a sailing along a vast ocean; but we can at least map the route which has carried us from the sea-cucumber stage to the conquest of the moon; and to deny that there is a wind blowing which makes the sails move is not only a rash hypothesis, but also a sign of metaphysical churlishness.
But whether we say that the wind, coming from a distant past, pushes the boat along, or whether we say that it drags it along into the future, is a matter of convenience. The purposiveness of all vital processes -- the striving of the blastula to grow into a chicken, regardless of the obstacles and hazards to which it is exposed, the resourceful improvisations of animals and men to reach the target of their endearours, might lead the unprejudiced observer to the conclusion that the pull of the future is as real, and sometimes more decisive than the pressure of the past. The pressure may be compared to the force exerted by a compressed spring, the pull to that of an expanded spring, threaded on the axis of time. Neither of them is more or less mechanistic than the other. Modern physics is re-thinking its ideas about time. If the future is completely determined in the Laplacian sense, then one description is as valid as the other. If it is indeterminate in the Heisenbergian sense, and there is an unknown factor operating within the air bubbles in the stream of causality, it may be influenced by the future as much as by the past. We ought to try to keep an open mind about causality and finality, even if the Zeitgeist frowns on us.*
* It is interesting to note that Waddington in a recent book argues in favour of a 'quasi-finalistic' view. [8]
The Swing of the Pendulum
In his book The Concept of Mind (1949) Professor Gilbert Ryle, an Oxford philosopher of strong Behaviourist leanings, attacked the customary distinction made between physical and mental events by calling the latter ('with deliberate abusiveness', as he said) the 'ghost in the machine'. Subsequently in a BBC broadcast, he elaborated his metaphor, and the ghost in the machine became a horse in a locomotive. [9] Professor Ryle is a prominent representative of the so-called Oxford School of Philosophy, which, in the words of one of its critics, 'treats genuine thought as a disease' (Gellner [10]). This curious philosophical aberration is now on the wane * and to hark back to it would arouse the indignant protests of the S.P.C.D.H. (see Appendix Two). Regardless of the verbal acrobatics of Behaviourists and their allies, the fundamental problems of mind and matter, of free will versus determinism, are still very much with us, and have acquired a new urgency -- not as a subject of philosophical debate, but because of their direct bearing on political ethics and private morals, on criminal justice, psychiatry, and our whole outlook on life. By the very act of denying the existence of the ghost in the machine -- of mind dependent on, but also responsible for, the actions of the body -- we incur the risk of turning it into a very nasty, malevolent ghost.
* See, inter alia, Smythies [11], John Beloff [12], Gellner [13] and Kneale [14].
Before the advent of Behaviourism, it was the psychologists and logicians who insisted that mental events have special characteristics which distinguish them from material events, whereas the physiologists were by and large inclined to take the materialist view that all mental events can be reduced to the operation of the 'automatic telephone exchange' in the brain. During the last fifty years, however, the situation has been almost reversed. While Oxford dons kept snickering about the horse in the locomotive, those men whose life work was devoted to the anatomy, physiology, pathology and surgery of the brain became increasingly converted to the opposite view. It could be summed up in a sigh of resignation: 'Oh, Brain is Brain, and Mind is Mind, and we don't know how the twain meet.' Let me give an illustration of the type of experiment which led them to that conclusion.
One of the greatest living neurosurgeons is Wilder Penfield of McGill University, who has evolved new techniques of experimenting on the exposed brain of consenting patients undergoing an operation. The patient is conscious; the experiments -- which are painless -- consist in applying low-voltage currents to selected points on the surface of the cerebral cortex. As the cortex is insensitive, the patient is unaware of the stimulating current, but he is aware of the movements which the current causes him to execute. Penfield reports:
When the neurosurgeon applies an electrode to the motor area of the patient's cerebral cortex causing the opposite hand to move, and when he asks the patient why he moved the hand, the response is: 'I didn't do it. You made me do it.' . . . It may be said that the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body. Once when I warned such a patient of my intention to stimulate the motor areas of the cortex, and challenged him to keep his hand from moving when the electrode was applied, he seized it with the other hand and struggled to hold it still. Thus, one hand, under the control of the right hemisphere driven by an electrode, and the other hand, which he controlled through the left hemisphere, were caused to struggle against each other. Behind the 'brain action' of one hemisphere was the patient's mind. Behind the action of the other hemisphere was the electrode. [15]
Penfield concluded his memorable paper:*
There are, as you see, many demonstrable mechanisms [in the brain]. They work for the purposes of the mind automatically when called upon. . . . But what agency is it that calls upon these mechanisms, choosing one rather than another? Is it another mechanism or is there in the mind something of different essence? . . . To declare that these two things are one does not make them so. But it does block the progress of research. [16] * Delivered at the 'Control of the Mind' Symposium at the University of California Medical Centre in San Francisco, 1961.
It is interesting to compare the reaction of Penfield's patients with the reaction of subjects who are made to carry out a post-hypnotic suggestion -- changing chairs, or touching their ankles, or saying 'February' when they hear the word 'three'. In both cases the subject's actions have been caused by the experimenter; but whereas the subject who does not know that he is obeying a post-hynoptic command automatically finds a more or less plausible rationalisation why he touched his ankle, Penfield's patients realise that they are obeying a physical compulsion: 'I never had a patient say, "I just wanted to do that anyway!"' One is tempted to say that the hypnotist imposes his will on the subject's mind -- the surgeon merely on his brain.
Two recent symposia on "Control of the Mind" (1961) [17] and "Brain and Conscious Experience" (1966) [18] were impressive demonstrations of the swing of the pendulum. Sir Charles Sherrington, perhaps the greatest neurologist of the century, was no longer alive, but his approach to the mind-body problem was repeatedly invoked as a kind of leitmotiv: 'That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only. . . . We have to regard the relation of mind to brain as still not merely unsolved, but still devoid of a basis of its very beginning.' [19]
The Stage and the Actors
However, if the flat-earthers have signally failed to demonstrate their contention that the mind-body problem is a pseudo-problem, it would be equally foolish to go to the other extreme and revert to crass Cartesian dualism. Nor would there be much point in going over once more the various theories which have been put forward to bridge the gulf -- interaction, parallelism, epiphe
nomenalism, identity-hypothesis, and so forth.* Let us inquire instead whether the conception of the open-ended hierarchy can shed any new light on this very old problem.
* Apart from the symposia mentioned previously, which approach the problem from the neurophysiological point of view, an excellent philosophical symposium has recently been edited by J.R. Smythies, Brain and Mind (1965).
The first, and at the same time decisive, step is to break away from thinking in terms of a two-tiered mind-matter dichotomy, and start thinking in terms of a multi-levelled hierarchy. Matter is no longer a unitary concept; the hierarchy of macroscopic, molecular, atomic, subatomic levels trails away without hitting rock-bottom, until matter dissolves into patterns of energy-concentration, and then perhaps into tensions in space. In the opposite direction we are faced with the same situation: there is an ascending series of levels, leading from automatic and semi-automatic reactions, through awareness and self-awareness, to the self's awareness of its awareness of itself, and so on, without hitting a ceiling.
The Cartesian tradition to identify 'mind' with 'conscious thinking' is deeply engrained in our habits of thought, and makes us constantly forget the obvious, trivial fact that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing affair but a matter of degrees. There is a continuous scale of gradations which extends from the unconsciousness that results from being hit on the head, through the restricted forms of consciousness in dreamless sleep, dreaming, day-dreaming, drowsiness, epileptic automatisms, and so on, up to bright, wide-awake states of arousal. These are the general states of consciousness which determine the amount of lighting -- darker or brighter -- of the stage on which the mental activity takes place. But the lower end of the scale extends far below the human level: ethologists who spend their lives observing animals refuse to draw a lower limit for consciousness, while neurophysiologists talk of 'spinal consciousness' in lower animals, and biologists of the 'protoplasmic consciousness' of protists.* Bergson even asserted that 'the unconsciousness of a falling stone is something different from the unconsciousness of a growing cabbage'.
* Such as the foraminifera, mentioned before (Chapter XI), which construct microscopic houses out of spicules of dead sponges -- houses which Hardy calls 'marvels of engineering skill, as if built to a plan'. Yet these single-called creatures have of course no nervous system.
The states of consciousness in man are easily influenced by drugs which alter the overall functioning of the brain; but also by the type of activity that goes on on the stage -- whether, lying in bed, I am thinking of the coming holidays, or counting sheep. Thus we have the paradoxical situation of a feedback loop where the actor's activities automatically brighten or darken the stage-lights -- which in turn influence the actions of the actors. Dreaming and other 'games of the underground' obey rules of acting different from those of the fully lit stage.
We must distinguish, however, between these general states of consciousness -- degrees of wakefulness, fatigue, intoxication -- and the degree of awareness of a specific activity. The first refers to 'being conscious', the second to 'being conscious of something'. The first corresponds to the overall lighting of the stage, the second to the beam concentrated on a particular actor. That the two are interrelated we have already seen. But awareness of a particular ongoing activity has its own variable scale. In man, this scale extends from the silent, self-regulating activities of viscerae and glands, of physiological processes of which we are normally unaware, through perceptions on the fringes of awareness, to automatised routines which we perform mechanically like a robot; and finally up to concentrating on a problem by directing on it the beam of focal awareness -- one actor singled out on the stage, the rest of which is plunged into darkness.
Shifts of Control
But now we come to an important point. We have seen (in Chapter VIII) that one and the same activity -- driving a car, for instance -- can be, according to circumstances, either carried out automatically without conscious awareness of one's own actions, or accompanied by varying degrees of awareness. Driving on a familiar quiet road, I can hand over to the 'automatic pilot' in my nervous system, and think about something else. Overtaking other cars on a motorway is mostly a kind of semi-conscious routine; overtaking in a tricky situation requires full awareness of what I am doing. These alternative possibilities apply not only to sensory-motor skills such as driving, bicycling, typing, playing the piano, but also to cognitive skills such as adding up a column of numbers, or 'turning one's mouth loose' to give a lecture -- as Lashley's friend did (Chapter II).
There seem to be several factors which determine how much, if any, conscious attention is to be paid to an ongoing activity. First, the acquisition of a skill by learning requires a high degree of concentration, whereas with increasing mastery and practice it can be left 'to look after itself'; which is another way of saying that the rules which govern rule-governed behaviour -- the canon of the skill -- function unconsciously; and this again applies equally to manipulative, perceptual and cognitive skills. The process of condensation of learning into habit goes on all the time, and amounts to a continual transformation of 'mental' into 'mechanical' activity -- of 'mind-processes' into 'machine-processes'.
Thus consciousness may be described in a negative way as the quality accompanying an activity which decreases in proportion to habit-formation. The transformation of learning into routine is accompanied by a dimming of the lights of awareness. We expect, therefore, that the opposite process will take place when routine is disturbed: that it will cause a change from 'mechanical' to 'mindful' behaviour. Everyday-experience confirms this; but what are the implications?
Habits and skills are functional holons, each with a fixed canon of rules and flexible strategies. Flexible strategies imply choices between several alternatives. The question is how these choices are made. Automatised routines are self-regulating in the sense that their strategy is automatically guided by feedbacks from their environments, without the necessity of referring decisions to higher levels. They operate by closed feedback loops, like servo-mechanisms or radar-controlled aeroplane landing devices. I have mentioned (p. 99) the boy on his bicycle and the tightrope-walker keeping his balance with the aid of a bamboo stick, as examples of such 'kinetic homeostasis'. The tightrope-walker certainly executes very supple, flexible manoeuvres, but they do not require conscious decisions; the visual and kinaesthetic feedback provides all the guidance needed. The same applies to driving a car -- so long as nothing unexpected happens, such as a kitten crossing the road. At that moment, a strategic choice has to be made which is beyond the competence of automatised routine,* and must be referred to 'higher quarters'. This shift of control of an ongoing activity from one level to a higher level of the hierarchy -- from 'mechanical' to 'mindful' behaviour -- seems to be of the essence of conscious decision-making and of the subjective experience of free will. It is what the patient on the operating table experiences when he consciously tries with his left hand to restrain the machine-like motion of his right hand -- and which, as Penfield says, makes him 'think of himself as having an existence separate from his body'.
* In computer language we would have to say: 'for which it has not been programmed'.
The Serial View
But at this point we risk once more falling back into simple two-tiered Cartesian dualism. The patient with his brain exposed is, of course, an exceptional and extreme case. The driver, who has to make a fast decision whether to run over the kitten or risk the safety of his passengers, does not think of his ego as leading 'an existence separate from his body'. What happens in the moment of crisis is a sudden shift to a higher level in a many-levelled hierarchy, from a semi-automatic to a more conscious performance which is a relative, not an absolute, affair. And, whatever the conscious decision, its execution -- the 'spelling-out process' -- must still rely on the automatised sub-skills (braking, swerving, etc.) on lower levels.
'Consciousness', to quote Thorpe, 'is a primary datum of existence and as such it cannot
be fully defined. . . . [20] The evidence suggests that at the lower levels [of the evolutionary scale] consciousness, if it exists, must be of a very generalised kind, so to say unstructured; and that with the development of purposive behaviour and a powerful faculty of attention, consciousness associated with expectation will become more and more vivid and precise.' [21]
What I am suggesting is that such gradings of 'structuring, vividness and precision' are found not only along the ladder of evolution, but also among members of the same species, and within the same individual at different stages of development and in different situations. Each 'upward' shift in the hierarchy leads to more vivid and structured conscious states, each downward shift has the opposite effect. Let me briefly elaborate on this.
Only a fraction of the sensory input to the cerebral cortex reaches consciousness, and again only a fraction of this is highlighted by focal awareness. But inputs which become conscious at all have already been processed and transformed: certain ranges of electro-magnetic waves have taken on the subjective qualities of colours, airwaves the qualities of pitch, and so forth. This is the first step in the serial process of promoting 'physical events' into 'mental events', and some philosophers regard it as the basic mystery, while others are unable to see the problem, and point out that bees, too, for instance, perceive patterns and colours, and dogs have their private universes of smell. I shall deliberately evade this deadlocked controversy, because the same problem arises with each shift upward in the hierarchies of perceiving, doing, knowing. Air vibrations do not become music in one single, magic transformation from the physical to the mental, but by a whole series of operations, of abstracting patterns in time and assembling them into more comprehensive patterns on higher levels of the hierarchy. The conscious appreciation of music depends on this, and the degree of 'musical awareness' corresponds to the degree of integration of melodic, harmonic, contrapuntal patterns into a coherent whole.