The Ghost in the Machine
As another example, reverting to the discussion in Chapter II, consider how we convert variations of air pressure into ideas, and back again. Understanding language depends on a constantly repeated series of 'quantum jumps', so to speak, from one level of the speech hierarchy to the next higher one: phonemes can only be interpreted on the level of morphemes, words must be referred to context, sentences to the larger context; and behind the meaning stands the intention, the unverbalised idea, the train of thoughts. But trains need pointsmen to guide them on their course. The pointsmen need instructions. And so on. Infinite regress is not an invention of philosophers. In one of Alfred Hayes' short stories* the heroine reflects on the chain of events which led to the accidental death of her child:
'Because we always think of things as happening in some sort of succession. And then we say: because. Thinking the because explains. And then you examine the because, as I've done, oh, so many times since, and it opens up and inside there's another because, smaller, a because inside the other because, and you keep opening them and they keep disclosing other becauses. . . . ' * The Beach at Ocean View.
Classical dualism knows only a single mind-body barrier. The hierarchic approach implies a serialistic instead of a dualistic view. Each in the series of upward shifts in assimilating music or language amounts to the crossing of a barrier from lower to higher states of awareness. The 'spelling out' of an idea is the reverse process: it converts 'airy nothings' into the mechanical motion of the organs of speech. This too is done by a series of steps, each of which triggers off pre-set neural 'mechanisms' of a more and more automatised type. The unverbalised image or idea which sets the process going pertains to a more 'mentalistic', ethereal level than its embodiment in speech; the invisible sentence-generating machinery works unconsciously, automatically, and can be thrown out of gear by damage to well-defined areas of the cortex; and the last step of articulating the sounds of speech is performed by entirely mechanised muscle contractions. Each step downward entails a handing-over of responsibility to more automatised automatisms; each step upward to more mentalistic processes of mentation. The mind-machine dichotomy is not localised along a single boundary between ego and environment, but is present on every level of the hierarchy. It is, in fact, a manifestation of our old friend, the two-faced god Janus.
To put it in a different way: the 'spelling out' of an intent -- whether it is a verbal intent or just the lighting of a cigarette -- is a process of particularisation, of setting sub-routines into motion, functional holons of a subordinate, autonomous part-character. On the other hand, the referring of decisions to higher levels, as well as the interpretation and generalisation of inputs, are integrative processes which tend to establish a higher degree of unity and wholeness of experience. Thus every upward shift or 'quantum jump' in the hierarchy would represent a quasi-holistic move, every downward shift a particularistic move, the former characterised by heightened awareness and mentalistic attributes, the latter by dimming awareness and mechanistic attributes.
Consciousness in this view is an emergent quality, which evolves into more complex and structured states in phylogeny, as the ultimate manifestation of the Integrative Tendency towards the creation of order out of disorder, of 'information' out of 'noise'. To quote another outstanding neurophysiologist of our time, R.W. Sperry (his italics):
Prior to the first appearance of conscious awareness in evolution, the entire cosmic process, science tells us, was only, as someone has phrased it, 'A play before empty benches', colourless and silent at that because, according to our present physics, prior to the advent of brains there was no colour and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavour or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety. . . . There is no more important quest in the whole of science probably than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: colour, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience. [22]
The Flatworm's Ego
Looking upward -- or inward -- every man has the feeling that there is in him a personality-core, or apex, 'which controls his thinking and directs the searchlight of his attention' (Penfield), a feeling of wholeness. Looking outward or downward he is only aware of the task at hand, a partial kind of awareness which fades, in descending order, into the dimness of routine, the unawareness of visceral processes, of the growing cabbage and the falling stone.
But in the upward direction the hierarchy is equally open-ended. The self which directs the searchlight of my attention can never be caught in its focal beam. Even the operations which generate language include processes which cannot be expressed by language (p. 33). It is a paradox as old as Achilles and the Tortoise, that the experiencing subject can never fully become the object of his experience; at best he can achieve successive approximations. If learning and knowing consist in making oneself a private model of the universe,* it follows that the model can never include a complete model of itself, because it must always lag one step behind the process which it is supposed to represent. With each upward-shift of awareness towards the apex of the hierarchy -- the self as an integrated whole -- it recedes like a mirage. 'Know thyself' is the most venerable and the most tantalising command.
* See Craik, The Nature of Explanation (1943), one of the cornerstones of modern communication theory.
On the other hand, even man's limited, incomplete capacity for self-awareness puts him into a category apart from other living beings. Animals as lowly as the flatworm apparently show signs of attentiveness and expectancy which could be called primitive forms of awareness; primates and domestic pets may also have the rudiments of self-awareness; but man nevertheless occupies a lone peak.
Now we have seen (Chapter IV) that if a flatworm is cut transversely into six segments, each of them is capable of regenerating into a complete animal, so that the classical dualist would have to assume that its mind or soul has split into six 'solons' (p. 68). In the present theory, however, the self or mind is not regarded as a discrete entity, a whole in an absolute sense; but each of its functional holons in the many-levelled hierarchy -- from visceral regulations to cognitive habits -- is regarded as having a measure of individuality, with the Janus-faced attributes of partness and wholeness; and the degree of their integratedness into a unified personality varies with circumstances, but is never absolute. Total awareness of selfhood, the identity of the knower and the known, though always in sight, is never achieved. It could only be achieved at the peak of the hierarchy which is always one step removed from the climber.
From this point of view, it is no longer absurd to assume that the flatworm's fragments, whose tissues have reverted to the condition of the growing embryo, have started all over again to build up a mind-body hierarchy, perhaps even with its concomitant dim awareness of selfhood. If consciousness is an emergent quality, the ugly paradox of the 'solon' -- implicit in all Eastern and Platonic philosophy -- ceases to exist.
The slow emergence of awareness in phylogeny is reflected to some extent in ontogeny. In the preceding chapter I quoted Piaget and Freud on the newborn infant's fluid world of experience, which knows as yet no boundaries between self and not-self. In a series of classic studies Piaget has shown that the establishment of that boundary is a gradual process, and that only around the age of seven or eight does the average child become fully conscious of its own, separate, personal identity. 'That particular ingredient of the ego [self-awareness] must be built up by experience', Adrian commented. [23] But there is no end to that building process.
A Road to Freedom
I have compared its successive stages to an infinite mathematical series converging towards unity,* or to a spiral curve converging towards a centre which it will only reach after an infinite number of involutions.
* The simplest series of this kind is: S = (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16
+ . . . 1/n), where n has to approach infinity for the sum S to approach unity.
But the quest for the self is a rather abstract pastime for philosophers and depth-psychologists; for ordinary mortals it assumes importance only where moral decisions or the feeling of responsibility for one's past actions -- in other words, the problem of free will -- is involved. The puzzle concerning the agency which directs one's thinking, and of the agency behind that agency, bothers one only when one feels guilty about one's silly, or sinful, or idle thoughts -- or actions.
I like to imagine a dialogue at high table at an Oxford college, between an elderly don of strictly deterministic persuasion, and a young Australian guest of uninhibited temperament.
The Australian exclaims: 'If you go on denying that I am free in my decisions, I'll punch your nose!' The old man gets red in his face: 'I deplore your unpardonable behaviour.' 'I apologise. I lost my temper.' 'You really ought to control yourself.' 'Thank you. The experiment was conclusive.'
It was indeed. 'Unpardonable', 'ought to', and 'control yourself' are all expressions which imply that the Australian's behaviour was not determined by heredity-cum-environment, that he was free to choose whether to be polite or rude. Whatever one's philosophical convictions, in everyday life it is impossible to carry on without the implicit belief in personal responsibility; and responsibility implies freedom of choice.
If I may quote what I wrote much earlier on -- when I was still primarily interested in the political implications of the problem:
It is now six o'clock in the evening, I have just had a drink and I feel a strong temptation to have a couple more and then go and dine out instead of writing this essay. I have fought myself over this issue for the last quarter of an hour and finally I have locked the gin and the vermouth in the cupboard and settled down to my desk, feeling very satisfied with myself. From a deterministic point of view this satisfaction is entirely spurious, since the issue was already settled before I started fighting myself; it was also settled that I should feel this spurious satisfaction and write what I write. Of course in my heart of hearts I do not believe that this is so, and I certainly did not believe it a quarter of an hour ago. Had I believed it, the process which I call 'inner struggle' would not have taken place, and fatality would have served me as a perfect excuse for going on drinking. Thus my disbelief in determinism must be contained in the set of factors which determine my behaviour; one of the conditions for fulfilling the prearranged pattern is that I should not believe that it is prearranged. Destiny can only have its way by forcing me to disbelieve in it. Thus the very concept of determinism condemns a man to live in a world where the rules of conduct are based on As Ifs and the rules of logic on Becauses. This paradox is not confined to scientific determinism; the Moslem, living in a world of religious determinism, displays the same mental split. Though he believes, in the words of the Koran, that 'every man's destiny is fastened on his neck', yet he curses his enemy and himself when he blunders, as if all were masters of their choice. He behaves on his own level exactly like old Karl Marx, who taught that man's mental make-up is a product of his environment, yet showered invectives on everybody who, in obedience to his environmental conditioning, couldn't help disagreeing with him. [24]
The subjective experience of freedom is as much a given datum as the sensation of colour, or the feeling of pain. It is the feeling of making a not enforced, not inevitable, choice. It seems to be working from inside outward, originating in the core of the personality. Even psychiatrists of the deterministic school agree that the abolition of the experience of having a will of his own leads to collapse of the patient's whole mental structure. Is that experience nevertheless based on an illusion?
The majority of participants at the symposium on 'Brain and Conscious Experience', mentioned above, were of the opposite opinion. One of the speakers, Professor MacKay, a communication theorist and computer expert, whom one would expect to incline towards a mechanistic outlook, concluded his paper as follows (his italics): 'Our belief that we are normally free in making our choices, so far from being contradictable, has no valid alternative from the standpoint even of the most deterministic pre-Heisenberg physics. . . .'* [25]
* Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, one of the foundations of modern physics, suggests that on the quantum level strict determinism no longer applies.
MacKay based his argument partly on the indeterminacy of modern physics, but mainly on a logical paradox to which I have already alluded: determinism implies predictability of behaviour, which means that an ideal computer, given all the relevant data about me, could predict what I am going to do; but these data would have to include my belief that I am free, which would have to be fed into the computer. At this point the argument becomes highly technical, and I must refer the reader to the original paper.
But arguments from logic and epistemology seem to me rather less convincing than the hierarchic approach. The fixed canons which govern the activities of a holon leave it a number of alternative choices. On the visceral level these choices are decided by the closed feedback-loops of homeostatic regulations. But on higher levels, the variety of choices increases with increasing complexity; and the decisions depend less and less on closed loops and stereotyped routines. Compare playing noughts and crosses with playing chess. In both cases, my choice of the next move is 'free' in the sense of not being determined by the fixed rules of the game. But while noughts and crosses offers only a few alternative choices, determined by simple, almost automatic strategies, the competent chess-player is guided in his decisions by strategic precepts on a much higher level of complexity; and these precepts have an even larger margin of uncertainty. They form a delicate, precarious web of pros and cons. It is this upward shift to higher levels which makes the choice into a conscious choice; and it is the delicate balance of pros and cons which lends it the subjective flavour of freedom.
From the objective point of view the decisive factor seems to me to be that the 'degrees of freedom', in the physicist's sense, increase in ascending order. Thus the higher the level to which decision-making is referred, the less predictable the choices; and the ultimate decisions rest with the apex -- but the apex itself does not rest. It goes on receding. The self, which has ultimate responsibility for a man's actions, can never be caught in the focal beam of his own awareness -- and consequently its actions can never be predicted by the perfect computer, however much data it is fed: because the data will of necessity always be incomplete.* In the end, they will again lead to an infinitely regressing series of loops within loops, and becauses inside becauses.
* This is related to MacKay's arguments and also to Karl Popper's proposition that no information system (such as a computing machine) can embody within itself an up-to-date representation of itself, including that representation. [26] A somewhat similar argument has been advanced by Michael Polanyi on the indeterminacy of the boundary conditions of physico-chemical systems. [27]
A Sort of Maxim
If we reverse our steps and move downward in the hierarchy, decision-making is taken over by semi-automatic, then by fully automatic, routines, and with each shift of control to lower levels the subjective experience of freedom diminishes, accompanied by a dimming of awareness. Habit is the enemy of freedom; the mechanisation of habits tends towards the 'rigor mortis' of the robot-like pedant (Chapter VIII). Machines cannot become like men, but men can become like machines.
The second enemy of freedom is passion, or more specifically, the self-assertive, hunger-rage-fear-rape class of emotions. When they are aroused, the control of decisions is taken over by those primitive levels of the hierarchy which the Victorians called 'the Beast in us', and which are in fact correlated to phylogenetically older structures in the nervous system (see below, Chapter XVI). The loss of freedom resulting from this downward shift of controls is reflected in the legal concept of 'diminished responsibility', and in the subjective feeling of acting under a compulsion: 'I couldn't help it . . .', 'I lost my head'
, 'I must have been out of my mind'. It is once more the Janus principle. Facing upward or inward, towards that unattainable core from which my decisions seem to emanate, I feel free. Facing the other way, there is the robot -- or the beast.
It is at this point that the moral dilemma of judging others arises. How am I to know whether or to what extent his responsibility was diminished when he acted as he did, and whether he could 'help it'? Compulsion and freedom are opposite ends of a graded scale; but there is no pointer attached to the scale that I could read. The safest hypothesis is to assign a minimum of responsibility to the other, and a maximum to oneself. There is an old French adage, Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner -- to understand all is to forgive all. On the above hypothesis it should be altered to: Tout comprendre, ne rien se pardonner -- understand all, forgive yourself nothing. It sounds like moral humility combined with intellectual arrogance. But it is relatively safe.