Thinks...

by David Lodge

  ‘Who knows? He might have developed some horribly painful degenerative disease next year.’

  ‘And he might not.’

  ‘No, he might not,’ Ralph concedes.

  ‘He might have had a long and happy life, and made lots of brilliant radio documentaries and had grandchildren and gone round the world and . . . all kinds of things.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know that now. And he didn’t have time to think about it before he died. He died full of hope. That’s why I say it was a good way to go.’

  The waitress comes up with their food and they suspend the conversation for a few moments as she serves them. It is an opportunity for Helen to calm herself.

  ‘So you think that when we die we just cease to exist?’ she says, when the waitress has gone.

  ‘Not in an absolute sense. The atoms of my body are indestructible.’

  ‘But your self, your spirit, your soul . . . ?’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned those are just ways of talking about certain kinds of brain activity. When the brain ceases to function, they necessarily cease too.’

  ‘And that doesn’t fill you with despair?’

  ‘No,’ he says cheerfully, twisting creamy ribbons of tagliatelle on his fork. ‘Why should it?’ He thrusts the steaming pasta into his mouth and munches vigorously.

  ‘Well, it seems pointless to spend years and years acquiring knowledge, accumulating experience, trying to be good, struggling to make something of yourself, as the saying goes, if nothing of that self survives death. It’s like building a beautiful sandcastle below the tideline.’

  ‘That’s the only part of the beach you can build a sandcastle,’ Ralph says. ‘Anyway, I hope to leave a permanent mark on the history of cognitive science before I go. Just as you must hope to do in literature. That’s a kind of life after death. The only kind.’

  ‘Well, yes, but the number of authors who go on being really read after their death is minuscule. Most of us end up being pulped, literally or metaphorically.’ Helen chivvies some limp lettuce leaves with brownish stalks to the side of her plate and cuts up the remainder. ‘What is cognitive science, exactly?’

  ‘The systematic study of the mind,’ he says. ‘It’s the last frontier of scientific enquiry.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The physicists have pretty well got the cosmos taped. It’s only a matter of time before they come up with a unified theory. The discovery of DNA has transformed biology once and for all. Consciousness is the biggest white space on the map of human knowledge. Did you know this is the Decade of the Brain?’

  ‘No. Who said so?’

  ‘Well, I think it was President Bush, as a matter of fact,’ says Ralph. ‘But he was speaking for the scientific community. All kinds of people have got interested in the subject lately – physicists, biologists, zoologists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, mathematicians . . .’

  ‘Which of those are you?’ Helen asks.

  ‘I started out as a philosopher. I read Moral Sciences at Cambridge, and did a PhD on the Philosophy of Mind. Then I went to America on a fellowship and got into computers and AI –’

  ‘AI?’

  ‘Artificial Intelligence. Once upon a time nobody was interested in the problem of consciousness except a few philosophers. Now it’s the biggest game in town.’

  ‘What’s the problem, then?’ Helen asks.

  Ralph chuckles. ‘You don’t find anything surprising or puzzling about the fact that you are a conscious being?’

  ‘Not really. About the content of my consciousness, yes, of course. Emotions, memories, feelings. They’re very problematic. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Well, they come into it. They’re called qualia in the literature.’

  ‘Qualia?’

  ‘The specific quality of our subjective experiences of the world – like the smell of coffee, or the taste of pineapple. They’re unmistakable, but very difficult to describe. Nobody’s figured out how to account for them yet. Nobody’s proved that they actually exist.’ Perceiving that she is about to protest, he adds, ‘Of course they seem real enough, but they may just be implementations of something more fundamental and mechanical.’

  ‘“The hardwiring in your brain”?’ she says, putting quote marks round the phrase in her intonation.

  Ralph smiles a pleased smile. ‘You watched my TV series?’

  ‘Only a little of it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, I don’t go the whole way with the neuroscientists. OK, the mind is a machine, but a virtual machine. A system of systems.’

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t a system at all.’

  ‘Oh, but it is. Everything in the universe is. If you’re a scientist you have to start from that assumption.’

  ‘I expect that’s why I dropped science at school as soon as they let me.’

  ‘No, you dropped it, I would guess, because it was doled out to you in spoonfuls of distilled boredom . . . Anyway, the problem of consciousness is basically the old mind-body one bequeathed by Descartes. My graduate students call our Centre, “the Mind/Body Shop”. We know that the mind doesn’t consist of some immaterial spook-stuff, the ghost in the machine. But what does it consist of? How do you explain the phenomenon of consciousness? Is it just electro-chemical activity in the brain? Neurones firing, neurotransmitters jumping across the synapses? In a sense, yes, that’s all there is that we can observe. You can do PET scans and MRI scans nowadays that show different parts of the brain lighting up like a pinball machine, as different emotions and sensations are triggered in the subject. But how is that activity translated into thought? If translated is the word, which it probably isn’t. Is there some kind of preverbal medium of consciousness – “mentalese” – which at a certain point, for certain purposes, gets articulated by the particular parts of the brain that specialize in language? These are the kind of questions I’m interested in.’

  ‘And what if they are unanswerable?’

  ‘There are some people in the field who take that view. They’re called mysterians.’

  ‘Mysterians. I like the sound of that,’ she says. ‘I think I’m a mysterian.’

  ‘They believe that consciousness is an irreducible self-evident fact about the world that can’t be explained in other terms.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was more like Keats’s “negative capability”,’ says Helen. She sounds disappointed.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘“When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”’

  ‘No, these guys are scientists and philosophers, not poets. But they’re wrong to give up the search for an explanation.’

  ‘What’s yours, then?’

  ‘I think the mind is like a computer – you use a computer?’

  ‘I’ve got a laptop. I use it like a glorified typewriter. I have no idea how it does the tricks it does.’

  ‘OK. Your PC is a linear computer. It performs a lot of tasks one at a time at terrific speed. The brain is more like a parallel computer, in other words it’s running lots of programs simultaneously. What we call “attention” is a particular interaction between various parts of the total system. The subsystems and possible connections and combinations between them are so multitudinous and complex that it’s very difficult to simulate the whole process – in fact, impossible in the present state of the art. But we’re getting there, as British Rail used to say.’

  ‘You mean, you’re trying to design a computer that thinks like a human being?’

  ‘In principle, that’s the ultimate objective.’

  ‘And feels like a human being? A computer that has hangovers and falls in love and suffers bereavement?’

  ‘A hangover is a kind of pain, and pain always has been a difficult nut to crack,’ says Ralph carefully. ‘But I don’t see any inherent impossibility in designing and programming a robot that could get into a symbiotic relationship with another robot and would exhibit s
ymptoms of distress if the other robot were put out of commission.’

  ‘You’re joking, of course?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘But it’s absurd!’ Helen exclaims. ‘How can robots have feelings? They’re just a lot of bits and pieces of metal and wire and plastic.’

  ‘They are at present,’ he says. ‘But there’s no reason why the hardware shouldn’t be embodied in some kind of organic material in the future. In the States they’ve already developed synthetic electromechanical muscle tissue for robots. Or we may develop computers that are carbon-based, like biological organisms, instead of silicon-based ones.’

  ‘Your Mind/Body Shop sounds like a modern version of Frankenstein’s laboratory.’

  ‘If only,’ he says, with a rueful smile. ‘We haven’t got the resources to build our own robots. Most of our work is theoretical or simulated. It’s cheaper – but less exciting. The nearest thing we’ve got to Frankenstein’s laboratory is Max Karinthy’s mural.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘I’ll show you now, if you’re free. And give you a cup of the best machine-made coffee you’ve ever had.’

  ‘All right,’ says Helen. ‘Thank you.’

  When the waitress brings the bill, Ralph picks it up, but Helen insists on paying her share and he does not make an issue of it.

  ‘You don’t mind walking?’ he asks, as they descend the stairs to the lobby.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘There is a shuttle bus in . . .’ He glances at a chunky stainless steel watch. ‘About ten minutes.’

  ‘No, I like to walk,’ she says. ‘It’s the only exercise I get.’

  ‘Me too. I always walk on campus unless its raining.’

  It isn’t raining outside, but looks as if it might soon. A damp wind is blowing across the campus under scudding grey clouds. They walk along the path that skirts the lake, moving into single file every now and again as a tinkling bell warns them of the approach of a cyclist. It being a Wednesday afternoon, there is evidence of sporting activity. Shouts and cries carry faintly from the playing fields on the eastern perimeter, and a rugby ball rises and falls in a spinning arc against the sky. On the lake, some students in wetsuits are windsurfing. The brightly coloured shards of their sails against the dark water make a pleasant picture, but the lake is hardly big enough for the purpose: no sooner have the craft got up some speed than they have to make quick turns to avoid hitting the bank, or each other. Capsizes are frequent.

  ‘I know what this place reminds me of,’ Helen says suddenly. ‘Gladeworld. Have you ever been?’

  ‘No, what is it?’

  ‘A sort of up-market holiday village. I went with my sister’s family last summer. It was in a biggish bit of wooded country, surrounded by a wire fence. You live in little houses built between the trees. In the middle there’s a huge plastic dome with a kind of swimming-pool-cum-botanical-gardens underneath it with lots of water chutes and whirlpools and suchlike. And there’s a supermarket and restaurants and sports halls – and an artificial lake for sailing and windsurfing that isn’t quite big enough. That’s what reminded me. That and the bicycles. You’re not allowed to drive your car at Gladeworld once you’ve unloaded it. Everybody rents bicycles, or walks. Everything you need for your holiday is inside the fence. You never need to go outside.’

  ‘It sounds ghastly.’

  ‘My sister’s children adored it, I have to say. But I felt a little trapped. There’s a manned security barrier to stop unauthorized people getting in, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was also there to discourage us from going out.’

  They walk on in silence for a while.

  ‘I get the impression you wish you hadn’t come here,’ he says.

  ‘I’m probably just homesick,’ she says. ‘I daresay I’ll settle down soon, and enjoy it.’

  ‘Why did you apply for the job?’

  ‘I need the money, for one thing.’

  ‘But they pay you peanuts!’ he exclaims, adding, ‘I happen to know because I’m on the Senate Academic Appointments Committee. I saw the papers.’

  ‘It may seem like peanuts to you, but I need it,’ says Helen. ‘I don’t earn a great deal from my books, alas. And although Martin’s life was insured, it only yields a modest annuity. But you’re right, it wasn’t just for the money. My daughter’s having a gap year between school and university, she’s in Australia. It was all planned before Martin died, and I didn’t want to stop her. It’s what they all do nowadays. And my son’s in Iowa for his year abroad – he’s doing American Studies at Manchester. The house seemed very big and echoey without them. And too full of memories. I thought a change of scene would do me good . . .’

  She falls silent. Ralph gives a vague grunt of assent.

  ‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘D’you like it here?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says, ‘but I’d go mad if I didn’t get away from time to time.’

  ‘To conferences, and on media jaunts?’

  He glances at her quizzically, as if struck by her choice of words. ‘That sort of thing, yes. There are worse places to be, but it’s a bit sleepy and provincial. The University was fashionable in the seventies, but it was never given enough money to grow to a viable size, not for serious scientific research anyway. Now it’s on the slide, to be frank. Like a football club desperately trying to avoid relegation from the Premier League. I didn’t quite realize that when I was offered the directorship of the Centre. I was quite happy at Cal Tech, but this seemed like an offer I couldn’t refuse, running my own show, in a purpose-built prize-winning building.’ He points to the squat, cylindrical structure which has now come into their view, with its grooved dome and opaque glass walls.

  ‘I’m told that the dome represents the twin hemispheres of the brain,’ Helen says.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why are the walls made of mirror glass?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  Helen smiles as if at some private joke, then frowns with concentration. ‘Because you can see out of it but not into it? Like the mind?’

  ‘Well done.’ Ralph nods like a satisfied teacher. ‘That’s half the answer. But after dark, when the lights are on, you can see everything that’s going on inside in the building from outside, symbolizing the explanatory power of scientific research. That was the architect’s idea, anyway.’

  ‘But if you draw the blinds –’

  ‘Good point!’ Ralph laughs. ‘The architect explicitly excluded blinds and curtains from his design, but people found their offices intolerable in bright sunshine so he had to put them in, and some of us like to draw them when it gets dark.’

  ‘Ruining the symbolism.’

  ‘Not really. You can always draw the blinds on consciousness. We never know for certain what another person is really thinking. Even if they choose to tell us, we can never know whether they’re telling the truth, or the whole truth. And by the same token nobody can know our thoughts as we know them.’

  ‘Just as well, perhaps. Social life would be difficult otherwise.’

  ‘Absolutely. Imagine what the Richmonds’ dinner party would have been like, if everyone had had those bubbles over their heads that you get in kids’ comics, with “Thinks . . .” inside them.’ He looks directly into Helen’s eyes as he says this, as if speculating about her thoughts on that occasion.

  She colours slightly. ‘I suppose that’s why people read novels,’ she says. ‘To find out what goes on in other people’s heads.’

  ‘But all they really find out is what has gone on in the writer’s head. It’s not real knowledge.’

  ‘Oh? What is real knowledge, then?’

  ‘Scientific knowledge. The trouble is, if you restrict the study of consciousness to what can be empirically observed and measured, you leave out what’s most distinctive about it.’

  ‘Qualia.’

  ‘Exactly. There’s an old joke that crops up in nearly every book on consciousness,
about two behaviourist psychologists who have sex, and afterwards one says to the other, “It was good for you, how was it for me?”’

  Helen has not heard this joke before, and laughs.

  ‘That’s the problem of consciousness in a nutshell,’ Ralph says. ‘How to give an objective, third-person account of a subjective, first-person phenomenon.’

  ‘Oh, but novelists have been doing that for the last two hundred years,’ says Helen airily.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  She stops on the footpath, lifts one hand, and shuts her eyes, frowning with concentration. Then she recites, with hardly any hesitation, or stumbling over words: ‘“She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once – she had tried it – the sense of the slippery and the sticky.”’

  He stares. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Henry James. The opening sentences of The Wings of the Dove.’ Helen walks on, and Ralph moves into step beside her.

  ‘Is it a party trick of yours – reciting chunks of classic novels from memory?’

  ‘I started a PhD thesis on point of view in Henry James,’ says Helen. ‘Never finished it, unfortunately, but some of the key quotations stuck.’

  ‘Do it again.’

  Helen repeats the quotation, and says, ‘You see – you have Kate’s consciousness there, her thoughts, her feelings, her impatience, her hesitation about leaving or staying, her perception of her own appearance in the mirror, the nasty texture of the armchair’s upholstery, “at once slippery and sticky” – how’s that for qualia? And yet it’s all narrated in the third person, in precise, elegant, well-formed sentences. It’s subjective and objective.’

  ‘Well, it’s effectively done, I grant you,’ says Ralph. ‘But it’s literary fiction, not science. James can claim to know what’s going on in Kate Whatshername’s head because he put it there, he invented her. Out of his own experience and folk psychology.’