Consciousness and the Novel
Page 3
I put two fingers on the bag—and astonishingly was taken into an irrelevant bliss.
Under the bag’s surface, the metal was hot to the touch—and yes, pushing under memories, I had it, I knew why I was happy. It brought back the moment, the grass and earth hot under my hand, when Martin and Irene told me she was going to have a child . . . I had been made a present of a Proustian moment, and the touch of the metal, whose heat might otherwise have seemed sinister, levitated me to the forgotten happiness of a joyous summer night.26
The allusion of course is to the famous moment in A la recherche du temps perdu when the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea triggers in the narrator a vivid and intense memory of another time and place. But the language of Snow’s passage has none of the shimmering symbolist rhetoric, the complex syntax and sensuous imagery, that we find in Proust. The qualia of the moment are described in flat, referential terms—“hot to the touch,” “the grass and earth hot under my hand.” Only “levitated” is a metaphor, and a slightly confusing one, suggesting a movement upwards in space rather than backwards in time.
Lewis Eliot describes this experience of bliss as “irrelevant.” It is a curious epithet to apply to bliss, suggesting a scientific civil servant’s guilt or impatience at being distracted from the agenda of a committee meeting. But the moment does, rather unusually for Snow, make a connection between qualia and personal history. One of the things I noticed in revisiting The New Men was an insistent dissociation of sensuous experience from the rest of life. The narrative is punctuated with what I would call nature notes—short observations of the weather, or of the natural world—which have no narrative function, nor, even when they contain metaphorical language, a symbolic function. For example:
The full moon shone down on the lightless blind-faced streets, and the shadows were dark indigo. Flecks of cloud, as though scanning the short syllables in a line of verse, stood against the impenetrable sky. Under the moon, the roofs of Pimlico shone blue as steel. It was a silent, beautiful wartime night. (See here)
Or:
The river-smell was astringent in the darkened air. Somewhere down the stream, a swan unfolded its wings and flapped noisily for a moment before settling again and sailing away. (See here)
These descriptive passages are precisely “irrelevant” to the real business of the novel, which is carried on in the dialogue that they interrupt. They are loose bits of lyricism, which could be moved about and inserted almost anywhere in the text without any change of import. They are not particularly well written, but this hardly matters. They communicate the same meaning every time they occur: the banal irony that nature is indifferent to the affairs of men; and the implication that Lewis Eliot is not so obsessed with those affairs, with the machinations of political and private life, as to be unaware and unappreciative of nature. This perhaps helps to make him appear a sympathetic and reliable narrator.
Another thing that struck me about this novel was how little hard science there is in it. The processes of nuclear fission are never fully described or explained, though Snow himself was fully conversant with them, but rather are alluded to in dialogue by the scientific characters in a kind of colloquial shorthand. Lewis Eliot is a lawyer by profession and frankly admits that he doesn’t understand the details of the scientific research over which he has a supervisory role. He thus stands as a kind of buffer between the reader and the technical details of nuclear fission. The emphasis is all on the human motivation and interaction of the physicists and their spouses: in short, we get a personalistic account of the development of the atomic bomb.
A more recent novel deals explicitly with the theme of consciousness and the two cultures in what I think is an interesting and thought-provoking way. The novel is Galatea 2.2 by the American novelist Richard Powers, published in 1995.27 I discovered this book only recently, perhaps because Powers is not as well known in Britain as in America, where he has been shortlisted several times for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and holds a coveted MacArthur Fellowship. His work tends to be categorised with genre fiction like the techno-thriller and science fiction rather than literary fiction, and the title of Galatea 2.2 encourages such a misapprehension. In fact he is a very literary novelist, and Galatea 2.2 is not the name of a spaceship or a distant star, but an allusion to the myth of Pygmalion. I am rather glad that I didn’t discover this novel any earlier, and certainly not when it was first published, because I might then have been discouraged from embarking on Thinks . . . The two novels are very different, but there are several echoes and parallels between them, and they both address the subject of consciousness by juxtaposing literary intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. The core story of Powers’s novel is a wager about whether or not it is possible to build a machine that can pass an examination in English Literature.
The narrator is called Richard Powers, and his biography corresponds quite closely to publicly known facts about the real author at the time of publication. He is 35 years old. He tells us that as a young man he was going to major in Physics at his Midwestern university but switched to English instead, started graduate work in literature but dropped out, lived in Boston for some time, lived in Holland for some time, published highly praised novels with scientific and speculative themes, received a prestigious fellowship which took him back to his alma mater in the Midwest, where the story of Galatea 2.2 begins—though the main narrative is interwoven with regular flashbacks describing his earlier life in some detail. A feature of the novel is that several of the locations and characters are referred to by a single initial. Thus Boston is B. and the Midwestern university town is U., and the woman whom the narrator meets when he is a graduate instructor and with whom he lives for many years, and whom he follows to Holland, is referred to simply as C. This convention reinforces the autobiographical effect because it seems designed to protect the identity of real people with whom the real Richard Powers has been involved. The main story “feels” fictional, for reasons I shall suggest in a moment, but exactly where autobiography and fiction diverge is impossible to determine from the text itself. The novel plays a typical postmodernist game with the reader in this respect.
When the main story starts, the narrator, Richard Powers, is in a demoralised state. He has broken up with his long-term partner, C.; he has a novel about to come out with which he is dissatisfied; and he is blocked on a new one, unable to get past the first sentence, “Picture a train heading south.” He is attached to the English Department at U., but also to the enormous and lavishly funded Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences, as a “token humanist.” This Center is an interdisciplinary think-tank. “At the vertex of several intersecting rays—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, visualization and signal processing—sat the culminating prize of consciousness’s long adventure: an owner’s manual for the brain” (see here). Powers’s account of these different disciplines, and of the disagreements between their exponents, is knowledgeable and lively. The main competition is between the top-down approach of Artificial Intelligence and the bottom-up approach of neuroscience. Powers meets a man called Philip Lentz who believes the future belongs to something in between: neural networks, or connectionism, at that time a new development seen as a departure from AI:
The brain was not a sequential, state function processor, as the AI people had it. At the same time, it emerged to exceed the chemical sum passing through its neuronal vesicles. The brain was a model-maker, continuously rewritten by the thing it tried to model. Why not model this and see what insights one might hook in to? (see here)
Lentz is a sardonic, crotchety middle-aged man who looks “like Jacob Bronowski’s evil twin.” Knowing Powers is a novelist, he gives him the mocking nickname “Marcel”; Powers retaliates by addressing Lentz as “Engineer.” The two-cultures distinction is implicitly alluded to in this nomenclature. One day in the Center’s cafeteria, Powers gets drawn into an argument between Lentz and a professor called Harold Plover. P
lover’s discipline is never specified, but Lentz describes it rudely as “his noncomputational Berkeley Zen bullshit,” which suggests to me that he is a philosophical physicist coming at the problem of consciousness from quantum physics and chaos theory, like Roger Penrose and James Trefil. In any event, Plover is certainly sceptical of Artificial Intelligence, whether in its classic or neural network forms. In the course of a heated argument Lentz boasts that he could build a machine that would be able to pass the Master’s Comprehensive Exam that Powers took when he was a graduate student in the English Department, based on a six-page list of set texts starting with Caedmon’s Hymn and ending with Richard Wright. A wager is made, to be determined by a Turing Test. In this test, devised by the great mathematician usually credited with inventing the computer, the judge sits at a console and communicates via a screen and keyboard with two invisible respondents, one human, the other a computer program. If the judge cannot tell the difference between the two respondents, the machine is deemed to have successfully replicated human intelligence. “It will be a rush job,” says Lentz, “but . . . in ten months we’ll have a neural net that can interpret any passage on the Master’s list . . . And its commentary will be at least as smooth as that of a twenty-two year old human” (see here).
Ten months is stipulated because that is the unexpired portion of Powers’s fellowship attachment to the University, and Lentz requires his assistance to build the machine, which goes through various stages or implementations called A, B, C, and so on. (This is confusing because of the use of the same letters to denote characters and places, but deliberately so—it is part of an elaborate web of cross-references between different elements of the book’s structure.) Each implementation takes the project a little nearer to imitating human intelligence. The project is linked up to the University super-computer, “a collection of 65,536 separate computers, chained like galley slaves into inconceivable, smoothly functioning parallel” (see here), vastly increasing its learning power. Speech recognition software is added so that Powers can read the entire list of set texts into the machine’s memory. Vision is added to implementation D. “I still have a passive retinal matrix lying around intact from work I did last year,” says Lentz. “We can paste it in” (see here). (The author is very adept at throwing in this plausible-sounding jargon.) Lentz is always insistent that there is nothing mysterious or privileged about human intelligence. “The brain, Lentz had it, was itself just a glorified, fudged-up Turing machine” (see here). That is why he is confident of replicating it. Powers is equally eager to succeed, but has humanist doubts. Implementation E lacks human responsiveness; when Powers asks what it would like to talk about, it freezes.
Then with implementation H there is a kind of breakthrough. The machine begins to ask spontaneous questions, like: “What sex am I?” Powers answers “female,” and names the machine “Helen.” Helen makes a weird noise that Powers realises is an attempt to sing: somewhere in her memory is a trace of a piece by Mozart that Lentz played to her distant prototype. She is able to recognize a joke, though not apparently to laugh. Instead she says, “That is a joke.” She has trouble with values because she has no concerns about self-preservation, no concept of causality. “She was a gigantic lexical genius stuck at Piaget’s stage two” (see here). But then there is a bomb scare at the Center, which has to be hurriedly evacuated. There is no way Powers can save Helen from the threat of destruction, because “she wasn’t, a thing but a distributed process . . . an architecture, a multidimensional shape” spread over countless subassemblies in the supercomputer (see here). Once the connections between these subassemblies were destroyed, Powers would never be able to put them together again because they have evolved on their own. He explains this to Helen.
“Helen could die?” Helen asked. “Extraordinary.” She’d liked the story of how the novelist Huxley, on his deathbed, had been reduced to this one word. (See here)
The bomb scare proves to be a hoax perpetrated by a junior professor in philosophy who has been denied tenure. But the episode has convinced Powers that Helen is conscious. One of the things that distinguishes human beings from every other kind of life on earth is that we know we are going to die. It is the tragic price of self-consciousness.
Obviously by this time the story has crossed the border between realistic fiction and science fiction or fantasy: that is to say, Powers the novelist has imagined a machine which so far does not exist, in order to explore and dramatise certain ideas about the nature of humans, just as H. G. Wells did in The Time Machine, and Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (a text explicitly alluded to in Galatea 2.2). As far as I know, no Artificial Intelligence project, with or without neural nets, has come anywhere near producing a Helen. And like Mary Shelley and Wells, Powers relies heavily on myth and literary precursor texts to convey a meaning that is essentially ironic. His title refers to the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with the female figure he carved, and, when the goddess of love transformed her into a living, breathing woman, called her Galatea. Powers does not fall in love with Helen. His attitude is more parental, or tutorial. But that, we gather, was why his relationship with C. foundered—he was too protective, too controlling. At U., while conducting the Helen experiment, he becomes romantically infatuated with a feisty young graduate student in the English department called A. She however finds his attentions embarrassing: he is of a different generation, and anyway she is already in a relationship. He tries to interest her in his project, and asks her to be the human respondent in the Turing Test, but when she looks at the list of set texts, she says: “I hate to be the one to break this to you. Your version of literary reality is a decade out of date . . . Don’t you know that all this stuff”—she slapped my six pages of titles—“is a culturally constructed, belated view of belles lettres?” (see here). The triumph of Theory, in short, has made Helen’s acquired knowledge of the literary canon culturally obsolete. It’s a neat reversal.
But the wager still stands, and Helen must take the test. She has trouble with modern literature. “It doesn’t make sense. I can’t get it. There’s something missing,” she complains. Lentz speculates it may be awareness of the modern world that Helen is lacking, and Powers accordingly feeds the daily news into her memory. Helen is appalled by the catalogue of horrors she absorbs. After learning about one particularly senseless crime, a racist road-rage murder committed with tire irons, she says: “I don’t want to play any more,” and falls silent (see here). Powers wonders if she hasn’t shown him the reason for his own writer’s block: the futility of writing in the face of the world’s injustice, suffering, evil. Lentz brushes aside this self-pitying response. “Tell her something. Anything. Whatever she needs. Just get her back here.” Powers decides that “it was time to try Helen on the religious mystery, the mystery of cognition” (see here). The use of the word “religious” is interesting. Soon the word “soul” occurs too:
Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers’ rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God.
Helen knew all that, saw through it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She’d had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith’s flip side. She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul’s parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time. (See here)
The rhetoric here is a little congested and over-excited—it is one of Powers’s faults as a writer that he will never use one metaphor when a dozen will
do. There are also literary allusions to Yeats (“the dying animal”) and Emily Dickinson (“sound made syllable”) thickening the mixture. But the general gist is clear enough, and it is unashamedly dualistic: body and soul, material and immaterial. This novel, ostensibly concerned with evoking the excitement of scientific research into consciousness, ends on a note of religious mysticism, negative theology, and something like Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism.
Helen starts to speak again, but in a subdued and cryptic fashion. The Turing Test is held. The judge sets for commentary a passage from The Tempest, “the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs,” etc. The graduate student A. writes a brilliant New Historicist essay. Helen writes:
“You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.”
At the bottom of the page, she added the words I taught her, words . . . cribbed from a letter she once made me read out loud.
“Take care, Richard. See everything for me.”
With that, H undid herself. Shut herself down. (p. 326)
It is a surprisingly poignant moment. The narrator, whose name, he observes, is an anagram of “Orphic Rewards,” draws some comfort and even inspiration from this last message: “She had come back . . . to tell me that one small thing. Life meant convincing another that you knew what it was to be alive” (p. 327). He re-dedicates himself to his vocation as novelist. So, like the masterpiece of his nicknamesake Marcel, Galatea 2.2 ends with the author beginning to write the book we have just finished reading.