So does Bran know what it’s like to be a direwolf? Or does he know only what it’s like for him (Bran) to be “inside” of the animal with access to its sense organs? It’s hard to come up with a definitive answer here. Sometimes it seems like Bran and Summer share their consciousness. Other times, either Bran is just there, silently noting what his direwolf is sensing, or Bran’s consciousness alone is operating “inside” of Summer’s body. The first option could be the case, so it looks as though in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, it is possible to embody more than one point of view, and therefore to be able to know what it is like to be something as strange as a direwolf. Does this tell us anything about the nature of consciousness?
Descartes and Direwolves
. . . if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us. This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.6
The great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) would have dismissed all of this “what it’s like” talk when it comes to direwolves, or any other animal for that matter, because he believed that animals were not conscious at all. He thought they were more like complex machines. Descartes thought this was true for two main reasons. First, he believed that consciousness required the existence of a soul—a nonphysical substance—and only persons had souls. Actually, saying that persons “have” souls is not quite correct; Descartes thought persons were souls. In other words, for Descartes, you are not your body, but rather you are an immaterial substance that is causally connected to your body. So when Sansa looks at Sandor Clegane and sees this very large dangerous man with half of his face burned off, she is seeing the Hound’s body only, and not the Hound himself. What makes this his body is the fact that when he, the Sandor Clegane soul, if you will, decided to slash Mycah, the butcher’s boy, with a sword, the Hound’s body is the one that did the slashing. And the same is true in the other direction. When Gregor held his brother’s face to the burning coals when they were children, it was the soul that was Sandor that felt the pain, and not some other soul.
So persons have souls, and consciousness takes place only in souls. Since animals don’t have souls, they’re not conscious. The second reason Descartes denied the existence of animal consciousness was that he thought that animal behavior could be completely explained in physical terms. This points to a difference between us and the other animals, because our behavior, Descartes thought, could not be explained in purely physical terms.
To illustrate this difference, Descartes focused on language. When Lord Commander Mormont’s raven says “Corn!” or “Snow!” Descartes would have said that this was a mechanical happening without any understanding on the bird’s part. But when the commander himself makes those same sounds, they have meaning for the commander. Further, the process by which we take our thoughts, which have meaning, and turn them into words that convey those meanings could not be explained in any mechanistic way. At least that’s what Descartes claimed.
Whether or not Descartes was right about this, the strategy of his argument was instructive. To argue for the existence of something that can’t be perceived, like the soul or the gods of Westeros, you might argue that without it, something is left unexplained. When it came to animals, Descartes thought the physical explanations were enough, so there was no need to postulate anything further. With persons, the physical explanations were not sufficient to account for language, meaning, and thought. So something further was needed. And according to Descartes, that something must be a nonphysical conscious thing: a soul.
There are many difficulties with Descartes’ position. First, many animals have sophisticated languages—the higher primates as well as dolphins and whales come to mind—so do they have souls as well? Perhaps their language has no meaning for them and is not being used to convey thought. If so, Descartes could accept the fact that these animals have a form of language, while maintaining that the important difference between them and us still holds. But there are still major problems with his view.
The cognitive and neurosciences have proposed various accounts of language and its relation to thought. Descartes was right that no simple mechanistic model could explain language. But the physical explanations available to us are much more complex than what was available in the first half of the seventeenth century, when Descartes was writing. So if physical explanations fail to fully explain human behavior, it’s probably not because of the relationship between thought and language. We would need another reason to divide persons from other animals, to deny the latter consciousness based on this type of argument.
A second, and much worse, problem for Descartes is that, given what we know about animals (the primates and higher mammals at least, which in Westeros would certainly include direwolves) in terms of anatomy, physiology, and biological origin, denying animal consciousness seems dubious at best. In fact, the reasons we have for thinking that other people are conscious are pretty much the same reasons applied to animals. To illustrate, think of Jon Snow and Ghost. Jon knows that he is conscious, as each individual similarly does. He assumes that his friends and not-so-friends on the Night’s Watch are also conscious, but this is something he infers and does not know directly as he does in his own case. Why does he make this inference? Why do each of us make similar inferences every day?
Well, first, there is the behavioral evidence, both verbal and nonverbal. The brothers of the Night’s Watch behave pretty much just as Jon does. You talk to them, they seem to understand, and they respond accordingly. They say they are cold, and move toward the fire. When stabbed, they cry out in pain. Ghost behaves in similar fashion, responding to Jon’s commands, trying to stay warm, and so forth. When attacked by Orell’s eagle, Ghost exhibited pain behavior similar to Jon’s as well. So if the behavioral evidence convinces us that other persons are conscious, the same sort of evidence ought to be convincing when applied to animals.
Second, animal physiology is quite similar to our own. It would be absurd to think that brains and nervous systems, designed (either by the gods or in a biologically natural way) to register pain, would do so in us but not in biologically similar creatures.7 Imagine thinking this of a fellow human: “Well, I know her brain and nervous system are like mine, and I know she shares a biological history with me in terms of evolution and human reproduction, but I bet she has no conscious experiences.” Why is this any less absurd when considering a seemingly aware, perceptive animal, like a direwolf?
Direwolves and animals in general can perceive their surrounding environment. They can smell food and hear predators; they can utilize their other senses as well. How is any of this possible without consciousness? Descartes (I know, I’m piling on here; were he alive, next I’d be asking to cut off some of his fingers) did have an answer to this. He thought that perception had three levels. The first, and lowest level, was a purely mechanical affair in which the information in the environment physically pressed upon the sense organs. At the next level, there was conscious awareness of the experience. And at the highest level, there was the ability to reason and make judgments about the experience. Descartes thought that animals functioned entirely at the first level, devoid of consciousness. The two higher levels were missing entirely in them since they lacked souls.
Sometimes we too perceive our surroundings without consciousness. In the classroom where I lecture, I often pace back and forth in the front of the room near the desk. And although I’m not paying attention to the desk—I’m not consciously aware of it—I navigate around it easily enough. My senses are detecting it, but there’s no conscious awareness attached. A more familiar example that philosophers like to discuss is the long-distance driver. This happens to everyone: You’re driving along on a highway for hours; you look up and see that you’re already near your destination, and you have no awareness of having gone past many familiar sights. Maybe you were
listening to music or to House and Philosophy on audio, but you weren’t paying attention to the road at all. (Contrast this with the driving experience you have in heavy traffic in a rainstorm, when your awareness is totally present and focused.) Yet you don’t hit anyone or drive off the road; you still perceive the environment.
Wargs Again
“When I touched Summer, I felt you in him. Just as you are in him now.”8
Much of the time, our perception isn’t so lacking in consciousness, but it might be possible that animal perception is always like this. That’s what Descartes thought. In our world, it’s possible, but extremely unlikely. Again, given all we know about animals biologically, and the similarity of their brains and sense organs to ours, we have every scientific reason to think that most higher animals have conscious sensory experiences very similar to our own.
That’s in our world; but what about Westeros and beyond? If we revisit wargs, there are some very interesting possibilities. Consider a case where Bran’s consciousness is “inside” Summer, so that Bran is experiencing what is happening where Summer’s direwolf body is located, perhaps very far away. Summer could be operating just as Descartes suggested, at sensation level one, while Bran’s consciousness provides the two higher levels—the awareness of the sensations and the ability to make judgments about them.
At first, the possibility of wargs looks bad for materialism. If one can transfer one’s consciousness somewhere else, then it appears that consciousness must be separate from brain function. In a world with wargs, must materialism then be false? Does this mean, in other words, that consciousness must be some sort of nonphysical phenomenon? No. There are several possibilities.
Perhaps consciousness is some sort of energy field generated by brains—pure speculation here—and wargs’ brains can send this energy field into other brains. Now, there are two ways to think about this. If we say that physical things obey physical laws, and warg brains violate these laws, then the existence of wargs would mean that materialism is false. That’s one possibility. The other possibility is magic. Wargs are supernatural creatures, after all. The fact that they can do what they do requires only that physical laws get violated, not that anything nonphysical occurs. This, to me, seems to be the more plausible explanation in this strange world.9
What about in our world? Remember, we started talking about wargs as a way of exploring Nagel’s “what it’s like” problem—the problem of subjectivity. If there are subjective facts about what it’s like to have a given experience, and if such facts can be known only from the point of view of the experiencer, does that show that the physical facts aren’t all the facts? I don’t see that it does at all. The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) argued that our experiences, which he thought were identical with brain events, were different from other physical facts only in how they are known (not in what they’re made of). We know our experiences directly because they occur in us (in our brains); other physical events that occur outside of our brains (in a different space-time region, Russell would say), we know indirectly, by inference. If Russell is right (he is; trust me on this), then subjectivity poses no problem for materialism in our world either.
What about the Wights?
A shard from his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye.
The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.10
Another way that philosophers try to argue against materialism is by the supposed possibility of zombies. Now you might be thinking that what they have in mind—the philosophers, not the zombies who lack consciousness and have nothing in mind—sounds a lot like those terrible creatures created by the Others: the wights.11 But you would be mistaken. The zombies that philosophers are talking about, I like to call phenomenal zombies. A zombie of this type would be some physical duplicate of a conscious being but would lack conscious experience altogether.
So imagine a creature physically just like Sansa, who lacks consciousness. It’s all dark on the inside. Some of you might think that I’m describing the real Sansa here, but that would be mean. Anyway, “Zombie Sansa” is a physical duplicate of the real Sansa who behaves, both verbally and nonverbally, exactly like her counterpart. But Zombie Sansa has no conscious experiences of any sort taking place. If this is possible, then it seems like materialism must be false; there is more to a person than just their physical being.
Many philosophers think that phenomenal zombies are possible, but I believe they are not. If materialism is true, then we know that when your brain is in the right state, you are conscious. Even if materialism is not true and consciousness is nonphysical, it’s connected to the appropriate brain states in a lawlike way (even Descartes granted this). What this means is that whether or not materialism is true, given that your brain is in the right state, and given that the laws of nature are the way they are, there must be consciousness. So when someone thinks they can conceive of Zombie Sansa—remember, a being that’s an exact physical duplicate of Sansa but without consciousness—what they are conceiving is a case where the laws of nature are operating differently. But a brain state that operated according to different laws of nature would be a different brain state. This is true because which brain state one is in is relative to some theoretical description of the brain. If brains operated according to different laws, then a different theoretical description would be in order. The phrase “same brain state” in part means “operates according to the same laws in the same way.”12
Thus, in our “thought experiment” where we try to imagine a physical duplicate of Ned Stark’s oldest daughter who lacks consciousness, we’re actually imagining a being that has a different sort of brain operating according to different laws of nature. A materialist would not be troubled by this; such a being would after all not be a physical duplicate of our Sansa. Because of magic, however, in Westeros I think we would have to say that Zombie Sansa is possible to imagine. There it might be that sometimes the lawlike functioning of our brains can go awry. Different metaphysics, different conclusion.
Back to the Wights
Then he saw it, a shadow in the shadows, sliding toward the inner door that led to Mormont’s sleeping cell, a man-shape all in black, cloaked and hooded . . . but beneath the hood, its eyes shone with an icy blue radiance.13
When we return to thinking about the wights—the real zombies like those we see in monster movies as opposed to the philosophers’ phenomenal zombies—we can again wonder whether they are possible, and if so, what that tells us about ourselves.
First, is there an analogous thought experiment in which we imagine a physical duplicate of a living person, but the duplicate is not alive? Well, there used to be a popular view known as vitalism, which claimed that living things differed from nonliving things by having an additional substance, a vital fluid or life force. In other words, living things were made of different stuff. Vitalism has been thoroughly discredited by the biological sciences. We now understand life pretty well. We know that living things aren’t made of different stuff, and that being alive is a matter of your physical stuff having a certain structure and function.
As a consequence, imagining a functioning physical duplicate of a person who is not alive doesn’t seem possible. The wights coming from beyond the Wall, however, is a real and terrifying scenario; but their existence, just like the Zombie Sansa of my earlier thought experiment, is possible only because the supernatural is at work. The normal laws of nature don’t always apply in this world.
Moreover, a closer examination of the wights reveals that they’re not entirely without life anyway—and the same is true of familiar movie zombies as well. The Others, who seem to be a demon race we know very little about (as of A Dance with Dragons at least), somehow are able to reanimate certain corpses, thus creating the wights. They have some signs of life—they can move, for example, and appear to have limited brain function—but they don’t show evidence of most normal metabolic processes. They don’t eat, eliminate wast
e, or reproduce, and they can’t be killed in common ways. So what we have here is perhaps best described as partly dead and partly alive. This changes little, however, when it comes to their conceivability.
Neither wights nor phenomenal zombies pose any threat if one wants to defend a materialist view. Neither is possible in our world; both are possible in Westeros and beyond because of supernatural forces at work, rather than nonphysical ones. In our world, we think we can imagine phenomenal zombies because we don’t as yet have a fully worked-out theory of consciousness. Our theories about life, on the other hand, are pretty much settled, and this is an important difference. What we know, as well as what we don’t know, impacts what we can and can’t conceive. When you throw some supernatural elements into the mix, mind and metaphysics become as tangled as the roots of a weirwood tree, and as mysterious as the messages in Melisandre’s fires.
NOTES
1. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 11.
2. George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 766.
3. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), pp. 883–884.
4. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 435–450.
5. George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (New York: Bantam Books, 2011), p. 61.
6. René Descartes, Letter to the Marquess of Newcastle, Nov. 23, 1643. Reprinted in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 17.
7. Voltaire remarked, “Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.” In his Philosophical Dictionary, “Animals,” reprinted in Regan and Singer, p. 21.
8. Martin, A Clash of Kings, p. 438.
9. Some might question this distinction at first, but saying that physical laws got violated is not the same as saying that something nonphysical occurred. If there was real magic and someone could, for example, actually make cards disappear and then reappear, no nonphysical cards would be involved. But maybe the laws of physics holding the atoms of the cards together could temporarily be suspended, so the disappearing could occur.
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