Stephen Wilson (6)

The mind is a fairly sexy place, academically speaking, these days. The learned get into punch-ups about it. Among the more entertaining spectacles vouchsafed the subscriber to the London Review of Books are Jerry Fodor's pieces on Daniel Dennett, distinguished arts and sciences professor at Tufts University (the adjective comes, it would appear, with the job). I hesitate to paraphrase Dennett's position, except to say that he is a determinist. (Please do not press me on a definition of the term.) Yet he believes in free will, of a kind. "Dennett's way of getting agents into a deterministic world depends on selling you an instrumentalist account of agency," fumes Fodor. Actually, he puts it more amusingly elsewhere, but I use the quote to illustrate the way people nowadays lose their tempers over what for the rest of us is rather abstract language. These are the interdisciplinary controversies of our day, our version of medieval theologians burning each other to death over the interpretation of scripture.

As for consciousness itself - well, that's a big can of worms, too. For a while in the 20th century the matter was largely left to psychology and philosophy. Thought experiments - proposing a ghost in the machine, say, or imagining, or failing to imagine, what it was like to be a bat - could sort out the problem for us. Then science made some astonishing leaps and bounds, and it became possible to construct a theory of consciousness that involved nothing more complex than the physical brain. We're not thinking - we're just electricity that believes it's conscious. Not everyone likes this idea. "As a human being and as a writer, I find that view of consciousness abhorrent - and intuitively unconvincing," says a character in David Lodge's 2001 novel, Thinks... quoted in Stephen Wilson's book. But then he would say that, wouldn't he?

So it's nice to have a handbook on all this that assumes its readers are simply reasonably cultivated and enquiring, rather than distinguished professors at Tufts or anywhere else. I had looked at its cover dyspeptically - the friendly design made me fear that something a lot harder was lurking within. I have a copy of The Oxford Companion to the Mind, which is remarkably thorough but, written largely in the vernacular of the experts in their fields, quickly gives one a bit of a headache. There is, miraculously, no such trouble here.

The book is thematically organised, and consists straightforwardly of extracts from literature, philosophy and science that can more or less comfortably fall under the headings of Perception, Memory, Emotion, Consciousness, and the like. I began to feel I was in safe hands when I came across the opening paragraphs of Beckett's Murphy , where the hero is tied into his armchair by seven scarves ("and life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word"). Secondary but not insignificant relief was provided in Wilson's rubric introducing Dennett, which contains the very comforting formulation "if I have understood him correctly..."

You will also find Keats's "Ode on Melancholy", as well as some Bunyan, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Dostoevsky and plenty more. You will find plenty of scientists, doctors and neuro-celebrities such as Oliver Sacks. Even a chunk of Thomas Nagel's essay "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" The point being made is that you do not need to have a very specialised PhD to be in this book - you simply have to have something that bears repetition - and that the fact that there is a history of ideas does not mean that ideas taken from history are no longer worth hearing.

And contrasts are illuminating: an extract from Julian Jaynes's remarkable thesis from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ("Consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has") comes hard on the heels of the Mandukya Upanishad ("this syllable 'Om' is this whole universe"). This is a very clever anthology, then, in the most rewarding sense: it allows us not so much to make up our own minds - after a few hours browsing, you'll probably never trust such a phrase again - but to offer as much information or stimulation as we need to get us thinking about thinking. Or thinking we're thinking about thinking. Or... well, you get the idea.
(Nicholas Lezard - The Guardian)… (mere)

The mind is a fairly sexy place, academically speaking, these days. The learned get into punch-ups about it. Among the more entertaining spectacles vouchsafed the subscriber to the London Review of Books are Jerry Fodor's pieces on Daniel Dennett, distinguished arts and sciences professor at Tufts University (the adjective comes, it would appear, with the job). I hesitate to paraphrase Dennett's position, except to say that he is a determinist. (Please do not press me on a definition of the term.) Yet he believes in free will, of a kind. "Dennett's way of getting agents into a deterministic world depends on selling you an instrumentalist account of agency," fumes Fodor. Actually, he puts it more amusingly elsewhere, but I use the quote to illustrate the way people nowadays lose their tempers over what for the rest of us is rather abstract language. These are the interdisciplinary controversies of our day, our version of medieval theologians burning each other to death over the interpretation of scripture.

As for consciousness itself - well, that's a big can of worms, too. For a while in the 20th century the matter was largely left to psychology and philosophy. Thought experiments - proposing a ghost in the machine, say, or imagining, or failing to imagine, what it was like to be a bat - could sort out the problem for us. Then science made some astonishing leaps and bounds, and it became possible to construct a theory of consciousness that involved nothing more complex than the physical brain. We're not thinking - we're just electricity that believes it's conscious. Not everyone likes this idea. "As a human being and as a writer, I find that view of consciousness abhorrent - and intuitively unconvincing," says a character in David Lodge's 2001 novel, Thinks... quoted in Stephen Wilson's book. But then he would say that, wouldn't he?

So it's nice to have a handbook on all this that assumes its readers are simply reasonably cultivated and enquiring, rather than distinguished professors at Tufts or anywhere else. I had looked at its cover dyspeptically - the friendly design made me fear that something a lot harder was lurking within. I have a copy of The Oxford Companion to the Mind, which is remarkably thorough but, written largely in the vernacular of the experts in their fields, quickly gives one a bit of a headache. There is, miraculously, no such trouble here.

The book is thematically organised, and consists straightforwardly of extracts from literature, philosophy and science that can more or less comfortably fall under the headings of Perception, Memory, Emotion, Consciousness, and the like. I began to feel I was in safe hands when I came across the opening paragraphs of Beckett's Murphy , where the hero is tied into his armchair by seven scarves ("and life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word"). Secondary but not insignificant relief was provided in Wilson's rubric introducing Dennett, which contains the very comforting formulation "if I have understood him correctly..."

You will also find Keats's "Ode on Melancholy", as well as some Bunyan, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Dostoevsky and plenty more. You will find plenty of scientists, doctors and neuro-celebrities such as Oliver Sacks. Even a chunk of Thomas Nagel's essay "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" The point being made is that you do not need to have a very specialised PhD to be in this book - you simply have to have something that bears repetition - and that the fact that there is a history of ideas does not mean that ideas taken from history are no longer worth hearing.

And contrasts are illuminating: an extract from Julian Jaynes's remarkable thesis from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ("Consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has") comes hard on the heels of the Mandukya Upanishad ("this syllable 'Om' is this whole universe"). This is a very clever anthology, then, in the most rewarding sense: it allows us not so much to make up our own minds - after a few hours browsing, you'll probably never trust such a phrase again - but to offer as much information or stimulation as we need to get us thinking about thinking. Or thinking we're thinking about thinking. Or... well, you get the idea.
(Nicholas Lezard - The Guardian)… (mere)