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08/04/2019 Are we more than molecules?

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Are we more than molecules?

Author Mark Haddon, author of States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY

By Mark Haddon
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17 JANUARY 2016 • 7:00AM

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Novelists, poets and artists can help us to piece together the mystery of human consciousness, says Mark Haddon
 

My son’s nine-year-old friend Yahya said it most succinctly. Why is life in the first person?

We think. We feel. We are aware of ourselves and the world around us. We have consciousness. We are made of the same raw
materials as bacteria, as earth, as rock, as the great dark nebulae of dust that swim between the stars, as the stars themselves. But
somehow, a vanishingly small fraction of that brute stuff (you, me, chimpanzees maybe, chickens possibly, worms probably not) has
been cunningly arranged into objects which experience what the American philosopher William James calls “subjective life”. How is
that possible? Why do most of us feel that we are something more than molecules? Why are even ardent materialists haunted by the
sense of being something insubstantial inhabiting a physical vessel?

The ancient Egyptians had a sophisticated model of a five-part soul attached to an earthly body. Doubtless simpler models go back
much, much further. It is a puzzle which, in its manifold cognate forms, has fascinated, divided and defined human culture for at least
as long as we have been able to write about these things. What do we mean by the soul? Does it live on after death? Can we be
reincarnated in the body of someone not yet born? When does consciousness begin and when does it end?

Richard Tennant Cooper's watercolour symbolises the effects of chloroform on the human body CREDIT: WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON

When I was nine years old I was obsessed by a question similar to Yahya’s. Why am I me? It seemed extraordinary that of all possible
times and places I was born in England in 1962. It gave me a thrilling shiver to think that I had narrowly escaped one of the terrifying
lives I knew children lived in other centuries and in other parts of the world.

I knew, even then, that there was something wrong with the question. It wasn’t possible for me to be anyone else. I was this body. I
wasn’t a blob of spiritual jam which had been squirted into a material doughnut when I entered the world. It was this life which had
made me. But that knowledge didn’t drive out the conviction that I was on the inside looking out. Turning this paradox over and over
in my mind I felt as if I’d stumbled on a missed stitch in the fabric of the universe and that if I tugged and worried at it for long enough
I might be able to tease out a loose strand and discover what the world was made of.

As a child I was sure we were  


on the brink of an Answer to
Two other subjects obsessed me as a boy, as they obsessed many people in the early Seventies:
Everything
cosmology and particle physics. I’d stayed up for the moon landing in July 1969. I watched
documentaries about relativity and black holes. We did Young’s double-slit experiment at school
to show that light was a wave despite also being a particle. I was certain that the world was on the
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brink of an Answer to Everything, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that. But with every
new development, every new discovery (cosmic inflation, string theory, the top quark, the Bose–
Einstein condensate…) the explanations felt more like complications. Increasingly the physics of
b_20150423)
the very big and the physics of the very small were becoming a matter of finding the maths to fit
the data. As the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said of quantum theory, “If you think you understand… then you don’t.” It’s
hard to read about the multiverse, for example, or look at a map of microwave background radiation from the early universe and sense
the jigsaw falling into place, as you might when reading for the first time about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

I can still think about the puzzle of consciousness, however, and feel the same infuriating, obsessive fascination I felt as a child.

Over the last 50 years biology, neuroscience and psychology have made huge advances in solving what the Australian philosopher
David Chalmers called the “easy” problems of consciousness, the questions of how the brain performs (and sometimes fails to
perform) its mechanical and computational functions: how we remember, how we process information from the external world, how
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we direct our attention, how we make judgments and take decisions… But we are no nearer to solving what he called the “hard”
problem, the question of why we experience these things from the inside, as subjects.

The problem still nags at me. How difficult can it be? The raw material is not squirreled away inside an atom. It didn’t happen 14
billion years ago. It’s not hiding on the other side of the universe. It’s right here. Stop reading and look around the room, become
aware of your feet, remember what you were doing yesterday. How is it possible for a lump of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen,
calcium and potassium to do these things? I can’t shake the conviction that some kind of answer is just around the corner but I still
have absolutely no idea what kind of answer it might be.

Writer Edgar Allan Poe contemplated the complexity of the brain long before many scientists took an interest CREDIT: AP

Indeed, far from solving the puzzle, recent advances in biology, neuroscience and psychology have, if anything, made it more
complex. It is getting more and more difficult to fall back on the idea that there is some kind of ghost in the machine, the idea, most
famously posited by Descartes, that the mind is a non-material entity connected to a material body. We understand the working of the
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brain in rapidly increasing detail and while what Edgar Allan Poe called “the magic pinions and the wizard wheels” are breathtakingly
complex, it really does look like it’s just molecules in there. Everything so far observed inside the human head is a chemical reaction,
an event which happens automatically when the right molecules are in the right place in the right state at the right time.

Materialism – the belief that everything in the universe is made exclusively of matter and that all mental events are therefore identical
to interactions between matter – seems to be winning. Indeed there are many philosophers and scientists who believe that it has
already won. But it feels like a pyrrhic victory. We are getting closer and closer to knowing precisely what happens in the brain when
we juggle, or taste lasagne, or recognise an angry face, but this offers us no help in explaining how and why those things are
experiences, only in showing the neural correlate, the stuff that happens in the brain at the same time. It may very well be that there is
no ghost in the machine, but how on earth does a machine give itself the impression that there is one?

The puzzle has, to a large extent, been monopolised in recent years by philosophy and neuroscience, and it has become generally
accepted that the languages of philosophy and neuroscience are those to use when discussing the subject. As a result much writing
about consciousness is complex at best and impenetrable at worst, and experts in neighbouring fields who are understandably
tempted to stray into the area risk sounding naive and ill-informed.

I would argue that we should ignore that monopoly. There are many languages in which we can explore the subject of consciousness.
There is ambiguity and contradiction, ignorance and simplicity. We should make no assumptions and feel free to ask any question,
however obscure and eccentric it might seem.

The subject is vast and approaching it in this manner makes it exponentially larger. We should think about disrupted and liminal
states of consciousness, what happens when consciousness fails or falters, what happens at the outer limits of consciousness – out-of-
body experiences and teleportation, multiple personality, sleep and dreams, the slips of language and memory, anaesthesia and death.

Artists understood the mind’s  


oddities long before doctors
We should listen to people who have remained awake during operations. We should hear from
were interested
hypnotists, think on the words of poets and artists, the dreaming and the dying. Writers of fiction,
who spend their days arranging words to make readers forget themselves and enter, for a brief
time, into the consciousness of characters who don’t exist, might have something important to
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contribute. Novelists, poets and artists have intuitively understood many of the mind’s oddities
since long before doctors and scientists began taking an interest.

_pq_fb_20150423) We don’t talk about consciousness in the way that we talk about other mental faculties. We are
happy to say that one person has a very good memory, that a second person takes little notice of
their surroundings, or that a third has a wonderful imagination. We accept that some people are unable to see or hear as clearly as
other people. But we look upon consciousness as something of a different order, the greater frame within which all these lesser
faculties are set, the mental theatre in which the drama of the world seems to be played out for us, something singular and monolithic
gifted equally to all human beings. You either have it or you don’t.

This way of thinking is due, in part, to the relationship between the idea of consciousness and the idea of the soul, so that the former
retains some of the sacred glow which was previously attached to the latter. Consequently to say that your consciousness differs from
mine feels tantamount to saying that one of us is more human than the other.

Except that consciousness is neither singular nor monolithic. The frame within which some people’s faculties are set is radically
different from that of others. And those individual frames can change radically over the years, as a result of accident and disease, of
growth and ageing.

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You might have a short-term memory less than a minute long and yet be wholly unaware of this fact. You might experience the
universe as empty and meaningless. You might experience the universe as a firework display of stimuli, significance, opportunity and
temptation. You might swing unpredictably between these two states. You might be unable to conceive that other people are
conscious in the way that you are conscious, and therefore have difficulty interacting with them. You might be unable to focus on the
present moment because you are haunted by the past and frightened by the future. You might hear inanimate objects talking. You
might hear voices inside your own head. You might find abstract thought well-nigh impossible.

We fall too easily into the trap of thinking that, on the one hand, there is the healthy, functioning consciousness of “normal” people,
and on the other hand there is the unhealthy, damaged consciousness of “abnormal” people, people we class as ill or damaged or
mentally diminished in some way. But that says more about society than about consciousness itself. In truth no way of experiencing
the world is intrinsically more or less valid than any other. And all of them are fascinating and informative.

Why is life in the first person?

We may never find a truly satisfying and conclusive answer. We may realise that it was the wrong question altogether. But you will
never really know what it is like to be me and I will never really know what it is like to be you. And this very unknowability of other
human beings is, in large part, what fuels our fascination with poetry and fiction and art, those windows into other minds. And as for
the puzzle of why it is like anything to be either you or me, that promises to remain one of the deep and abiding mysteries of the
universe for a long time.

This is an edited version of Mark Haddon’s introduction to States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness
(http://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Wellcome-Foundation/States-of-Mind--Experiences-at-the-Edge-of-Consciousness---An-Anthology/18223843)
(Wellcome Collection, £8.99).  The Pier Falls, Haddon’s new collection of short stories, will be published in May by Cape

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