The Mind Outside My Head: Tim Parks
"…Everything
we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, Manzotti argues, involves the
same creation of a physical unity—the moment of consciousness—sustained
by processes within and without the head. The room, or part of a room,
that you see now, including the screen on which you’re reading this
blog, becomes, in combination with your faculties, a whole; this is
consciousness. It happens in time, and it takes time (consciousness of
visual phenomena seems to require at least 100 milliseconds to occur),
and it changes constantly…"
Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos
Lighthouse at Dungeness, coast of Kent, Great Britain, 2006
“There are no images.” This was the first time I noticed Riccardo Manzotti. It was a
conference on art and neuroscience.
Someone had spoken about the images we keep in our minds. Manzotti
seemed agitated. The girl sitting next to me explained that he built
robots, was a genius. “There are no images and no representations in our
minds,” he insisted. “Our visual experience of the world is a continuum
between see-er and seen united in a shared process of seeing.”
I
was curious, if only because, as a novelist I’d always supposed I was
dealing in images, imagery. This stuff might have implications. So we
had a beer together.
Manzotti has a degree in
engineering and another in philosophy. He teaches in the psychology
department at IULM University, Milan. The move from engineering to
philosophy was prompted by conceptual problems he’d run into when first
seeking to build robots. What does it mean that a subject sees an
object? “People say the robot stores images of the world through its
video camera. It doesn’t, it stores digital data. It has no images.”
Manzotti
is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not
safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store
information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting,
and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he
calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various
otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have
separated out and stabilized in the words
subject and
object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.
His
favorite example is the rainbow. For the rainbow experience to happen
we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and
the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them.
Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a
particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a
process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an
instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in
the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated
from what is perceived (the view held by the “internalists” who account
for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread
between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique,
transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer
doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.
Everything
we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, Manzotti argues, involves the
same creation of a physical unity—the moment of consciousness—sustained
by processes within and without the head. The room, or part of a room,
that you see now, including the screen on which you’re reading this
blog, becomes, in combination with your faculties, a whole; this is
consciousness. It happens in time, and it takes time (consciousness of
visual phenomena seems to require at least 100 milliseconds to occur),
and it changes constantly.
This minimal time lapse
(some claim it is as much as 500 milliseconds) required for brain and
world to generate consciousness allows Manzotti to deal with what would
seem to be the obvious objection to the externalist theory. Do we not
have consciousness when the eyes are shut and the mind lies in silence?
And what about dreams? Isn’t the brain evidently sufficient to sustain
consciousness without support from outside?
We do
indeed have consciousness in these moments, Manzotti replies, but it is
still spread out between mind and world. It may take only a fraction of a
second for you to become conscious of the face appearing at your
window, and then three more years before the same face surfaces in a
dream, perhaps mingled with all kinds of other stimuli from elsewhere.
But this doesn’t change the fact that consciousness is a coming together
of brain and world: the physical process begun at the window is
continuing in memory and dream. The congenitally blind, Manzotti points
out, don’t dream colors because they have never encountered them.
Consciousness is the mingling of mind process with the processes we call
objects that are all in a state of flux, however fast or slow.
Gianni Ansaldi
Riccardo Manzotti
Let’s
leave aside the gospel truth or otherwise of all this. I tend to be
skeptical of people with big ideas and Manzotti, like Einstein I
suppose, has the long unkempt hair and animated manner of the possibly
crazy scientist or visionary. All the same, you can see at once that
taking his externalist ideas on board would radically change our
approach to the notion of what an individual or a self is. Which in
turn, for a novelist—and
that’s my job—means
a different way of thinking about narrative, about description, about
character. The fact is that I met Manzotti shortly after attending a
ten-day retreat where, in strict silence, people were trying to develop a
Buddhist meditation technique called Vipassana. I had gone originally
for
health reasons,
assured that the technique was useful for chronic pain and with no
intention at all (for heaven’s sake) of taking on board any ideas that
might be in the air. But the experience was so fascinating it was
impossible not to be curious.
“Are you aware,” I asked
Manzotti, “of the Buddhist principle of ‘conditioned arising,’ which
seems remarkably similar to your insistence that there are neither
objects nor subjects nor images, but only processes in a state of flux?”
Manzotti
is irritated by this digression. He isn’t aware of Buddhist ideas. Just
as he worries that people will confuse his determinedly “physical” view
of consciousness with Berkeley’s idealism, so he wants to avoid like
the plague being mixed up with anything that smells New Age.
“The
Buddha,” I rib him, “argued that the world was made up of
infinitesimally small particles in a constant cause-and-effect flux, and
in Vipassana the meditator is invited to contemplate that flux in his
own mind and body and to accept his oneness with it. Do it for ten days
in a row in complete silence and you begin to understand why Buddhists
don’t accept the existence of the self as a separate entity, or, if you
like, why Buddhist priests don’t write novels.”
Manzotti
reflects. He is a man who publishes academic papers constructed, as is
appropriate, with the most careful reasoning in the most respectable
journals and, to boot, designs charming comic-strip essays that
introduce non-professionals to his view of the world by analyzing such
things as what it means when we see a face, or hear a tune, or call a
thing an object.
Over a drink, however, he’ll go a little further:
If,
as I believe, the orthodox, internalist vision of consciousness is
false and even naive, then we have to ask why so many intelligent people
hold it. It’s not hard to understand. By locating consciousness
exclusively within the brain we can imagine that the subject, me, at
some very deep level, is not subject to the same law of constant change
that evidently governs the phenomena around me. The subject accrues and
sheds attributes, but remains in essence him or herself. This allows for
the notion of someone’s being responsible, even for actions carried out
years ago, and hence gives rise to a particular moral universe; it also
creates the comforting illusion that perhaps the self could survive
separate from the world. Behind it all there is the desire to deny
change in ourselves, perhaps to survive death. Anyway, to be an entity
outside the world.
I laugh: “If we’re going to claim
that society holds the vision it does because it’s comforting and
convenient, then why do you hold a different one?”
Manzotti
doesn’t answer the question directly. It’s time to order another beer.
“Notions of convenience might not be the same for everyone,” he
eventually ponders. “For example, a guy obsessed by building a robot
that simulates human behavior would have special reasons for wanting to
get the model of consciousness right.”
The Reasoner
A panel from
A process oriented externalist solution to the hard problem by Riccardo Manzotti
For
some time I walk the streets of Milan trying to accept that
consciousness is not locked in my head but spread out across the revving
traffic, the rustling leaves, the dog shit, the blue sky, the gritty
cobbles, the solemn facades, the soft breeze, the unseasonal
temperatures, the screaming children, the air, the women. After a while
it begins to make sense. There are small shifts of mood passing from
street to park, from outside to inside, from red to blue, male to
female, night to day, tram to metro, center to suburb. There are varying
tensions between focus of vision and field of vision, between
conversation and background noise. In general there is more: the
intrusion of smells, the slap of a passing truck, a persistent touching
of heat and breeze. Oddly, the critical faculty is somewhat attenuated;
one distinguishes a little less urgently between the beautiful and the
ugly, the slow line and the fast in bank and supermarket. Sometimes it’s
a tiny bit like reading a passage from Joyce, who was never a favorite
author of mine.
Not of course that Manzotti would ever
suggest that people should do this. He’s a scientist. Consciousness is
consciousness whatever your ideas about it. You don’t decide whether the
mind is spread, if spread it is. All the same, once you accept that
this might be a more accurate model of how things are, then oddly enough
things do begin to feel different. I guess we’re just that kind of
creature: within or without, consciousness can be profoundly altered by a
voice declaring, “There are no images.”
As a lover of obscure children’s books by famous authors of grown-up literature, I was delighted to discover The Wishing Tree (UK; public library) by none other than William Faulkner — a sort of grimly whimsical morality tale, somewhere between Alice In Wonderland, Don Quixote, and To Kill a Mockingbird, about a girl who embarks upon a strange adventure on her birthday only to realize the importance of choosing one’s wishes with consideration and kindness.
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