- Theatre of the Mind:
- Raising the Curtainon Consciousness
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- By Jay Ingram.
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- HarperCollins, 294 pages, $37.95
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- Imagine that a drug was invented that induced permanent,
general anesthesia -- the total loss of consciousness -- even though people
who took it somehow continued to get up in the morning and go to sleep
at night just as before, completely unchanged in the eyes of those around
them. Taking the drug, then, would amount to dying. It would have all the
attractions of death for the depressed and suffering, and all of its horrors
for those who love life. For when we are not conscious, not only do we
cease to exist in the sense that matters to us, but the world itself blinks
out for us.
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- Consciousness, therefore, is the ultimate gift, the starting
point which makes life and the world a reality for us. And yet consciousness
is invisible to science, just as it is invisible to me or you. How then
does Jay Ingram, the man who translates the wonders of science for the
common Canadian, propose, as his subtitle promises, to "raise the
curtain on consciousness"? For consciousness is not like stars or
stags or quirks or quarks. It is the last remnant of what, since the days
of the ancients, has been called the soul.
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- Behold the great mystery of our era, the world-knot that
lies behind the curtain at the core of our culture: consciousness. The
mind has employed science to solve the mysteries of the universe, but now
is boggled by the riddle of itself. Consciousness does not permeate you
like an electric field. It does not appear with the aid of microscopes,
x-rays or magnetic resonance imaging. It cannot be seen in the skull, which
is instead stuffed with neurons. Ingram knows this. Why, then, write this
book?
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- Galileo and Newton, the forefathers of modern science,
proclaimed the soul non-physical, hence forever beyond the grasp of science.
For centuries their view prevailed, dividing the universe into two realms,
the physical, which is the kingdom of science, and the spiritual, which
is the kingdom of religion. Even psychology, the "science" of
the mind that stumbled into existence scarcely more than a century ago,
long ago shunned the riddle of consciousness in favour of behaviorism.
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- Ingram himself calls consciousness "an immaterial
thing" that "has no substance," seeming thereby to rule
it outside the scope of science -- even as he details score upon score
of scientific glimpses into it. And so he turns to genuflect now and then
toward the old masters, even as he marches away from them toward the new
scientific frontier.
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- We are lucky that scientists are a restless breed, rushing
in where angels fear to tread. Consciousness has come in from the outer
darkness and onto the scientific agenda. Scientists are no longer ridiculed
for studying consciousness, for theorizing about it, or even for their
faith that they will one day discover its secret. Ingram works his magic
of translating scientific research into the coinage of common understanding.
He deftly outlines dozens upon dozens of experiments that lift the curtain
to reveal a glimpse of consciousness, the last remnant of the soul.
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- The most obvious, and most popular, scientific method
for studying consciousness is to observe the workings of the brain while
its owner is in one or another conscious state. One example Ingram reports
is that of a French research group that imaged the brain while their subjects
performed mental tasks -- only to discover that these people's brains were
most active when instructed to think of nothing at all. As in so many cases
in consciousness research, the results of this experiment cry out for interpretation,
hence for philosophy, and so ambiguity seeps in precisely where we crave
clarity.
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- Ingram, no slave to scientific authority, never hesitates
to cast a critical eye over scientific findings. He sketches the main currents
in the philosophy of mind and employs its findings as needed. If the brain
is most active when consciousness is least active, then this would seem
to indicate that consciousness is not a brain process, nor caused by one.
On the other hand, Ingram writes, "The subjects themselves reported
that their mental rest period was absolutely filled with thoughts."
So far, so good, for the scientific project.
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- Onward! In his tour, Ingram relates the famous case of
H. M., whose hippocampuses were removed way back in 1953 in a surgical
procedure that successfully relieved his debilitating, massive epileptic
seizures. The unintended result was that, from then on, he could not form
any new long-term memories. His short-term memory still functioned well
enough that he could do such things as carry on a normal conversation,
which, after all, requires that one still remember at the end of a sentence
what it was one was talking about when the sentence began. But, without
any new long-term memories, H. M. was "stuck in 1953" -- unable
to comprehend his own age, or the date, or even to look out the windows
without being shocked by a world manifestly unlike that of 1953.
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- H. M. was living evidence for the hypothesis that consciousness
somehow depends on the brain. A change in his brain caused a massive change
in his consciousness, not the other way around. Gradually, through painstaking
research, scientists came to understand the role of the hippocampus as
mediator between the emotional lower brain and the cognitive upper brain.
Among other things, it directs the cerebrum to take notes about events
that arouse emotions, thereby controlling long-term memories.
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- This is more like it, but it proves nothing. It is still
conceivable that consciousness is non-physical, and tied to the body in
that mysterious metaphysical form of bondage that unites body and soul
in so many religious doctrines. Still, as Ingram presents one experimental
result after another, such mere conceivability melts away, to be replaced
by the sense that consciousness is "an invention more than an impression."
His most striking conclusion is that "the more we learn about consciousness,
the less impressive it seems." He does not propose a theory of consciousness,
but as he relates various scientific results, the monolithic concept of
consciousness is deconstructed, and replaced by an assembly of abilities,
disabilities, representations and illusions. Thus we gradually discover
what we are.
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- Science sometimes leads to results that are inimical
to the assumptions from which it springs. Newton was a stellar proponent
of the "mechanical philosophy," the view that scientific understanding
is achieved only when the mysteries of nature are reconceived in terms
of underlying clockwork mechanisms. In this way he happily explained light
and colours. But he was embarrassed by his inability to think of a mechanism
to explain gravity, though he racked his brain in the quest. He went to
his grave unable to shake the accusation that gravity, a cornerstone of
his physics, was an occult force of the sort that disgraced the outmoded
Aristotelian science of his predecessors.
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- But no matter, for a new generation of physicists grew
up learning Newton's physics at their mothers' knees, and for them gravity
just did not seem mysterious. For them it was an intuitively natural concept
that illuminated the manifold workings of nature. Reading Theatre of the
Mind promises to have a similar, salutary effect on our generation. There
probably is no other book in which so many relevant scientific findings
are presented with as little fuss and obfuscation. Gradually, consciousness
really does begin to look like nothing more than the last remnant of an
official mystery that was formerly packaged under the opaque heading of
"the soul." As this mystery dissolves, it is replaced by a more
complex picture of our musings, dreamings, rememberings, forgettings and
wonderings. Best of all, Ingram, as always, delivers the goods in a manner
that is readily accessible -- and a lot of fun.
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- Jeffrey Foss teaches philosophy at the University of
Victoria. He is the author of Science and the Riddle of Consciousness.
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