THINGS

Things are the freeze-frames of flux,

snapshots at our shutter speed

of wild, hurtling motion.

Remember the castle

your child self built out of sand,

how tide tongues demolished it,

lick by inexorable lick;

but, nothing lost,

waves would trowel a corrugated shore,

or smooth the grains to snooker-table flats.

As starlings in their murmurations wedge, stream, arrow,

then scatter to their separate roosts,

as houses for all their solid look

are halfway between clay and rubble,

as atoms, those promiscuous particles,

give freely of their mass

to chalk cliffs and toe nails,

to Jupiter moons, bottles of ink,

and the innermost chambers of my brain.

so things are swirlings in a lava lamp

that switch, swivel, swerve, merge, diverge,

but to our sluggish seeing seem solid, fixed and still.

BITS AND PIECES

The human body is made of organs which are made up of cells and the cells themselves of smaller components which contain within them atoms. Even the atom is divisible into smaller parts. To simplify it all, let us just say that the human body is made of very much smaller particles.

These particles are physical bits and pieces of the universe. Their history can be traced back as far as the history of the universe can be traced back. Every particle within the human body is as old as the universe which, so cosmologists tell us, is fifteen thousand million years.

Every part of what is now the human body was once part of a star and was once part of the earth. The material that now forms part of a finger or the kidneys might once have been part of a tree or a mountainside. Our hair might have been  soil, our eyes once grass, plants or any number of things.

So the human body is a temporary collection of particles as ancient as the universe itself. They were once the bits and pieces of something else.

Moreover we know that these particles will at some point cease to be parts of this body and will be released back into the environment from which they came. In the future they may be found in rivers, soil, plants, trees, under the sea, anywhere the forces of nature push and pull them.

Clouds are collections of water droplets that form into shapes and then dissipate. The material stuff of those water droplets does not come into being when the cloud takes shape nor does it cease to exist when the cloud loses its shape.

In the formation of clouds material gathers together, becomes a shape with an outline and dimensions. There is a distance from one edge to the opposite edge of a cloud and from its top to its base. But then the parts of the cloud disperse and the shape is lost.

The formation of the human body is a slow-motion version of the gathering of a cloud. Particles collect; they form a shape which holds together with an outline and dimensions. Over time the shape collapses and the particles of which it is made disperse.

All physical objects are temporary frames for particles. A table was once a tree; one day its parts will blow in the wind as ashes from a fire. And so will objects that seem more permanent, mountains and even the earth and stars: all are time-limited shapes.

A kaleidoscope contains many coloured pieces. Shake the kaleidoscope and the pieces become organised into a pattern; shake it again and the pattern disperses.

PROPERTY DUALISM

Substance dualism is the name given to the view that mind and matter are two quite distinct substances, entities that can exist on their own or in their own right without being dependent on anything beyond themselves. Mind exists independently of matter: matter exists independently of mind.

Property dualism is quite different. This view holds that some physical objects, the brain in particular, have both physical properties and mental properties. So, according to this position, the mind, including consciousness, is not a substance separate from the body and brain but rather a property of the body and brain.

What does this actually mean? The brain is certainly a physical object and as such has physical properties: it has mass, volume, dimensions, spatial location and so on. But, according to property dualism it also has properties like thinking, having pains, emotional states and sensory experiences.

An initial response is to express astonishment at what is being put forward here. For it seems strange, to say the least, that one type of physical object should be endowed with a set of properties so different from (as far as anyone can tell) the properties of all the other physical objects in the known universe. For we do not suppose that grass and trees, sand and iron, water and carbon, for example, have any properties other than physical ones.

The brain is made up of components, of compounds and ultimately the elements which are in the category of physical objects like those listed above with only physical characteristics or properties. How can it be that put together in the combinations found in a living human or animal brain these components then acquire properties so very different?

And we must not lose sight of just how very different the two types of property are. To take just one example, the physical properties of the brain are public ones. A brain can be measured and weighed; its consistency can be compared with that of the skull or of any other body part; a brain can be on public display – imagine a brain operation watched on the internet by millions of viewers around the world.

By contrast an experience of pain is in a totally different category. The experience is private to the experiencer; it cannot be made public; its nature, its unique quality cannot be deduced from any amount of analysis of the brain.

To make sense of the idea of property dualism it is necessary first to understand a particular set of physical objects uniquely possessing, in addition to their physical properties, other properties so very different, indeed of such a completely different order of existence.

BRAIN SCANS SHOW PAIN

‘Premature babies can feel pain, scans show’. So reads a headline in the daily newspaper[1]. Has pain at last been registered on a machine? Looking at the details of the article, I find that the facts are not quite as the headline implied. What the scans showed was that during blood tests on premature babies surges of blood and oxygen in the sensory areas of their brains were detected. But then the article adds – ‘demonstrating that pain was being processed’.

The article implies that this evidence is a breakthrough because it is quite distinct from previous evidence concerning premature babies. That evidence was about behaviour. Scientists had observed behaviour signs of pain before, such as reflex movement, but it was always a possibility that there was ‘pain behaviour’ without pain actually being experienced. The brain events now observed, however, are presented as giving proof of a quite different order, or so it seems.

Why do the scientists (or at least the reporters) believe that pain has been detected? There is a part of the brain called the somatosensory cortex. It processes data from the body’s surface and, the article says, ‘is known to be linked to feelings of pain in adults’. That can only mean that the reports of some adults who, unlike premature babies, are able to tell others in words when they are in pain, have been correlated with surges of blood and oxygen in that part of the brain. So we know that when a volunteer feels pain, a particular type of brain event is occurring.

It may be that these findings lead to a practical effect, that more thought will be given to the consequences of procedures on premature babies which now seem to cause pain.

But the assumption in the article needs to be challenged. The impression is given that a conscious state had at last been included in a measuring process, that pain itself, not a change in the brain, had moved a dial or appeared on a screen when what was reported was a practical not a metaphysical breakthrough. A type of brain event that regularly correlates with a type of conscious event was identified for the first time in premature babies.

It may change the way premature babies are treated but it tells us nothing new about consciousness.

Is there any way that consciousness might be scientifically measure or recorded? Think of all the measuring devices that exist. Take into account all the advances, the new technologies far beyond what is possible at present.

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[1] The Daily Telegraph (5.4.06)

OUT OF THE BLUE

When we say,
‘It came out of the blue,’
we don’t mean
‘out of the blue’
because the ‘blue’ is a something
and when we say ‘it came out of the blue’
we mean it came out of nothing.
But that something should come out of nothing
makes our heads spin.
It’s like standing on the edge of the universe
and asking, ‘where do we go from here?’
or at the end of time
and wondering what’s next.
Better not to say,
‘It came out of the blue.’
If we want to say sane.

NOTHING OUT OF NOTHING 2

Another response to an old saying that probably goes back to the ancient Greeks: ‘nothing comes out of nothing’. A truism, surely? No thing is made out of nothing. Everything that has been made was formerly something else out of which it was made. Consider any object in the universe: a star, a hill, a tree, a house, a fingernail, a cell, an atom. Each one came into being out of the material that existed before its formation. There is no new material; only old material or energy which can be fashioned into new forms. Nothing is created, if we mean by ‘created’ a real substance brought into existence out of complete emptiness.

Coal, oil, chalk, limestone were formerly living things. Time and pressure converted one sort of material into another. Cars are made of metals, plastics, rubber; books out of trees.

Always we make a something out of a something. We cannot make sense of a something arising out of a nothing. This understanding is an intuition into the way things really are. It is also a sophisticated fundamental tenet of science, the law of conservation of mass and energy whereby there are never any increases or decreases in the total amount of mass and energy in the universe.

Is the existence of consciousness a contradiction of this self-evident fact and fundamental law? For if consciousness is real and it was not manufactured out of matter (how could it have been?) then the very fact of consciousness seems a transgression of this law. Neither mass nor energy was expended in its making; consciousness itself does not consume mass or energy.

But if consciousness is not a part of the physical domain but rather accompanies it, then the cycle of physical reactions continues, not affecting and unaffected by consciousness. There is then no transgression of the law of conservation.

This idea of consciousness accompanying or existing in parallel with the physical, with the brain in particular, may solve one problem – the apparently intractable problem of explaining how consciousness could be made out of the brain. But it does not solve the problem with which we began. Nothing comes out of nothing. If consciousness, is not made out of bodies, of what is it made? Where does consciousness come from?

NOTHING OUT OF NOTHING 1

‘Nothing shall come of  nothing. Speak again,’ bellows Shakespeare’s King Lear to  his youngest daughter, Cordelia, little realising that he is setting in motion a sequence of events that will reduce him from proud autocrat to a virtual nothing himself.

But the idea that nothing can come out of nothing long predates Shakespeare. It is an ancient maxim. Indeed it seems the sort of truth that needs no argument to prove it; it is so elemental; we know it intuitively. A something can be made out of a something but out of nothing nothing can be made.

Is this principle relevant to consciousness? The brain is a physical object; the parts of the brain do work and the power to do work is what we mean by energy. Energy, what it can do and what can be done with it, comes under the First Law of Thermodynamics. According to this law energy can be changed from one form into another but it can neither be created nor destroyed. The total amount of energy in the universe remains constant.

Where does consciousness come from? What does consciousness do?

The brain is all the time busy converting energy from one form to another. At the end of every day there is as much energy in the whole system as there was at the beginning. All the energy used by the brain in its firing neurons and its synaptic connections can be accounted for. Nothing is lost and nothing is gained in the physical system.

And yet during that day there have been sense experiences, emotional states, ideas, memories evoked and so on. These states of consciousness are real. Something has come into existence that seems to be outside the flow of energy and all its exchanges. All the physical stuff has remained constant; all the energy has been accounted for and yet there is something else.

How did consciousness come into being without any expenditure of energy?

How can consciousness have caused any event to happen in the brain without adding to the amount of energy?

Consciousness looks like a something out of nothing. But is that possible? Surely ‘nothing shall come out of nothing’?

MATERIALISM

Materialism is ultimately an unconvincing account of the nature of reality on three counts, two scientific, one philosophical.

1. By virtue only of scientific investigation and analysis the concept of physical objects as made of little solid lumps, infinitesimal marbles, grains or whatever has been demolished. What matter has been shown to be is difficult to put into words: points of energy, potentialities but certainly not lumpy ‘things’ as we ordinarily understand them to be.

2. Materialism in the sense of an explanation for why things take the form they have and moves and change also collapses. For, on the best available scientific analysis, every event in the universe is caused by one or more of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak nuclear forces. But that is as far as present understanding goes. No one knows how (not to mention why) forces come to exist. No one can know that they will continue into the future, change in strength, disappear altogether. The whole of the universe from galaxies to subatomic particles rests on a mysterious foundation.

3. We do not know physical things directly but infer their existence indirectly from immediate conscious experiences. Consider the world around us at this moment: we know that we are seeing, hearing, touching. That is the basic data. It is from that we, at one remove, come to know matter.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND EVOLUTION 2

Let us take for granted for the moment the standard history we are taught about our origins, the story of evolution.

There is a date given for the beginning of the universe, one for the formation of this planet, the earth, one for the arising of the first plant life forms, one for the first animals and one for the first humans.

On this scheme of history humans and even animals are very late arrivals on the scene. During most of the history of the universe there have been no humans and no animals. The universe for most of its existence has been completely inanimate.  And, more than that, it has been completely without consciousness.

Let us assume that, like humans, animals are conscious beings. It is not important at this point to determine precisely which living things from the virus and bacterium to the chimpanzee and ape are conscious. For the moment let us just assume that mammals, birds, reptiles are sentient to some degree, that is, that they are capable of having some type of conscious state, some however minimal awareness, whether of pain or of heat or hunger.

For billions of years the universe was devoid of consciousness. Then, somehow, at some point that coincided with the coming into existence of the new physical form of certain animals, consciousness arrived on the scene.

Now, in the diverse range of animal structures, particularly those of humans, consciousness is rich, deep, subtle and infinitely varied. Now there is music, agony, laughter, flights of imagination, thought both shallow and profound. Then, go back into the universe’s history, there was silence, total darkness, a complete emptiness of experience, of feeling, of consciousness.

There was, then, so it seems, a time before consciousness; there was a time when consciousness first manifested; and there have been all the ages since during which consciousness has become more and more diverse.

Is there any way of explaining how consciousness entered into the history of the universe?

Did animal bodies manufacture consciousness out of their own physical substance?

But if consciousness is not made of matter how could it have come into existence in this way?

And consider what is now happening. Something totally made out of the physical stuff of the universe, this human body holding a pen, is now shaping questions, thinking about and pondering the very nature of the universe. How did such a state of affairs come about? How did a part of the universe come to think about itself?

SEEING FOR THE FIRST TIME

What could be more wonderful? What could be a greater cause for rejoicing than that the blind should see? And not just sight restored after loss; think of the man born blind who has spent half a lifetime without sight, who has never seen a blade of grass or a cloud and has no conception or what seeing might be like. Imagine that he is given sight.

There are cases where it has happened: a few people, having been blind from birth, by modern techniques in medical technology have become able to see. But there has not always been rejoicing. Or, perhaps, the period of rejoicing has been brief. There have even been suicides among this very small group. What would have seemed less likely?

Could it be that after decades of coping with the world in terms of its sounds and its smells and tastes and its feels, suddenly to see is to be overwhelmed by an onslaught of chaotic images, to be so bewildered, so overwhelmed as to be unable to cope?

We think of seeing in a very simple way. There is me over here with eyes and a brain and a tree over there and with the aid of light I just see the tree. And we may imagine that the man blind from birth who is given sight and looks for the first time will see the tree much as I see the tree.

But suppose that seeing is not like that at all, that we do not just see in the way a camera takes a photograph. We have to learn to see. The learning of those sighted from birth takes place before memories begin to be laid down. We cannot recall learning to see.

A world of things like trees is not given as a finished product to be seen by the person seeing for the first time. Perhaps our completed picture of the world owes as much to the way we learn as to the things we see.