In an argument of this complexity, there is inevitable debris that gets left on the floor. The time has come to sweep it up. My central theme is looking at how concepts of emotion can become corrupt, but this is confused by the fact that our brains create a number of other illusions that cloud the issue. I need to address this, and this means being thoroughly unscientific, and only marginally philosophical. Writing this chapter fills me with self-loathing [for which I shall suppress the behavioural response].
There are three misconceptions that I need to dispel: firstly, the notion that true biological instinct ever drives a human action; secondly, that we think with a “mind”; and, thirdly, I need to address the confusion surrounding perceptive illusion in general. More specifically, I’ll be looking at the question of how our brains create the impression that we can remember feelings and rely upon this memory for identification of emotional states.
INSTINCT AND RATIONAL THOUGHT
Lions and hyenas hate one another with a passion. They hate each other even more than the New York Yankees and the New England Patriots hate each other. [Wait! Do they play the same sport?] Whenever lions and hyenas meet each other, they fight ferociously, but these fights almost never end up with death or injury. They end with one team running away. So which team flees? In almost every case, it is the one with the lower aggregate body mass. The “Brave Lion” idea does not stack-up here.
Imagine you are in a restaurant in New Orleans with your friends, and the waiter brings a steaming plate of Cajun crawfish. Your eyes focus on the plate like a vulture, and pick out the biggest one; then (acting all nonchalant, and perhaps making a remark intended purely to distract) you swoop in before anyone else spots it. When you do this, you make a decision. (You could after all have taken the smallest one.) You can make this decision without using language in your head. This is fortunate, because lions and hyenas also have to make a decision; and they don’t have language.
If you hold up two objects, you can look at them and spot whether one is bigger than the other or not, without using language in your head. Now imagine that I hold up two blocks of wood, and I ask you: is this block more or less than 20% bigger than the other? Again, you can look at the two blocks of wood, make a mental comparison and decide without needing to use language in your head.
Now let’s imagine that because lions have sharper teeth and retractable claws, they can take on hyenas with a 20% higher aggregate body mass. If you can assess whether something is more or less than 120% of your size without using language, why can’t the lion? The problem is this: “the same size as” is something that can be understood if you have never had language; but “20% bigger than” is hard to conceptualise if it has never been put into language.
Lions and hyenas work off equality of size because they have never had language. Their simplistic fight or flight instinct has been streamlined by the process of natural selection, and this instinct is possible without language. One lion is going to be more frightened of two fat hyenas than he is of three lean hungry ones if the former has a higher aggregate weight. From the lion’s perspective, this is probably the wrong choice. But how can the lion improve on it without language? If the lion gained language, he could work this out. But look what has happened: the simple instinct gained through natural selection has disappeared. A lion with language has to decide when to use the simple rule, and when to use the more subtle assessment. However, this results in the simple rule being ousted as the only outcome determined by instinct. It is now simply another option. Instinct would evaporate the instant the lion could make the decision using language-based reasoning.
Language permits you to second-guess your instinct, and if you can second-guess it, it isn’t instinct any more. Humans, who have language, are able to engage in post-language non-verbal thought, so they no longer have true biological instinct. We have behavioural responses to emotional states that can be explained as instinct derived from evolution by natural selection, but once we start habitually manipulating these responses, can we still be said to fully retain the instinct?
Imagine that a female friend of yours says to you: “I have met this guy, but I can’t decide whether he is serious or a jackass.” And you advise: “Listen to your instincts.” What you mean, it seems to me, is to assess how you feel and think of the situation without using language as a medium for reasoning. However, as should now be clear, thinking about how we feel isn’t that simple. Human emotion was originally a product of evolution by natural selection, but this process has been corrupted. Language enables us to think conceptually about behaviour and this has led us to tactically deceive ourselves with our own emotional behaviour, and instinct no longer provides a reliable answer.
When the quarterback sees his teammate in open space by third base, he throws the ball without thinking it through in language. This is post-language non-verbal thought: how could he know the point of this throw (as opposed to another one) if he had not learned the rules and strategy of the game? Learning the strategy requires language. The decision on where to throw the ball does not.
So there are three modes of thinking:
In any situation where we have time for the second and third, we can never be said to truly follow the first. Instinct, in its biological sense, vanishes. [Eureka! And he kicks the puck through the hoop and into the bleachers.]
THE MYTH OF THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Discovering what consciousness is should be a scientific problem. We should approach the problem the same way we try to understand gravity or how influenza viruses cause disease. However, the only consciousness that each of us can observe is our own, and to analyse it in an objective scientific manner we would need to be able to observe someone else’s. Our initial line of enquiry is bound to be introspection, and it becomes hard to avoid some appeal to intuition. In this way, science collides headfirst with philosophy and creates a problem that leaves the greatest thinkers flummoxed.
We don’t need years of study in philosophy to be able to study our thoughts by way of introspection. When you read this book, I hope that it causes you to have thoughts, although it might just trigger a feeling of boredom. Either way, you will doubtless see your response as a conscious one – something that is subjective and personal to you alone. This process of introspection has led people through the centuries to regard the mental world as distinct from the physical one. We make decisions in our mental world (according to the “common sense” view) and this causes our body to do the mind’s willing. The philosopher-speak term for this conception of separate mental and physical worlds is “dualist interactionism” (or sometimes “interactionist dualism” by annoying people trying to pretend that their theory is different). In exposing its absurdity, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle rather caustically referred to it as “the myth of the Ghost in the Machine”.86 This became the catchphrase by which people poke fun at such ridiculous explanations.
Most people attribute dualist interactionism to Descartes87, but this is a mistake. In philosophy, practically everybody from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century believed in the separateness of the mind.88 The significance of Descartes is that he was the first to examine the problem in the wake of the scientific revolution that followed the discoveries of Galileo. Prior to Galileo, most philosophers couldn’t see a problem with mental phenomena causing physical ones. Gilbert Ryle terminated philosophy’s belief in a non-physical mind causing the movement of the physical body through “volitions”. In other words, the laws of physics and chemistry determine the movement of the body, but this causal chain cannot begin with something that lies outside these laws.
Philosophers tried to wriggle off this hook by making two distinct concepts of mind: the “phenomenal mind” is the mind of experience qualia that we observe through introspection; and the “psychological mind” is the mind that causes the body to act. But this just moves the scientific disconnect to a different place. If your decision to act occurs in your phenomenal mind, then how does this cause the psychological mind to do its stuff? If the psychological mind is all that matters, then what exactly is the phenomenal mind?
Scientist have tried to finagle the problem by making use of the same risible distinction: Freud and his followers examined the phenomenal mind, and later the behaviourists focussed on the psychological mind, sometimes going as far as completely denying the existence of mental phenomena. In other words, your experience of your thought is an illusion. Well, as we will discuss in the next section, the brain is certainly a consummate illusionist, but the problem is that we cannot ask what sort of illusion it is except through the medium of thought, which is the very illusion that we are trying to analyse. This is a problem that appears intractable.
Contemporary thinkers from both science and philosophy mostly divide the problem of consciousness into the “Hard Problem” and the “Easy Problem”. The philosopher David Chalmers coined this terminology89, but Leibniz was perhaps the first to make the Hard Problem clear:
Supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.90
The Hard Problem is explaining how thought generates the experience of thought. Somehow, we have a way of seeing our thought as it happens and we are aware of it. Similarly, perception generates the experience of perception. This is the Hard Problem because we don’t even know what a hypothetical explanation might look like.
Now for the Easy Problem, which is actually not easy at all; it is called “easy” because we sort of know what the problem actually is. It is understanding how unconscious and conscious brain processes work. Neuroscience is gradually unravelling all this. For example, cognitive neuroscientists are a grim bunch of people who study people who have had bits of their brains destroyed by tumour, haemorrhage or trauma. They do so to find out what each of them can no longer do. By a process of gradual elimination, they are constructing a map of the brain to determine what each part of the brain actually does (speech, movement, memory, rational thought, etc.). If every conscious thought requires a bit of the brain for us to experience it, we could say that cognitive neuroscientists are gradually exorcising the Ghost from the Machine. However, if cognitive neuroscientists find all the parts of the brain that deal with the human experience of suffering, they could not be said to understand suffering. If suffering were just a physical brain state, then surely we wouldn’t need to care about it. I am guessing that even cognitive neuroscientists are capable of suffering, and what is important about suffering is that we experience it, not that it is just some neural electronics. We are also learning how neurons work. Although we are still some way from understanding how logical thought can be explained by neural function, it is not inconceivable that eventually scientists will figure this out, but this still won’t explain consciousness.
Many philosophers and scientists suspect that the Hard Problem will never be solved.91 Others argue that the Hard Problem does not even exist.92 These two views on the Hard Problem seem to have reached a sort of stalemate where nothing will change until someone comes up with a completely different way of looking at things.
There has been a philosophical hoopla about this for about two millennia. So what progress have we made? Precisely none! David Chalmers considers that philosophical theories of consciousness basically fall into eight different categories, and there are another nine (mostly scientific) theories.93 Seventeen theories is hardly evidence of emerging consensus. If I overdose on my imagination pills, I could probably dream up an eighteenth, but would that actually help?
This book is about how we understand feelings, which are states of consciousness; so I must address the problem. I can either solve it or dodge it. And since nobody else has been able to solve it, dodging looks like the prudent strategy. Why bother being clever when being wily gets you out of trouble with much less effort?
I tend to start these problems by looking at it from an evolutionary angle. Let’s consider a hypothetical sensory qualia, because this enables us to avoid the preconception that, if we see it, it must be True. Carbon monoxide kills humans, but doesn’t have a smell. Imagine that some geological event meant that the earth starts to periodically spew carbon monoxide. A genetic mutation occurs in me that somehow causes a “ding” to go off in my brain whenever carbon monoxide is present. At first, I have no idea what the ding is, but then I notice that whenever the ding goes off people around me start dying, so I learn to run until the dinging stops. I will out-survive other humans, and my offspring will out-survive the humans of their generation, so the ding-gene will propagate throughout humanity. My brain is tricking me to promote my survival, and it is senseless considering whether the ding is representative of a true state of affairs. It is not necessary to understand the metaphysics of emotional qualia to understand that they serve the purpose of driving actions. If these qualia are some sort of brain-synthesised phenomena, and if they prompt actions that promote survival, then the nature of the phenomena is irrelevant. Evolution is concerned with passing on your genes by any means – including, possibly, your deception.
An emotion is a form of yearning that drives an action that enhances biological fitness. Lower animals that seem to lack consciousness have mechanisms to survive, but don’t have a yearning to survive because yearning occurs in the phenomenal mind. Is not the yearning a prerequisite for more complex survival strategies? The conscious mind is almost certainly a prerequisite of language that again permits the calculation of even more complex survival strategies.
MEMORIES OF FEELINGS
A while ago, I did a survey of a group of friends. [Remember: philosophers don’t get scientific research!] I asked them to close their eyes and think of an image and tell me whether this image was in colour or not. About a quarter of them told me that they saw the image in monochrome black-and-white while the rest saw the image in polychrome. I have thought about this, and I have come to the conclusion that I don’t see the image either way.
Think about how you see with your physical eye. You have this sensation of seeing the whole of your visual field as a colour image; but actually your physical eye flits over what is before you and takes in the most important parts of the image in sequence, and the rest is left to your peripheral vision. There is a physiological reason for this: The light sensors at the back of your eye (the retina) have a concentrated point (called the “fovea centralis”). Here there is a concentration of cone cells, and the rest of your retina has a higher concentration of rod cells. We tend to overlook how hopeless our peripheral vision really is. Ask a friend to put up a number of fingers in front of your face, but just to one side of your focal point, and you won’t be able to count them.
Now, let’s think about the mind’s eye. When I picture a mental image, my mind’s eye does the same thing as my physical eye: it flits over the mental image in sequence, picking out the most important details in sequence and the rest is left to the peripheral vision of my mind’s eye – which is almost non-existent. There may be a physiological reason why my mind’s eye works the same way as my physical eye; namely that the vision circuits of my brain evolved in tandem with my eye, and they are simply set up to process visual data in the way my physical eye sees: a sequence of detailed images in the middle of a fuzzy one. When I conjure up a mental image, I use some of the same brain circuits as when I see a physical image, and these are simply set up to scan the image one point at a time.
So then, how do I see my mental image with my mind’s eye? Well, let’s say that my mental image is a pastoral scene, rather like a John Constable painting. As my mind’s eye flits over the mental image, it picks out the colours in sequence, but my mental peripheral image is entirely black-and-white. So if my mind’s eye flits to the sky, my brain says “blue” and when my mind’s eye flits to the cornfield, my brain says “yellow”. But if I try to assemble all the colours together, I simply cannot do it. This way of seeing with my mind’s eye is neither monochrome nor polychrome. I call it “serial duochrome”, but our brain tricks us into thinking that we see a polychrome image.
It is instructive to think about the vision of other species because as we go backwards down the evolutionary chain, we can see elements of our incredible visual ability being successively taken away.
Colour vision in mammals evolved about thirty million years ago, before the evolutionary split between New World monkeys and Old World monkeys. The only mammals that have colour vision are humans, apes and Old World monkeys. We therefore tend to think that it is easy to imagine what your dog sees – you just have to look at a black-and-white TV. However, it is quite likely a dog lacks many other elements of our visual capability, though it is difficult to be certain.
When I was a child, I used to go bird watching. I remember that if you want to enter a bird hide in clear view of the birds, then three people should approach the hide, two should enter it and the third should walk on in clear sight of the birds. If everyone enters the hide, the birds know that you are there and stay clear. However, if one person keeps walking, the birds don’t know that there is anyone in the hide because a bird cannot tell the difference between three humans and one. Maybe a bird sees humans in much the same way that you see fingers when they are held just off the centre of your visual field. It is certainly astonishing that hawks can spot a mouse from a hundred metres up, but we should not imagine that they see what we see plus the ability to see the mouse. A hawk can pick out the movement of the mouse so well, in part because it is poor at resolving everything that is stationary. Birds keep their head stationary for brief periods of time and then jerk them to another position. The frequency with which a bird twitches its head (three or four times a second) is a crude measure of how long it takes to resolve a static image. A lizard moves its head only every few seconds. This would imply that a bird resolves a static image several times faster than a lizard, which seems reasonable since it has a more highly evolved brain.
It is almost impossible to imagine what some animals see. Try to imagine what an insect “looks like” to a bat’s echolocator on a pitchdark night. The philosopher Thomas Nagel attempted to describe this.94 Bat sonar, Nagel points out, is nothing like any sensory experience that we possess, but we must assume that a bat experiences the perception of its sonar. Our imagination might permit us to imagine what it is like for us to be a bat, but it does not permit us to imagine what it is like for a bat to be a bat: flying on webbed hands, catching insects in our mouths in the dark and spending all day hanging upside-down in a cave. This, in part, is because we lack the neurophysiological systems that a bat has for echolocation.95 A bat must have a different experience of this because it has a different brain structure.
Some scientists and philosophers argue that only humans have consciousness. I think this implausible, and a better way to think of it is that consciousness is proportional to development. For example, a frog lacks most of our conscious experience of vision because a frog cannot see anything that is stationary.96 This is fine for the frog because everything the frog eats moves, and everything that eats the frog moves. You can get a frog as hungry as you like, and when you sit it in front of a fly it will do nothing. However, as soon as the fly moves, the frog will zap it with a sticky slurp. What else does a frog need to see? Its sex life is conducted solely through the senses of touch and sound. The way a frog sees therefore accounts for the way it moves: hop-freeze-hop-freeze. The freeze permits it to see any pursuing predator because the predator is the only thing (during that moment of freeze) that is moving relative to the frog. If the frog moved smoothly, its eye would deliver its brain a blur of information that it would not be able to compute (frogs not being too clever).
OK, so now think about how an egret hunts. Egrets are a major predator of frogs. The egret makes a confident stride towards the frog, and then it freezes. From the frog’s perspective, danger appears in a flash and then completely vanishes. Now let’s break this movement down a bit further: An egret at rest has a long neck coiled in an S-shape. Before the egret starts its stride, it stretches its neck out first like an arrow. Only when its neck is fully extended, does it take the step and it simultaneously recoils its neck; so when its body moves forward its head is motionless. The frog is sitting on its lily pad contemplating all that is beautiful in the world (i.e. insects); and suddenly a pointy head appears without a body attached. The head then vanishes; and then a body appears without a head attached. Then both the head and the body vanish. The frog never sees a complete egret, and now cannot see anything. The frog is thinking “huh?” when a jagging stab comes out of nowhere, and the frog disappears down a slimy tube into oblivion.
Vision can mean many different things, and physical vision may not result in comparable images to mental vision. So let’s get back to our mind’s eye, and do a simple experiment: I want you to conjure up a mental image of the world’s most famous painting – the Mona Lisa. Imagine you enter the hallowed room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and there is chaos in there. Someone has vandalised the Mona Lisa. Oh no! They have put bright pink lipstick on her mouth. So, you are focussing on your mental image of the Mona Lisa; and now, I want you to apply bright pink lipstick to your mental image. Concentrate now! When you have a mental image of the whole of the Mona Lisa complete with bright pink lipstick, you can open your eyes and write an angry blog-post about how my book is complete nonsense. However, I doubt you can do that (unless you are David Hockney) because your brain tricks you into thinking it can do things that actually it can’t.
We have explored the mind’s eye. Now let’s explore the mind’s big toe.
Huh?
Didn’t you know that your mind has a big toe? [This is what happens if you do too much philosophy – it’s pathetic!] In the chapter The Language of Feeling and Emotion, I pointed out that a different pain results when someone stamps on your toe and when you stub it. Now close your eyes and try to remember exactly what stubbing your toe feels like. This is your mind’s big toe in action. I find that thinking about this is the best way to visualise what an egret looks like to a frog. If I try to recall the feeling, I simply draw a blank.
One of the only times in my life when I have been seriously hurt was when some goon knocked me off my bike with his car. I have often tried to remember what that actually felt like. It isn’t that I can’t remember anything, because I do. So when I say, “Hey, Brain! Give me a memory of the feeling”, my brain says, “Sure, Matt! Here you go”; and my brain gives me a mental image of me lying in the road like a rag-doll. “No, Brain! The feeling!” This result is seriously strange because I never saw myself lying in the road; all I saw was the paramedic looking down at me. Not only does my brain convert the feeling in my memory into the body language of the feeling, it converts it into body language that I never actually saw. Why would my brain do this to me unless it was incapable of delivering me a memory of the feeling itself? Our brain is constantly playing con-tricks on us to make us think it can do things that it can’t.
But what is the implication of this for emotional memory? If we think we remember feelings but actually only remember the body language, then the memory is false if the body language was either affected or suppressed. If you live in a culture where people habitually pretend to be happy or suppress anxiety, then remembering the behaviour is going to give you falsely favourable memories of the experience. This would imply that nostalgia has a simple causal explanation. You could be remembering, not a feeling, but a belief about a feeling. Or it could be that you remember a belief in an emotion, where the feeling never actually occurred. How could you ever know?