Scott Bakker’s novel Neuropath (2008) is best described as a near-future science fiction thriller. It takes place in a world that is recognizably our own, only a few years down the line. Everyday life for affluent North Americans is not much different in the future world of the novel from how it is today; but enough time has passed that political and environmental conditions have gotten significantly worse. On the TV news, we hear about such events as terrorist attacks on Moscow and the American Southwest, “French ecoriots”, and “the Chinese economic crisis”. The news also features “a tasteless story about Ray Kurzweil’s recent death”: evidently the futurist does not achieve his goal of attaining immortality by uploading his consciousness onto the Internet. More significantly, we learn of “the emergency repeal of the constitutional provisions guaranteeing due process” under United States law. In fear of terrorism, we are told, “the American public had enthusiastically surrendered their constitutional scruples”. In this near-future America, the National Security Agency (NSA) can permanently detain anyone they choose. Either they arrest you directly; or else they plant child pornography on your computer, and let the local authorities do the job. “Scarcely a month passed”, the novel tells us, “without some story of some reform-minded political figure arrested on child pornography charges”.
In this setting, Neuropath tells the story of Thomas Bible, a forty-something psychology professor, divorced, with two children and a dog, living a humdrum life in the “packed anonymity” of the suburbs. Thomas is the author of a book, Through the Brain Darkly, which presents a revolutionary new theory of the human mind. The book is too extreme to have made much of a public impact: “the reviews were harsh; it went out of print”. Yet everything in the novel turns upon Thomas’ theory, which is referred to, throughout the book, as “the Argument” (with a capital A). Neuropath is science fiction, not just because it is set slightly in the future, but more importantly because the Argument that it presents is extrapolated, as an Author’s Note points out, from “actual trends and discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science”. These trends and discoveries all point to the disturbing truth that “we are not what we think we are”.
The Argument starts from the observation that science always understands things “in terms of quantity and function instead of quality and intention”. Indeed, “wherever science encounters intention or purpose in the world, it snuffs it out. The world as described by science is arbitrary and random. There’s innumerable causes for everything, but no reasons for anything”. Physical science is a war machine, a weapon of mass destruction. As a result of its relentless progress over the past several centuries, “science has pretty much scrubbed psychology from the natural world”. We no longer believe that natural events carry omens and convey messages. We use weather satellites to track oncoming storms, instead of blaming Thor for the thunder.
This aspect of Neuropath ’s Argument accords well with the naturalistic currents in contemporary philosophy. The speculative realist philosopher Ray Brassier, drawing upon both continental and analytic sources, makes a similar point. Brassier insists that, due to the success of physical science over the past few centuries, the “intelligibility” of the world
has become detached from meaning: with modern science, conceptual rationality weans itself from the narrative structures that continue to prevail in theology and theologically inflected metaphysics… The world has no author and there is no story enciphered in the structure of reality. No narrative is unfolding in nature.
Such an observation is scarcely even controversial any longer. Weber’s thesis on the disenchantment of the world has become our obvious condition. “Contemporary culture”, as we are told in Neuropath, has long since “digested the meaninglessness of natural events, the fact that they [are] indifferent to all things human”.
But what happens when we apply the scientific method, not just to the surrounding physical world, but also to ourselves, and especially to our minds? This is something that we still find disquieting. As the Argument insists, if naturalism is right, then what holds true for all other entities in the universe must hold true for human beings as well. The things that we have come to understand about the world must be applied as well to our own processes of understanding. And indeed, recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have taught us a lot about the brain. This is largely due to new technologies, like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), first developed in 1992, which allows us to track brain activity in real time; and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), first successfully used in 1985, which allows us to affect targeted portions of the brain in such a way as to alter a person’s feelings, attitudes, and judgments. Through these techniques, together with advances in computing power, we have arguably learned more about the physical functioning of the brain in the past thirty years or so, than we did in all of previous human history.
Of course, the relation of brain to mind, or of electro-chemical processes in our neurons to full-fledged subjective experience, is still hugely controversial. But Neuropath’s Argument takes it as a given that science is now in process of scrubbing psychology from the human world, just as it previously scrubbed psychology from the natural world. That is to say, the psyche itself is rapidly being depsychologized, as paradoxical as this might sound. Even the decenterings of subjectivity proposed by psychoanalysis and deconstruction have not really prepared us for this eventuality. We cannot help believing that we have reasons for what we do; “human beings explain and understand themselves in terms of intentions, desires, purposes, hopes, and so on”. But in fact, as Neuropath reminds us, “every thought, every experience, every element of your consciousness is a product of various neural processes”. You might think that you have actively chosen to do something or other; but “as a matter of fact – fact, unfortunately, not speculation – your brain simply processed a chain of sensory inputs… then generated a particular behavioral output”. The brain is “a machine that generates behaviors which are either repeated or not depending on how the resulting environmental feedback stimulates its pleasure or pain systems”. We like to imagine ourselves as free, rational beings; but actually (to quote the novel at its most harshly cynical) “we’re simply meat puppets deluded into believing we live in a moral and meaningful world”.
Brassier makes a similar point: today, he says, it is no longer possible, as Nietzsche suggested in the 19th century, and as the existentialists still maintained in the mid 20th, “for human consciousness to provide the meaning that was absent from nature”. This is because we can no longer grant any special status to our own subjectivity. “The meanings generated by consciousness can themselves be understood and explained as the products of purposeless but perfectly intelligible processes, which are at once neurobiological and sociohistorical”. Brassier warns us that human subjectivity no longer provides a refuge from science’s relentless demystification and disenchantment of the world.
In fact, Neuropath ’s Argument tells us that things are even more extreme than this. Recent research in neurobiology and cognitive psychology shows that most of the neural processes that go on in our brains are not consciously accessible to us at all. This is why our actual self-awareness is so misleading, incomplete, and prone to illusion and error. This is more thoroughly the case than Freud ever imagined. Our attempts at self-examination through introspection are incompetent at best, and delusional at worst. Most of what we think about ourselves is biased and inaccurate. Pushing the negative results of this recent research as far and as provocatively as possible, the Argument in Neuropath suggests that the human mind is altogether incapable – in principle, and not just in fact – of understanding itself. Things like intentions, meanings, and purposes “only seem real because we’re riding the neural horse backward”. But since we remain necessarily committed to such artifacts, we remain inescapably blind to the actual material causes of our thoughts and actions. We are constitutively unable to trace our own mental states back to the electrochemical events in the brain that produce them.
Our psychological self-explanations are therefore best understood as fictional narratives, or confabulations. We may think here of Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments on “the precursors of decision-making”. These experiments are frequently referenced both in affect theory and the philosophy of mind; and they are explicitly referred to at one point in the novel. Libet discovered that “readiness potentials” for a given action build up in the neurons of a subject’s brain, half of a second before the subject consciously decides to perform that action. In effect, our decisions have already been made for us – or at the very least made by nonconscious processes within us – prior to our very awareness of making them. Here the third person trumps the first person: mental events that are inaccessible to introspection can nonetheless be measured and recorded by objectifying scientific instruments. Under such conditions, my sense of exercising “free will” is only a self-deluding attempt to give myself credit for an event in my brain that has already happened. In the words of the novel, “willing… is an add-on of some kind, something that comes to us after the fact”. It is hard for us to fully grasp “just how after the fact conscious experience is”.
This temporal lag is crucial. It means that our minds are never able to keep up with themselves. The media theorist Mark Hansen has insisted that
human experience is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation caused by the complex entanglement of humans within networks of media technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception, etc).
The Argument in Neuropath suggests that this is not only the case in relation to computerized microsensors and other forms of what Hansen calls “21st century media”, but applies globally in terms of the brain’s relation to itself. “The brain simply isn’t equipped to keep track of itself… it lacks the processing power… The best it can do is scribble cartoons of itself”. The Argument tells us that everyday life, as we experience it, is nothing more than such a “cartoon”. We live, inescapably, in “Disney World”: a world that is “papered over with conceit after comforting conceit… anchored in psychological need rather than physical fact”. This is inevitable, because
the bulk of your brain’s processing falls outside what you can experience; it simply doesn’t exist for your consciousness, not even as an absence… Our brains… are entirely blind to the deep processing that drives them… The neural correlates of consciousness have no access to the real neurophysiological movers and shakers down below.
In this regard, we are even worse off than the mythological prisoners in the cave of Plato’s Republic. For they at least have the faint hope of becoming aware of their plight, and ascending towards the light. But we are never released from our illusions, not even when we become aware that our experiences are illusions. We are never able to see “the shadow behind the occluded frame”. That is to say, since the “frame” that limits my awareness is itself “occluded”, I am unable to realize that my experience is, in point of fact, circumscribed and partial. Since I cannot perceive the boundaries of my experience, I cannot even grasp that my experience is limited, rather than being comprehensive. This is why, for instance as the novel observes my “visual field” seems to “simply ‘run out’ without having any visible edge”.
The Argument also undermines our common intuitions about our own inner sensations, or what the philosophers call qualia. I tend to think, as many people do, that there is a certain vividness and intensity to my inner life. But this qualitative dimension of my experience is something that I cannot capture and put into words. For instance, I can tell you that I am seeing a particular shade of the color red; but I do not know how to convey to you – or even describe to myself – the deep, and quite specific, feeling of seeing this precise shade of red. I don’t even know how to explain its difference from other closely related, but ever so slightly distinct, shades of red. I am inclined to presume that, so long as you are not blind or colorblind, your experience of this particular shade is similar to mine. But I cannot ever prove this, as there is no way of actually comparing my inner experience with yours. This is the difficulty that Wittgenstein struggles with in his Philosophical Investigations, and that underlies Thomas Nagel’s meditation on the difficulty of knowing what it is like to be a bat.
The problem would seem to be that there is a mismatch between the functional information processing that goes on in the brain, on the one hand, and the phenomenal experience that emerges as a result of this processing, on the other. The former is accessible to objective, third-person measurement with things like fMRI scans; but the latter is not. Many philosophers of mind – David Chalmers is one prominent example – seize upon this imbalance, and maintain that information processing is simply not enough to account for the “rich inner life” of conscious entities. This is why, according to Chalmers, subjective experience itself is not “susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms”. On the other side, reductionist thinkers – most famously Daniel Dennett – respond that this seeming mismatch is itself only an illusion. If we look carefully enough at the phenomena of consciousness, Dennett says, we discover that all of its features do in fact reduce, without remainder, to computational and neural mechanisms. Dennett therefore maintains that “consciousness cannot be separated from function”, and that there are no “absolutely indescribable properties in our experience”.
Now, Scott Bakker is evidently much closer to Dennett’s reductionist view of consciousness than he is to Chalmers’ expansionary one. But the Argument in Neuropath takes a radical step that Dennett does not, and thereby turns the whole dispute about qualia inside out. Instead of denying, as Dennett does, the very claim of a mismatch between information processing and inner, phenomenal experience, the Argument in Neuropath accepts the existence of a disparity, only to reverse its terms. For the Argument suggests that phenomenal experience is the consequence, not of an overflowing qualitative richness, but rather of a fundamental deficiency. We see, hear, and feel in the way that we do as a result of informational impoverishment. No matter what I experience, “the neural processing that makes these experiences possible… is utterly invisible” in and of itself. What seem to be the positive features of conscious experience are therefore really symptoms of this basic deficiency, the negative consequences of limitation and ignorance. My experience of this particular shade of red is ineffable, not because it exceeds any sort of measure, but because it is too “subtle” (as Thomas Metzinger puts it) to reach the threshold of discernibility needed for even the most minimal cognition.
According to the Argument, what holds for the qualitative nature of consciousness holds also for its other seemingly inexplicable features, such as its unity and presentness. “Experiences are always unitary, and they’re always now”, the Argument tells us, because “they’re byproducts of what the brain lacks”. Our minds perpetually suffer from “things like inattentional blindness, change blindness, masking, perceptual asynchrony, processing lags, and so on… You could make a career out of cataloging all the ways in which consciousness is either blinkered or outright deceptive… Out of all the information our brains crunch every second, only a tiny sliver makes it to conscious experience – less than a millionth, by some estimates”. The seeming richness of my first-person perspective is a hallucinatory effect of this fundamental sparseness.
What does this mean for human subjective experience? We live in “a world of pure experience”, William James told us long ago. In the words of the novel, we cannot help believing that experience is “pure and bone-deep. What could be more true than that? What could be more true than the feelings that underwrite our very existence?” And yet, the latest scientific evidence suggests that we do not even “experience experience as it is”. Rather, experience itself is “profoundly deceptive”. The Argument tells us that this discordance is precisely as “we should expect”, once we have learned how untrustworthy our own beliefs can be, and how mistaken our introspection.
I think that it is worth insisting upon the sheer, radical outrageousness of this claim. Modern philosophy, from Descartes all the way through to phenomenology, is grounded upon the self-evident givenness of immediate experience, and subsequently of our introspective reflection upon this experience. Descartes imagines an “evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me”. Yet even if all the things I think are false, Descartes says, it still remains true that I exist, because I am the one who is thinking these things.
Recent cognitive psychology, however, casts doubt even upon this minimal self-assurance. For apparently experience still happens even when there is no hope of attributing it to myself. The Argument therefore draws a wedge between experience itself, and any hope that I might have of ‘owning it’, let alone reflecting upon it clearly. I can easily be mistaken when I grasp my own experience; and in any case, I can only lay hold of it after the fact. “You like to think that you have all these experiences, that you author all of your actions, but the sad fact, my dear, is that you simply accompany them”. Instead of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”, the Argument suggests that “something like ‘it thinks, therefore I was ’ would probably be more accurate”.
The Argument, as it is put forth in Neuropath, is a sketch for what Scott Bakker subsequently develops in a fuller and more explicit form on his blog, Three Pound Brain. Here, he calls it the Blind Brain Theory (BBT). Indeed, at one point in Neuropath, the Argument is formally referred to as the “Blind Brain Hypothesis”. In moving from a hypothesis to a full-blown theory, the blog marshals experimental evidence, and engages in straightforward philosophical disputation, in a way that the novel does not. The blog seeks to rigorously establish what the novel merely asserts. In Three Pound Brain, Bakker argues for the truth of the BBT; he elaborates and complicates the theory, shows how it addresses and resolves various conceptual impasses, and contrasts it with other theses in the philosophy of mind. None of this is done in the novel.
However, all this does not mean that Neuropath is just a mere illustration of the BBT. My claim about the novel, as about science fiction more generally, is precisely the opposite. The difference between blog and novel, as more broadly between philosophy and science fiction, has to do with the way that the latter works as a thought experiment, and an exploration of extreme possibilities. In Neuropath, Bakker does not attempt to prove the Argument, philosophically or empirically. Rather, he explores the (largely horrific) consequences of the Argument: those that would result from its being true, as well as those that might result from people becoming aware of it, maintaining it, and putting it into practice. What is really at stake in Neuropath is the question of how the world is changed – personally, socially, and technologically – once the Argument has become conceivable; and even more, once it has become operational. Human consciousness may well have always been delusional, but recent technological inventions make it possible to mobilize our delusions in a new way.
The ultimate consequence envisioned by Neuropath is what it calls “the semantic apocalypse, the apocalypse of meaning”. This is a conflagration in which our common-sense intuitions about ourselves are discredited once and for all. It’s not just a matter of so-called folk psychology being replaced by a more scientific vocabulary, as some philosophers have imagined. Rather, our very ability to make sense of our own experience is paralyzed. We are no longer able to believe that anything in our lives is meaningful – or even that anything in our lives can be referred back to ourselves. This is not existential alienation, nor even totalitarian mind control, but something worse: an even more extreme self-divestment. In one of the novel’s most lurid passages, Thomas is told: “You want to believe I’m doing things to you, when in fact I’m doing things with you. The only reason I can play your thoughts and experiences like a sock puppet is because that’s what you are”. It’s a rather extreme, and negative, version of what used to be celebrated as Romantic inspiration: “not I, but the wind that blows through me”.
We may compare this, once again, to Brassier’s claim that any effort “to wrest some sort of psychologically satisfying narrative from elements of the modern scientific worldview… is doomed because it is the very category of narrative that has been rendered cognitively redundant by modern science”. In a certain sense, Neuropath tells us, the semantic apocalypse has "already happened”. It is too late for us to retreat from the implications of the new neuroscience and cognitive science. For the first time in human history, perhaps, we are no longer able to escape or deny – as previous generations did – “the nihilistic truth of existence”. We can no longer tell ourselves the kinds of stories that make our lives meaningful again.
I think that there is another way to say this, though it is one that the novel does not put forth explicitly. Consider the history of modern, scientific conceptualizations of the mind. These generally track the most advanced technologies available at any given time. Materialists of the 18th century speculated that the mind worked like a clockwork mechanism. In the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, Freud was only one of many theorists who modeled the mind instead in thermodynamic terms, as if it were something like a steam engine or a vast hydraulic system. In the later 20th century, thanks to cybernetics and the development of computing, the mind was conceived in terms of information processing. It was thought to be like a digital computer, with the brain as hardware, and mental processes as platform-independent software.
Today, in the early 21st century, we still take for granted (excessively, in my view) the primacy of information processing. But we are starting to abandon the idea of mental happenings as immaterial, platform-independent patterns. Ray Kurzweil’s fantasy of uploading his consciousness to a computer can no longer be taken seriously. Instead, we now seek to explain the mind directly in terms of the electro-chemical processes that actually occur within the brain. With fMRI and TMS, we have moved from technologies that serve as metaphors for the mind, to technologies that themselves literally act upon the mind, by measuring the flow of blood in the brain, and by stimulating or inhibiting particular neurons in determinate ways.
In other words, the question of the mind today has become more a matter of engineering practice, than one of scientific and philosophical understanding. The Argument is less a matter of what the mind is, and of what we can know about it, than of what the mind does, and what we can in turn do with it or to it. The shift from psychological reasons and intentions to physiological causes and mechanisms is also a shift from epistemology to instrumentality.
This is why the Argument needs to be addressed pragmatically, in terms of its consequences, more than it needs to be confirmed or discredited through philosophical argument. And such an exploration of consequences, as I have already suggested, is more the province of science fictional speculation and extrapolation, than it is one of strictly philosophical discussion. Brassier claims that “the very category of narrative” has become “cognitively redundant” as a result of recent neurobiological findings, but Neuropath demonstrates that even this redundancy still needs to be addressed in narrative.
The Argument’s effects and consequences are dramatized in Neuropath in terms of what can best be described as an ongoing duel between the two main characters: Thomas Bible, the original author of the Argument, and his erstwhile best friend Neil Cassidy, a neurosurgeon who puts the Argument into actual practice. Thomas and Neil have a long relationship, dating back to when they were college roommates. Indeed, Thomas originally develops the Argument as an undergraduate, in the course of “college bull sessions” with Neil. The novel describes these sessions as an experience of mutual infatuation and intoxication: like taking “a kind of experimental drug”, or even like “a religious experience”. Even science-based demystification tends to be grasped in mystical or intoxicating terms.
As Thomas and Neil elaborate the Argument, it both frightens and excites them. With other people, they use it as a sort of social weapon, trotting it out for things like “mopping the floor with lit majors, freaking people out around the bong”. For simply to maintain the Argument is to display your bravado. It shows that you are tough enough to handle its nihilistic implications – unlike all your shocked and wimpy listeners, who cannot accept it because it “cut[s] against the grain of too much hardwiring and socialization”. The Argument is necessarily a provocation, and thereby a powerful tool in a game of macho one-upmanship. And this continues to be the case throughout Neuropath. Even at the end of the book, when he is being tortured by Neil, who claims to have pushed the implications of the Argument much further than Thomas has ever dared – even then, Thomas still admires and looks up to the alpha-male exuberance of his friend-turned-tormentor. Thomas cannot help wondering, “where did [Neil] find the balls to do the things he did?” The very outrageousness of the Argument becomes a reason for espousing it, and a mark of the power of whoever does.
In the present time of the novel, Neil shows up on Thomas’ doorstep in order to, in effect, reproach him for backsliding from the rigor of maintaining the Argument. “Like most, Thomas had moved on… The years passed, the children grew, and he found himself packing all the old questions away, even as he continued playing Professor Bible, destroyer of worlds in the classroom. Nothing killed old revelations quite so effectively as responsibility and routine”. Thomas still maintains the Argument in theory, but he doesn’t imagine that people in general are "capable of believing it. And he doesn’t himself live as if it were true. His humdrum existence as a suburban, divorced father-of-two continues unchanged. Thomas is sort of like those 19th century atheists who (much to the scorn of Nietzsche) continued to act in everyday life in the same ways, and with the same morality, as they would have done if they still believed in God.
Neil, in contrast, “had never let go” of the Argument; his entire life consists of following it to its furthest consequences. And this is what sets the narrative of Neuropath into motion. When Neil visits Thomas, he reveals that ever since medical school he has been working for the NSA, putting his expertise to use in “neuromanipulation”. Inspired by the Argument, Neil develops new technologies for interrogating prisoners. This is the science fictional core of Neuropath. Just as the Argument itself is extrapolated from recent scientific discoveries, so Neil’s inventions – inspired by the Argument – are extrapolated from, and projected beyond, what scientists are actually capable of doing today. At least, I hope that the technologies imagined in the book are not yet possible, and have not already been put into use in Langley, Virginia and Guantanamo Bay.
In the near-future world of Neuropath, the NSA has discovered how to manipulate the brains of “terrorists” and other political prisoners. The real problem with torture, from the NSA’s point of view, is that it is not nearly effective enough. Why waste so much time and energy trying to break a prisoner’s will to resist, when we now know that this “will” is “simply one more neural mechanism” that can easily be put “offline”? As Neil explains to Thomas, when interrogating prisoners “we simply isolated the offending circuits and shut them off. It was as easy as flicking a switch”. Once this is done, the prisoner ceases all resistance, and is happy to reveal everything he knows. Mental privacy does not need to be violated, when it can much more easily just be shunted aside and rendered irrelevant. “Why design a machine to read thoughts”, Neil says, “when all you have to do is shut down a few circuits and have your subject read them out for you?”
Horrible as this is, it is only the beginning of the way in which Neil works through the pragmatic consequences of the Argument. The main plot line of Neuropath involves Neil going rogue from the NSA, and engaging on a crime spree that seems designed to demonstrate the truth of the Argument. Neil kidnaps people and performs gruesome operations upon them in order to alter their minds. The most prominent victim is Theodoros Gyges, a billionaire tycoon. Neil kidnaps Gyges, surgically alters his brain in order to create two specific cognitive impairments, and then releases him again. The first impairment is prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. This is a rare syndrome, but one that has been much studied, and is well known to scientists and clinicians. Gyges’ sense of vision is not in itself impaired; but he becomes unable to recognize and remember human faces. As a result, his sense of identity shatters. His family and friends come to seem like “faceless monstrosities”, alien intruders. “When I stare at you”, Gyges says, “I don’t recognize your face from one second to the next. And it’s not like your face becomes something new every moment, something that I’ve never seen before. It’s just unknown. Unknowable”. “Ms disorientation also applies to Gyges’ sense of himself; he cannot even recognize his own face in the mirror. Is personal identity still possible without the power of recognition? Gyges’ infirmity works so as “to undermine the notion of personhood” altogether.
Neil also implants a second infirmity in Gyges’ brain: a sexual compulsion that transforms him into a gruesome serial killer, known in the tabloids as the Chiropractor. In this guise, Gyges not only rapes and murders women, but eviscerates their bodies as well. He easily evades detection and capture, despite the efforts of a huge task force to track him. Presumably he cannot be accurately profiled, because he is no longer a “self” in any conventional sense. In the original (UK) version of Neuropath – though not in the slightly revised US version – short first-person passages from the Chiropractor’s perspective, printed in italics, are interspersed between the third-person chapters that tell Thomas’ story. These passages are oddly impersonal, despite being voiced by an I. “Oh yes, I see you”, The Chiropractor imagines saying to one of his victims. “As still as a magazine cover. As blank as a porn star between takes… At long last, you mean only what I want you to mean”. The Chiropractor’s murders are a kind of lurid, pulp version of Neil’s and the NSA’s experiments, wiping the slate clean of the victims’ own intentions and meanings.
In the course of the novel, Neil kidnaps and performs surgery upon a number of other test subjects besides Gyges. These episodes all work as demonstrations of the Argument. Neil rewires the brain of a porn actress so that she literally orgasms while mutilating herself to death. He reprograms a Congressman who frequently pontificates about free will and responsibility, so that the man takes bites out of the flesh of a living 10-year-old girl, all the while proclaiming that he does not want to do this. Neil then subjects a televangelist to alternate spasms of feeling himself to be secure in God’s grace and knowing himself to have been eternally damned to Hell. Through all of Neil’s actions, the Argument – as Thomas comes to recognize – is “not simply paraphrased, but enacted ”.
Such assaults, Neil tells Thomas, are “meant to get your brain processing the Argument again, to reacquaint you in the most urgent and intimate way with the force of your own logic”. And they are followed by the climactic confrontation of the novel, in which Neil straps Thomas into the Marionette device, known colloquially as “Mary”: an NSA contraption which is able to induce whatever mood or feeling the operator wishes to implant in the subject’s mind. This machine is, once again, only a slight extrapolation from actually existing technology. It is “adapted”, Neil tells Thomas, “from stereotactic neuroradial surgical devices – you know, the ones that use overlapping particle beams to burn out tumors? We found a way of doping the blood so that we could exercise pinpoint metabolic control at multiple points in the brain”.
With Mary, Neil leads Thomas through a roller coaster ride of different mental experiences, all of which feel as “real” as any experience ever does. Thomas is made to feel “ambient well-being” one moment, then panic and dread the next. He cycles through such states as orgasmic release, out-of-body experience, the collapse of the visual field and warping of “extrapersonal space”, the impression that what Neil is telling him is being spoken by his own voice, and the sense that, “no matter what you’re looking at, you’re convinced that you’re willing it to happen”. Thomas is filled with pain, and then given the sense that “a strange buoyancy filled everything, made candy of all the sharp edges. It suddenly seemed that he watched a rubber world, a place filled with foam simulacra”.
But what can it mean for Thomas to discover, through these experiences, that “Neil had transformed him into the demonstration of his own outrageous claim”? The Argument, in all its extremity, may well be true. But can it ever be entirely believed? I may, at best, accept it intellectually; but how could I espouse it with full conviction? For if I were to do this, I would be forced to recognize that my own “convictions” and beliefs – including my belief in the Argument – are themselves nothing but fictions. Such is the central enigma around which Neuropath turns. In order to truly grasp the Argument, you cannot just assert it; you have to actually live it and experience it. But this can only happen if you are forced to embrace it, as Thomas is forced by means of the Marionette machine. For the consequences of the Argument are intrinsically inaccessible to experience – and indeed, strictly speaking, unlivable. In short, the Argument cannot be adopted existentially. It can only be enacted, instrumentalized, or put into effect.
In philosophical terms, The Argument involves, and indeed requires, a performative contradiction. It’s a bit like saying, “this statement is a lie”, or “everything is relative”. For if The Argument is true, then logically speaking I cannot possibly have the credibility, or the authority, to affirm its truth. After all, as Thomas puts it at one point, “everyone thinks they’ve won the Magical Belief Lottery… Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system”. How could anyone who believes The Argument be any different, when The Argument itself makes clear that he or she is not?
This observation does not in itself refute the Argument. It’s little more than a cheap debating trick to say, for instance, that relativism cannot possibly be true, because if you say that everything is relative, then you are making a statement that itself isn’t relative, but absolute. Such a criticism ignores the way that statements (including argumentative and rationalistic ones) are themselves always situational and mediated. Relativists, like advocates of the Argument, may well discredit themselves by the manner in which they make their claims, but this does not necessarily undermine the truth of their assertions. The Argument suggests that everyone believes that they have won the Magical Belief Lottery, but that nobody has any good grounds for their belief. The fact that this is also the psychological case for somebody who believes the Argument is not a refutation of the Argument, but yet another piece of evidence in its favor.
The Argument’s literal outrageousness – its existential inaccessibility, its incompatibility with the means we have for arguing it – thus does not prevent it from being true. But what can it mean to say that the Argument is supported by the weight of scientific, experimental evidence? It is here, I think, that we come up against the limits of epistemology. Ray Brassier both grounds and tempers his nihilism by appealing to “our ability to continually revise our beliefs”, and thereby to accept scientific evidence, even when it is radically counterintuitive. Following and radicalizing Wilfrid Sellars, Brassier says that we must “distinguish the normative realm of subjective rationality from the phenomenological domain of conscious experience”. The latter is altogether delusive, in just the ways that the Argument claims. But the former, according to Brassier, takes place when we “acquire the ability to understand ourselves as rational agents operating in the concept-governed space of reasons”. When we do this, Brassier adds, we find that “reason itself enjoins the destitution of selfhood”. Once we “acknowledge the cognitive authority of… empirical science”, we are also led to reject “the existence of entities called ‘selves’” that have any sort of “autonomous reality”. By separating rational agency from phenomenal selfhood, Brassier claims to avoid the paradox of performative contradiction.
I remain skeptical of Brassier’s rationalistic claim, however. For it is based upon an untenable idealization of the powers of reason. Brassier’s account of “conceptual normativity” is far from the messy ways in which experimental science actually operates. Pragmatically speaking, the Sellars-Brassier normative model fails to encompass the wide range of practices, protocols, instrumental arrangements, and institutions by means of which scientific facts are discovered and established. And conceptually speaking, our rationality only consists – as Bakker suggests in Three Pound Brain – in a set of heuristic devices, which work well enough in their own proper contexts, but which tend to mislead us when they are pushed beyond their limits of applicability. Brassier argues for the possibility, and indeed the necessity, of attaining a “view from nowhere”. But Bakker asks: “How could your ‘view from nowhere’ be anything other than virtual, simply another heuristic?” There is no escaping the double bind of performative contradiction.
Neuropath is devastating and brutal in the way it suggests that science can only impose its harsh truths upon us through an extended, and deeply performative, process. We do not rationally accede to scientific propositions; rather, we are compelled to accept them. We cannot assent to the Argument through any “game of giving and asking for reasons”, as Sellars and Brassier would like to believe. For the Argument is only validated – if that is still the right word – when Neil establishes it in practice, pushing violently against Thomas’ literal inability to accept it. Brassier argues that, when we are “bound” by a rational scientific claim, “this binding is spontaneously undertaken by a subject, not passively submitted to by an object”. But Neuropath narrates a process in which there is no room for any such spontaneity. In other words, we cannot have done with narrative (as Brassier would wish), because only narrative can get us to the point where its own pretensions to establish and stabilize meaning is undone.
We need to embrace our performative contradictions, rather than trying to manage or reduce them philosophically. A properly situated performative contradiction is crucial, even unavoidable or necessary. Call this a kind of extended or paradoxical pragmatism. The only way to realize the implications and consequences of an idea (which, as William James suggests, are where the idea finds its “truth”) is to enact it. In the present circumstances, since the idea involves our cognitive faculties themselves, it necessitates a kind of experimentation upon ourselves, which results in dislodging ourselves from being in control of the experiment. In consequence, the enactment of the idea necessarily pushes us to the point of performative contradiction. We might say that Neuropath sadistically forces its readers to face the consequences of the Argument, in the same way that, within the novel, Neil sadistically forces these consequences upon Thomas. Just as Neil performatively demonstrates the truth of the Argument to Thomas, so Neuropath itself performs a symbolic demonstration of this truth for the reader.
How does such an enactment take place within the novel? Neuropath continually proposes – or leads us to hypothesize – meaningful explanations for what is going on, and especially for Neil’s violent and bizarre actions. But each time, the book then pulls the rug from under us, so that all of these seemingly plausible explanations end up being discredited. At one point, for instance, Thomas concludes that Neil has “developed, nursed, and concealed some kind of psychopathic affective fixation” upon him. But even as he makes this diagnosis, Thomas also retains the suspicion that it is merely “a way to entangle the unexpected within expectation, to utterly eliminate the threat of surprise”. When he can pigeonhole Neil by assigning a motivation to him, Thomas feels as if “control had returned”. But this kind of assurance never lasts. It is always undercut by some new development, when Neil or another character violates Thomas’ expectations, “moving at right angles to who she was”.
As it repeatedly performs this maneuver, Neuropath becomes something of an anti-detective-novel. The detective genre works by moving through a series of particular hypotheses or explanations, each of which is first proposed, and then discredited. The failure of each proposal leaves room for it to be replaced by a better one, until at the end of the novel the case is solved. As Sherlock Holmes says, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. But Neuropath drags this process into a bad infinity. It never arrives at a determinate explanation, and thereby undermines the very tendency to give an explanatory meaning to what is happening. We end up not knowing what motivates Neil’s actions; nor even whether we should say that he is persecuting Thomas, or rather that he is striving to enlighten him. For we learn, by virtue of the Argument, that such a matter should not be explained in terms of psychological motivations at all.
“There’s no such thing as reasons”, the novel tells us again and again, “just causes”. But it also tells us – as Neil reminds Thomas at one point – that even though “reasons may be deceptions… they’re still functional”. In other words, rather than eliminating narrative altogether, Neuropath narrates the failure of narrative expectations. Only narrative can explain how, in Brassier’s words, “the very category of narrative… has been rendered cognitively redundant by modern science”. We cannot get away from reasons and explanations – all the more so when the inevitable failure of reasons and explanations is what we are trying to explain. And similarly, there is no way of getting beyond genre fiction conventions – like those of science fiction or the detective novel – especially when we trying to criticize or undermine them.
Another way to put this is to say that, in its exploration of performative contradiction, the novel strains toward a point that it ultimately cannot reach: a point that cannot be represented or dramatized within it. This point is that of Neil’s own consciousness. What is it like to actually live and experience the world in such a way that Nagel’s “what is it like?” question becomes meaningless? Even as Thomas is strapped to the Marionette machine, we are told, “the greater part of him wondered, even revered. What would it be to walk without self or conscience, with plans indistinguishable from compulsions, one more accident in the mindless wreck that was the world? What would it be like to act, not as something as puny or wretched as a person, but as a selfless vehicle, a conduit for everything that came before?” The novel forces us to confront this question, but also prevents us from being able to answer it.
Neil embodies the enigma of performative contradiction, because he claims to have actually attained the state of existing without the illusion of responsible selfhood. “I still experience things, after all”, he says; “it’s just a radically different experience, one far more sensitive to the fragmentary truth of our souls. One without volition, purpose, selfhood, right or wrong”. Neil has apparently “passed beyond the veil… he thinks he’s seen his way through the illusions of consciousness”. In such a state, Neil no longer operates in terms of “motives, goals, reasons”. But rather, as he describes it: “I’ve disconnected certain performance-inhibiting circuits… What you folk, psychologists, call anxiety, fear; all that bullshit. They’re little more than memories to me now. But I’ve also shut down some of the more deceptive circuits as well. I now know, for instance, that I will utterly nothing. I’m no longer fooled into thinking that ‘I’ do anything at all”.
We might like to think of this state as the rational “destitution of selfhood” that Brassier finds crucial to the scientific method, allowing us to operate “in the concept-governed space of reasons”. We might also like to regard it as a kind of Zen selfless attentiveness, such as the consciousness researcher Susan Blackmore describes:
If I genuinely believe that there is no ‘I’ inside, with free will and conscious deliberate choice, then how do I decide what to do? The answer is to have faith in the memetic viewer; to accept that the selection of genes and memes will determine the action and there is no need for an extra ‘me’ to get involved. To live honestly, I must just get out of the way and allow decisions to make themselves.
I say the result is unnerving because at first it is odd to observe that actions happen whether or not ‘I’ will them. I used to have two possible routes home, the main road and the prettier but slower lanes. As I drove up to the junction I was often torn by indecisiveness. How could I decide? Which would I enjoy most? Which would be best? One day I suddenly realized that ‘I’ didn’t have to decide. I sat there, paying attention. The lights changed, a foot pressed the pedal, a hand changed gear, and the choice was made. I certainly never went straight on into the stone wall or bang into another car. And whichever way I went was fine. As time went on I found that more and more decisions were like this. It brought a great sense of freedom to let so many decisions alone.
Neuropath, however, doesn’t let us off the hook by offering us any such easy escape hatch. The novel presents a far less benign sense of “I”-lessness than is provided by either Brassier or Blackmore. We learn that Neil has performed surgery both on himself, and on other NSA agents, in order to eliminate all feelings of conscience or responsibility. This is rather hilariously called the “Flat Affect Neuroplasty Program”. Its aim is to turn you into a “radio-surgical psychopath”. Agents have their “amygdalas… stripped down to their predatory essentials”. All their “social circuitry” is “amputated”. They are swept clean of “compassion”, “guilt”, and “shame”. They are now free to operate “without a whisper of self-consciousness”; as far as they are concerned, “anything goes”.
The purpose of the Program, we are told, is “to position flat affect bargainers at every level of the government and military”. The technology works to create “people surgically unaffected by your Stone Age biases. People capable of driving the hard bargains, who don’t need to bullshit themselves when it comes to choosing the projection of US power over the dissolution of the Knesset, or Orinoco drilling rights over starving Venezuelans”. The semantic apocalypse may well be at hand, but “thanks to us, America will survive to pick up the pieces, believe you me”.
The parodic language here lets us know that we are neither in the realm of mysticism, nor in the “space of reasons” – but fully within the strategic logic of the national security state. Selflessness or impersonality is simply another tool for manipulation. The Flat Affect Neuroplasty Program is based on the supposition that, once we eliminate the illusions of selfhood, and once the layers of social conditioning are removed, we will be left with the cold self-interest of a rational “bargainer” who chooses the most efficient game-theoretical strategy. And isn’t this where we must inevitably end up, once we have concluded, along with Daniel Dennett, that “consciousness cannot be separated from function”? Philosophy and science alike are reduced to their use for the machinations of power. It does not matter what consciousness actually is, but only how it can be manipulated.
Yet even this does not seem to go far enough for Neil – which is perhaps why he goes rogue from the NSA. For Neil, game-theoretic calculations are beside the point. There can be no contest, he says, and no “winners or losers”, because – once the illusion of selfhood has been stripped away – “there’s no one keeping score” any longer. Neil often talks in terms of “hardwired” Darwinian imperatives for survival and the passing on of genes to progeny. But even such bedrock commitments are no longer left in place, once “the rules binding everyday human intercourse” have been swept away as sentimental twaddle. Neil knows that ultimately we are “hardwired” as much for “loyalty and solidarity” as we are for “infidelity” and sexual gratification; not to mention for “self-justifying rationalization” and for being “biased and closed-minded”. The “hardwired” tendencies and traits of the human mind give rise to all our delusions of consciousness – and it is these that Neil’s neurosurgery works to strip away.
In other words, the Flat Affect Neuroplasty Program fails to embrace the full force of the performative contradiction that arises from manipulating and experimenting upon – which is to say from undoing – oneself. Although “the feeling of being you… can be shut down with the flick of a switch”, this is not enough for Neil’s own explorations as “the world’s first neuronaut”. Pushing things to the limit is no easy matter; it requires a more radical intervention. As Neil tells Thomas, “your brain needs to process the actual loss of its network, it needs to see it crash. Only then will it be able to accept, to see through the cartoon mind it confuses for itself”. As mystics and neuromanipulators both know, there must be a stage of “desolation as insight” before true illumination can be reached. Only trauma can truly liberate me from the “hardwired” illusions of selfhood.
And this is the point towards which Neuropath strives. When the Marionette machine wipes out Thomas’ sense of selfhood, we are told, “there was simply this clearing, this space, a manifold of things and happenings, articulated in time, and belonging to no one”. Within Thomas, “something began to understand. Something… not him”. For now “he was but a moment, something deeper than him realized. Nothing more than a fragment, fooled by blindness into thinking itself whole”. Is this, as Neil claims, “what it’s like when the self is shut down”? Does the first-person “I” still exist, when it is no longer like something to be the way I am? Such oxymoronic language is unavoidable here, for the novel depicts the destitution of selfhood as an infinite approach to an asymptotic point that is never actually reached.
At the end of the novel, Thomas is brought to the verge of this mystical illumination, only to be thrust back to the horrors of everyday life. He cannot help feeling a certain sense of loss at reverting back to himself: “everything would be shadows after this – simulations. No fear, no pain, no joy or love would be as profound, as true, as what Mary had shown him”. Thomas is left like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, or like a cinema spectator, waiting for the final revelatory breakthrough that will never come: “experience, unspooling like a movie, qualms for color, hopes for shape, decisions for the illusion of movement, waiting for the bulb to burn through, for the celluloid to boil into black rings, so that it all could vanish into the hidden frame, leaving only catcalls and white light on a white screen”. Thomas will never experience this nirvana, this nothingness, this access to “the brain beyond and beneath”.
As for Neil, his presumptive mental state shimmers just beyond the pages of the book, something that resists all representation. Or better, we should say that Neil’s condition cannot be figured within the novel, precisely because it is not a something. We should add, though, along with Wittgenstein, that it “is not a Nothing either”; rather, it is that “about which nothing could be said”. Neil’s mental state – if we can still call it that – is the point toward which the entire novel strains, but which it cannot finally inhabit. For such a condition resists being narrated: even though, or perhaps precisely because, it can only be approached and designated in the course of a fictional narration like that of Neuropath. Neil’s brain state, or mental condition, cannot be represented, because it has itself been swept clear of representations. I mean this quite literally: it apparently no longer contains any of the “mental representations” that, according to Metzinger’s orthodox philosophy of mind, constitute both the “content” and the “vehicle” of consciousness. For Neil, the “cartoon” of consciousness – or what Metzinger calls the phenomenal self model (PSM) – “no longer exists”. It might even be the case that Neil is effectively a philosophical zombie. This is a being who acts in all respects (including that of making subjective reports of his inner state) like a conscious human person, but who is actually devoid of any inner experience at all. How could we know?
The enigma of Neil’s inner state – its performative contradiction – cannot be resolved rationally, conceptually, or philosophically. Instead, it is worked out in the terms, and with the resources, of genre fiction. That is to say, since it cannot be meaningfully integrated into the narrative, it has to be killed off, or wiped from the narrative, instead. Neuropath ends, as it must, with Neil’s death. He is murdered by his own initial victim, Theorodos Gyges. Through a necessary and profound irony, Gyges is able to find Neil, and take revenge upon him, despite not being able to recognize him. It is only at this point that we finally find out that Gyges does not only suffer from face blindness, but is also the sexual serial killer known as the Chiropractor.
This ending is not just an arbitrary deus ex machina, because Gyges’ own backstory turns out to be crucial. We learn that Gyges is caught in the contradiction between the rape-murders that (thanks to Neil’s surgery) he compulsively performs, and the religious sensibility that he still retains. He has no access to the causes of his actions, but he nonetheless still needs to give himself reasons for what he does, in order to excuse his own behavior. To justify his actions to himself, The Chiropractor always begins his assaults by severing the victim’s spinal cord. In this way, he says, although “they know” what is happening to them, “they do not feel” it – or, in the revised version of the novel, “they can’t feeeeeel what I do. That means it’s not a sin, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?” Gyges wants to believe that he isn’t really hurting his victims, because he takes care that they do not suffer any physical pain. When the spinal cord is cut, he says, “the soul is preserved, kept safe, wrapped in a box”. Gyges proclaims that “I only fuck the meat”; and the meat, for him, is finally not of any importance.
Just as Neil intended, Gyges embodies the Argument, or lives it. Even though he is trapped in an endless nightmare in which he cannot recognize himself, and even though he is continually compelled to perform monstrous actions that he does not countenance, Gyges nonetheless produces a fabulation that makes it all seem meaningful and reasonable. This is echoed in the way that his victims are still forced to know the horrors that they are unable to feel. Neil performs the inverse operation when he subjects Thomas to the Marionette machine. For Thomas is compelled to feel his own inability to know. The Argument demolishes all our pretensions to self-understanding, or indeed to any sort of positive knowledge. Cognition is nothing more than delusional confabulation, or rationalization after the fact. But we cling so desperately to our “cartoon” illusions that cognition can only break down when we are made to feel the full force of its implosion. Thomas is swamped by overwhelming waves of impersonal affect:
Never had he so yearned, as though a chasm had cracked open within him, an endless clutching abyss, suddenly filled with divinity, with a resounding, weeping unity, pinged by twinges of anxiety that grew like bloodstains, that blackened into a thrumming dread, with claws like capillaries, peeling muscle from the inside of skin, while the world before him flapped back and forth like wings on an interdimensional hinge…
This is the point at which the scientific reduction of consciousness flips over into a kind of ferocious mysticism, a via negativa, a mortification of both the mind and the flesh. Of course, this experience is an entirely instrumentalized one. It corresponds to no beyond, and it can be turned on or off with the flip of a switch. But even in this nullity, this absence of self – where there is “no feeling, no sensation” – there is still an incipience: “just a trembling, a teetering blacker than black”.