Perspectives on Mind
Introduction
No aspect of the human mind is easy to investigate, and for those who wish to understand the biological underpinnings of the mind, consciousness is generally regarded as the towering problem . . .
If elucidating the mind is the last frontier of the life sciences, consciousness often seems like the last mystery of the elucidation of the mind. Some regard it as insoluble.
(Damasio, 2000, p. 4)
Carmen uses her cosmological story (as I do in creating the fictional character of Carmen) as a way into a complex domain; as a starting point to addressing discursive obstacles inherent in studying the relationship between the human mind and creativity – two complex and elusive concepts. In this chapter I draw on ‘Carmen’s Cosmology’ and ‘Ainslie’s Story’ to focus attention on aspects of the mind which have bearing on the human experience of creativity – of ‘being’ in creativity country. Given her usual focus on the pragmatic aspects of life, Carmen wouldn’t ordinarily have thought of putting consciousness and creativity side by side to consider their relationship. What prompted the juxtaposition was Frank’s puzzlement (see introductory notes to Carmen’s Cosmology), his need to understand why anyone would strip the life out of the pavement pictures their friend had created by stealing the colours they were made with and worse, that this thief was prepared to hurt their friend in the process. Why would anyone want or need to do that? Frank and Carmen are engaged in the process of investigating who the culprit might be (so they can get the colours back) when Frank asks Carmen to tell her seemingly unrelated story about the beginning of time and the emergence of consciousness.
Carmen is forced to take a gigantic leap from that direct, close to home question (who did the crime) as she narrates her story to Frank, to ask the deeper underlying question, “What is the significance of these pastel images and why would they have been created in the first place? ” In the process of considering that question she traverses imaginative terrain which eventually leads her to ponder yet another question – whether the acquisition of consciousness would have been, as she had thought up to that point, an exclusively positive endowment for the human species. Having been confronted by the potentially alarming prospect that it might not have been, Carmen is then prompted to consider what kind of ‘problem’ (or disruption) the acquisition of consciousness might have posed in human life and how our species might have responded to such disruption. In the imaginative evolution of a story unexpected questions frequently arise for any storyteller. She comes to the conclusion, as her story unfolds, that the emergence of the ‘knowing mind’, of the mind becoming aware of self in relation to the universe, would have been alarming and disruptive. The hapless human, she surmises, has lived hitherto in a state of equilibrium with the world. Without something else emerging alongside consciousness to balance this disruptive state of ‘knowing going nowhere’, Carmen can see that human beings would have remained dangerously confused, out of balance and unable to flourish in their new state. Through the medium of her story, Carmen begins to confront problems associated with the concept of ‘mind’ which have bothered philosophers for as long as there have been any; the nature of thought, of Self; the relation of mind to body – split or no split; the ‘truth’ of material reality; the subjective character of sensory experience; the conceptual tension between materialism and phenomenal experience; intentionality; the multiplicity of meanings of the key words we use to define these phenomena; and the conflation of phenomena in which distinct aspects are often lumped together.
Carmen is a courageous ‘out there’ sort of woman but she knows her limitations (and she’s beginning to wish that Frank had stayed at home with Shirley and Collin25). Rather than stray too far theoretically outside her field of forensics, Carmen confines her first forays into this complicated philosophical domain to an exploratory narrative. Besides, it’s the easiest way to keep Frank happy and focused and out of her detective toolbox.
Carmen’s cosmological story considers what consciousness might mean to the human species. She doesn’t attempt to defend the Big Bang theory or proffer an alternative. The Big Bang simply sets the scene. She cannot see into the mind’s “I” of another person, whether they be a fugitive criminal or a hapless newly conscious being, but she can gather evidence and testimony, as I can, which might lead towards a plausible representation of how things are – and she can imagine. Carmen is also aware that it is important, on the one hand, to investigate each piece of evidence independently in sequence and on the other hand to place each beside the other to better understand how their relationship tells the story. In the context of both Carmen’s research and mine, relationships matter.
Frank was the catalyst for Carmen to ask questions about consciousness. Two vehicles colliding on an April morning was mine. If that collision hadn’t happened I would not have known what the total absence of communication feels like. Being on the receiving end of an external monologue with my own story locked inside my unresponsive body prompted the inevitable question, “What is consciousness, and what is consciousness for? ” While I lay there in the emergency room having lights shone in my eyes and pins jabbed in the soles of my feet, listening to doctors express the opinion that me and my brain were history, I was story-making with a vengeance. I felt I was working like the clappers, images, scenarios, possible strategies and outcomes flooded through my “mind” – all the while I simply wanted to yell at the top of my un-cooperating voice, “I’m here, you idiots, I’m still bloody here and I can hear every dopey word you’re saying!”
Without communication what is the point of thinking anything? It occurred to me that this story-making might end up being the purpose of my remaining existence – simply to lie there inert and functionless telling myself stories. If I could think, I would have to do something with those thoughts or go mad. If I could not communicate, “I” would cease to exist as a sentient being for anyone but myself. Somehow that would have to be bearable. I wondered, too, how long my “I” could hold together within a non-participating, non-expressive body. Who decides if I am conscious – me, or others in the world outside of “me”? And what part does my body play in my being ‘me”?
I have no pathway to follow, at this time, to find answers to specific questions like why ‘they’ (the medical team) couldn’t tell that I was most definitely ‘at home’, or what a scan of my brain might have looked like then compared with what it looks like now, although such comparative information would be interesting. The question that begs consideration remains with the experience of consciousness – its phenomenological ‘essence’26 – without neural causal explanations however interesting they might be. It was quite clear to me, as I experienced this unfamiliar state, that without communication with other beings, without a dialogue with the world, consciousness is a curse. That, in turn, begged the question – how can one have a dialogue with the world without relationships? The one and only possibility I came up with at the time – which I, fortunately, didn’t have a lengthy period to test out – was, as I have already mentioned, telling myself stories. This, I decided, was the means by which I would continue to dialogue with the world, if not with my fellows.
While I was in this outwardly comatose state my stories needed to both entertain me and contain my questions, provide a space in which they could rest until they could be answered, or not. Afterwards when I was returned to the communicative human realm, I needed to find out what other people, who were supposed to know, thought about consciousness.
Carmen is not a cosmologist by profession, nor a neuroscientist, an anthropologist, or an evolutionary biologist. I am none of these either. Carmen is a detective who solves mysteries. I am a writer and a filmmaker. Carmen enjoys practical ordered thinking processes and has a tendency to get technical about things – which is why she is both irritated by and appreciative of the free flowing thought of someone like Frank. Ambiguity is Carmen’s enemy. Frank challenges her to be more imaginative. In that he is her perfect foil. Carmen needs Frank to bust her out of her intellectual comfort zone. I weave stories and, happily, have them both to help me stretch my boundaries and rein me in.
From her detective’s perspective, asking the question “what is it like to have consciousness as opposed to not having it,” gives rise to some ‘motivational’ clues as to the properties consciousness might have that can begin to explain what it might be for in the broadest sense, and what we (human beings) might need to, comfortably, live with it. In Carmen’s world, if she can understand a criminal’s motivation, what is behind his experience of the world, she might better understand how to apprehend him. What ‘motive’ might this elusive ‘consciousness’ have for existing, or human’s have for acquiring it? Carmen is, in a sense, ‘profiling’ consciousness. She begins with the given ‘incident’ that has occurred (the emergence of consciousness in human beings) and tracks back to uncover what kind of character she is dealing with in order to project forward and imagine what this character might do next and what ‘environment’ it might choose to support its activities.
Given that I am not a neuroscientist it seems sensible, to begin with, to make use of Carmen’s ‘profiling’ strategy to investigate the relationship between consciousness, creativity and mind-body, to look at what ‘motive’ creativity and consciousness might have for existing, and what kind of ‘character’ a life might have without one or other or both. In so doing I am fully aware that a profile can only be a synthesis of, and a projection beyond, what is known, and not creativity (or consciousness) itself, considering, only, what consciousness or creativity is like for me and ‘might be like’ for others.
My experience of “un-consciousness”, suggested to me that consciousness and creativity are in constant dialogue (two pictures either side of one coin, Frank says, joined in the middle by the space we cannot see) depending on this ongoing conversation with one another to maintain equilibrium – the functional flourishing of the human being in the world. It is the fundamental aspects, the essence of consciousness, creativity and body-mind and how they relate to one another that are of interest to me here – gaining understanding of what the human organism requires from a dialogue between consciousness and creativity.
To establish and understand the link between creativity, consciousness and mind-body it is necessary to build a picture of each of these concepts in turn.
Approaches to studying consciousness need not be any different from approaching any other aspect of human biology. It is possible, for example, to know something fundamental about the role of the organ of the heart in our biological existence without knowing or describing the ins and outs of its mechanics, its relationship to the circulatory system and every other physiological process with which it is intimately connected. Neither the layperson nor the philosopher needs to know the detail of these systems. The same is true of consciousness. It is necessary however, that some sense of why the organ (or the mechanism) and its processes are important, is known in order to consider their place in the human condition. This does not mean that knowledge of fundamental aspects of biology – for example, that the beating of the heart is a requirement for our biological survival – is all that matters. The more that ‘appropriate somebody’s’ know about the ins and outs of bodies, the better equipped we are (having embarked on the road of tinkering with things) to take action to preserve or maximise their functionality.
My first understandings about ‘heart’ included establishing what ‘heart’ is not. I learnt early what a heart looked like, that a heart is not a liver, a kidney or a spleen. I have felt it beating all my life, fast or slow depending on the messages it receives from my experience of the world and my state of ‘wellness’. I feel it jump in sudden fright, or thud with fear inside my chest. I know it doesn’t reside in my elbow or my foot. It doesn’t gurgle like my stomach or tingle like my skin. I can’t wilfully make it stop its work like I can with my other muscles or, briefly, with my lungs.
My first understandings of consciousness are not quite so easy to adduce after a quick survey of sensations within my own body or drawing from a rudimentary, schoolgirl knowledge of biology. I know, somehow, that I am Me, a unique me unlike anybody else’s me. I know when I am awake. I have a particular state of awareness of my ‘being’ in my dreams, and my ownership of them when I am having them. I am aware of a state of ‘becoming’ when waking consciousness returns. General knowledge has informed me since I was quite small that consciousness is about being awake (as opposed to asleep or comatose), that consciousness has a relationship to being alive as opposed to being dead, insofar as consciousness requires life; that it is about thinking as opposed to dull incomprehension.
But how is consciousness different from awareness or sentience, cognition, or intelligence, comprehension, brain function, or mind? I couldn’t dissect a living frog in class and see its consciousness at work, as I was expected to do to see its living heart in action. I knew that the ether soaked cotton wool we dropped into the jar the frog was in had something to do with why the frog stopped jumping, and why we were able to cut it open with ease while it was still alive (I have forever afterwards associated the sickly smell of ether with drawn and quartered frogs). What I was supposed to learn from that procedure (apart from what a beating heart looked like) was that consciousness is required to experience pain27.
Post accident I had to ask, “Whose view of consciousness can be relied upon? ” I have on occasion been unconscious and completely oblivious to what, in a conscious state would have been considerable pain; and I have been fully mentally conscious and oblivious to pain because of chemical intervention (local anaesthetic etc. ). I have also been, apparently to all outside observers, ‘unconscious’ but totally capable of experiencing pain, both physical and psychic (albeit curiously disassociated from the feelings one would usually associate with such conditions). Clearly consciousness is not a single state of being in the body – it is a multitude of states perceivable (or not) in many different ways by the body it is in (or is in it) and the bodies, in relation, looking on.
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