Prof. Jefferson, in his article, tells us that 'consciousness depends upon (or 'is the sum of')[a]
the activities of the whole intact nervous system, central and
peripheral'; and the article clearly takes it for granted that an
elucidation of the nervous system and its workings, if it were complete,
is all that would be required for a total understanding of
consciousness. 'We shall agree in the belief' says Prof. J. 'that
whatever mental qualities human beings display during consciousness are
derived in the end from the millions of cells in the cortex and from
infinitely elaborate internuncial connections with subcortical
structures.' This is certainly the generally accepted view in scientific
circles.
Two assumptions are implicit in this attitude. The first is that
between each possible state of the nervous system and each possible
state of consciousness there exists a one-to-one correspondence. With
this assumption we shall not quarrel (though a practical demonstration
of its validity obviously offers certain difficulties). The second
assumption is that the working of the nervous system strictly obeys the
established laws of science, and in particular those of physics and
bio-chemistry.
A physiologist (or neurologist), clearly enough, is bound to make this
second assumption: it is the assumption of every man of science that the
results of his investigations can be arranged in an ordered pattern
exemplifying regular laws of behaviour, and furthermore that these laws
of behaviour hold not only in the restricted field of his own
investigations but universally in all branches of science to which they
may be applicable. Thus, for example, the biologist accepts without
question the laws established by the experimental chemist as well as
those established by people who have investigated the behaviour of
electricity; and the theoretical physicist assumes that, ultimately, the
behaviour of all things whatsoever can be accounted for in terms of
certain fundamental laws that are his special field of study. Failure to
make this assumption, it might seem, must obviously lead to chaos—what
hope of understanding the order of the universe and man's place in it
unless we assume that the universe is ordered (i.e. that the
same experiment repeated at different times and in different places will
always give the same result)? What hope for suffering humanity if
vaccination (for example) had purely random effects, producing immunity
from smallpox in one, precipitating the measles in another, and simply
giving a slight squint to a third? Medicine would be impossible unless
cures could be predicted with some confidence. Besides, in view of the
astonishing successes of modern science (and medical science in
particular), what sane person could possibly be tempted to doubt this
assumption—does not the success of the scientific method abundantly
justify the assumptions it makes?
To begin with, doubting of this scientific assumption (supposing that
it is necessary to doubt it) does not necessarily land us in chaos. To
deny the universality of the order discovered by science and embodied in
its laws is not by any means to deny that science discovers any order
at all. Nor is it to deny that there is any universal order. If, as may
be thought, there is a universal order of more fundamental nature than
that revealed by science (though quantum theory, in a muddled way, is
partly aware of it),[b]
we can quite well allow the scientific order a limited validity within
this universal order. (Logicians, whose task it is to investigate such
matters, are well aware that the laws of science are only probably, not certainly,
true.) 'Things' we may say 'obey the laws of science...except when they
don't.' Or, to be more precise, 'the laws of science are less uniformly
valid in one region than in another.' Details are not necessary here;
what is important is the general idea.
But is it necessary to doubt the scientific assumption? Are we obliged
to reject the simple and convenient view of the universal validity of
science for the undeniably more complicated and tiresome view suggested
above? Imagine that, by accident, you rest your bare arm on a hot stove.
You will undoubtedly lift your arm in a hurry. Why? Because contact
with the hot stove is painful, you may say. But this won't do at all.
What we want is an account of the changes that took place in your
nervous system from the time your arm was rested on the stove to the
time it was raised; and this account must be in strictly scientific
terms. Pain, however, is not a scientific term. We can speak of
an electrical or chemical impulse travelling along a nerve up your arm
to your brain; for these are all things that can be publicly observed
(in theory at least) by each one of a team of physiologists who are
experimenting on you. But the pain you feel is strictly private: not
even in theory can the team of physiologists observe it.[c] (You can tell
them that you feel pain, of course, but this does not make the pain
public: what is public here is the sound of your voice, and the meaning
of the words you utter is quite irrelevant—to allow that your words are
meaningful is to beg the whole question.) A physiologist can observe an impulse moving up your arm, but he cannot observe a pain
moving up your arm; only you can do that (if, for example, a red-hot
needle is moved on your skin from the elbow to the shoulder; but not, of
course, if your nerve is stimulated at a stationary point, when all you
will feel is a stationary pain). This means (and I shall emphasize it
by underlining it) that a
physiologist must make no reference whatsoever to feeling (pleasure,
pain, indifference) in his account of human behaviour. If he fails to
abstain he abandons scientific method.
A physiologist is bound to maintain that the pain you felt when your
arm was against the stove had nothing at all to do with the immediately
subsequent removal of the arm from the stove (nor with your remarks
about it); he must maintain this because he is obliged to
claim, if he is to be consistent, that he can fully account for the
movement of your arm (and the sound of your voice) in terms of neural
mechanisms alone and without any reference to the pain. And if feeling
plays no part in our actions we must count it a fortunate coincidence
that the state of the nervous system to which the painful feeling of a
burning arm corresponds happens to be one that brings about
removal of the arm from the hot surface: if the converse were true, and
the nervous system pressed the arm down still harder on the hot surface,
we should have a pretty miserable time of it. Imagine it: each time we
felt pain we should find the neural mechanism making the body do the
very thing that aggravated the pain; and perhaps we should find
ourselves recoiling from pleasure 'as if we had been burned'. But no;
our bodies, by some happy chance, do just what we should wish them to
do—when there is pleasure the body acts in such a way as to prolong it,
and when there is pain the body takes action to bring it to an end. Or
can it possibly be that feeling does, after all, dictate—to some extent
at least—what our bodies shall do? Were we perhaps wrong in so
categorically rejecting your original explanation that you raised your
arm because contact with the hot stove was painful?
Or consider the case of a man who takes alcohol. Are the motions of
buying the bottle, opening it, pouring the contents into a glass, and
finally swallowing, wholly to be accounted for without any reference to
the fact that he finds it pleasant to be intoxicated?
Certainly, there is good experimental evidence that our behaviour will
accommodate itself, after a short period, to a change of environment in
such a way as to give us the least possible discomfort in the altered
circumstances.[d]
This is the principle upon which the conditioning of reflexes depends—a
rat is repeatedly made uncomfortable by an electric shock if he behaves
in a certain way, and, in consequence, 'learns' to behave in a
different way.
But if we are to allow, as clearly enough we must, that feeling is
capable of affecting the state of the nervous system (either by
determining a specific action, such as raising the arm off a hot stove,
or by conditioning a fairly lasting change in behaviour), then we shall
find ourselves obliged to abandon the postulate of the universal
validity of the laws of science. So long as feeling depended upon the
state of the nervous system and the state of the nervous system upon
scientific determinism, all was well; but if, in addition, the state of
the nervous system must be admitted to depend upon feeling, then (at
least in the eyes of science) we enter the realms of chaos; for feeling,
not being publicly observable, is not a scientific entity, and cannot
therefore be governed by any laws of science, and the behaviour of the
nervous system, accordingly, ceases to be wholly rational. In short, the
living body, and the nervous system in particular, are regions where
the laws of science are manifestly less uniformly valid than elsewhere.
In your recent letter you said that you see that there is not much use
in your studying paranormal phenomena because you find yourself trying
to explain and understand them on a scientific, rational, basis; and you
don't think this can really be done. You are quite right, of course, in
thinking that these phenomena cannot be explained on a scientific
basis; but this is the very reason why they should be studied.
Certainly, they cannot be explained or understood in a hurry, but this
is no great matter; the important thing is that they afford striking and
varied evidence (both spontaneous and experimental) that the laws of
rational science are not universally valid. And it is failure or refusal
to accept this fact that so effectively blocks the way to progress in
clear thinking of a fundamental nature.
The achievements of the rational methods of science have been so
striking, and the methods themselves are so beautifully simple and tidy,
that there is a natural tendency on the part of rationalists to make
the wholly irrational assumption that reason (or science) is capable of
accounting for everything. Indeed, this assumption is so very nearly an
axiom (except in isolated pockets—see footnote b)
that the strongest emotional resistances are encountered by anyone who
ventures to question it. Yet there is a failure of rational science that
is still more striking than the most striking of its successes; and
that is...to account for itself.
Without the scientist there is no science; but science cannot, without
inconsistency, admit the existence of the scientist; for the scientist
is a man, and a man is not to be explained if feeling is ignored; and
feeling is outside the domain of science. Science, however, in its claim
to universal validity, is unwilling to recognize this; and a bastard
entity has been brought into existence to make this claim seem valid.
This bastard entity is sensation. Prof. Jefferson says 'When we
analyze in physiological terms alone...' and then proceeds to speak of
'...the classical pathways by which sensation reaches the thalamus and
finally the cerebral cortex'. Sensation, in Prof. J.'s view, is
a purely physiological term. This means that it is nothing more nor
less than an electrical or chemical impulse (I believe there is still
some uncertainty in this matter) travelling along a nerve. Under no
circumstances, then, can the word 'sensation' be taken to mean
'feeling'. But obviously this is just what it does mean in
ordinary usage. A painful sensation is a painful feeling, or more
simply, a pain. And this being so, the word 'sensation' cannot possibly
be a physiological term. But the physiologist, by using it as if
it were a physiological term, manages to fuse two strictly incompatible
meanings into a single word, and this gives the illusion that the two
meanings are the same. We saw (para. 1) that Prof. J. uses the two
expressions 'to depend upon' and 'to be the sum of' as if they meant the
same thing, and this is nothing else than the very ambiguity we have
been discussing, but in another form. To be just, I don't suppose that
the Professor is aware of the duplicity; he is deceiving himself in good
faith, in company, no doubt, with almost all his colleagues; for the
ambiguity is so convenient and so unobtrusive (to a non-philosophical
eye, at least) that it would be regarded as ridiculous, if not
positively heretical, even to point it out, let alone to object to it.
Nevertheless, it is with the help of this piece of verbal legerdemain
that the pleasing illusion of the universal validity of rational science
is maintained.[e]
It must now be remarked that the current scientific interpretation of
the word 'consciousness' is itself inadequate (quite apart from the fact
that consciousness is just as much beyond the domain of science as
feeling). From Prof. J.'s article (as well as from other sources) it is
evident that 'consciousness', for the scientist, means 'rational
thought' or 'awareness of what one is doing or thinking'. The Professor
seems to exclude 'automatic or conditioned behaviour' from conscious
activity, and this is in accordance with current scientific opinion. But
conditioned behaviour, as we noted before, involves feeling (pleasure
or pain); and to exclude this feeling from consciousness is to invite
confusion. (Does an unconscious pain hurt? If you say 'yes', I ask 'how
do you know, seeing that you are not conscious of it?' If you say 'no', I
ask 'then how can you tell it is a pain and not a pleasant feeling?,
how do you know there is any feeling at all?') This restriction of
consciousness to rational thought is simply a prejudice of rationalism;
and in the Buddha's Teaching it is specifically stated that
consciousness (viññāna), feeling (vedanā) and perception (saññā) are inseparable—whenever
there is any one of them there are all three. But to understand this a
more subtle and intelligent approach to consciousness (or, more
generally, to experience) is necessary.
The mistake is to approach consciousness by way of the body. But
rational science, being essentially the study of what is public, namely matter,
has no alternative. The laws of science are the laws of matter, and if
these laws are universal then consciousness (whatever it may be) must
necessarily be subordinate to matter. What science overlooks, and cannot
help overlooking, is the fact that in order to know the body it is first necessary to be conscious of it—the body is an object (amongst other objects) of consciousness,
and to seek to investigate consciousness by way of the body, instead of
the other way round, is to put the cart before the horse. Consciousness
comes first, and if it is to be known it must be studied directly (that
is to say, by immediate reflexion). This matter has been stated clearly
by J.-P. Sartre, who, in his principal work dealing with consciousness,
writes more than 250 pages out of a total of 700 before mentioning the
body at all. This is what he says.
Perhaps some may be surprised that we have treated the problem of knowing without raising the question of the body and of the senses and even once referring to it. It is not my purpose to misunderstand or to ignore the role of the body. But what is important above all else, in ontology as elsewhere, is to observe strict order in discussion. Now the body, whatever may be its function, appears first as the known. We cannot therefore refer knowledge back to it, or discuss it before we have defined knowing, nor can we derive knowing in its fundamental structure from the body in any way or manner whatsoever. (EN, pp. 270-1; B&N, p. 218)And Sartre goes on to point out that whatever knowledge we have about our own body is derived in the first place from seeing other people's bodies. As a doctor this will be evident to you—you know about the structure of your own heart not from having dissected it but from having dissected other people's bodies in your student days. Knowledge of our own body is thus very indirect, and this is particularly true of the nervous system.
The foregoing remarks are generally applicable to all those medical
men—perhaps the majority?—who have allowed their scientific attitude
towards medicine (which is admirable in its proper place) to affect and
infect their general outlook on life, so that they now quite fail to
understand what it is to be an existing individual. But more especially
these remarks apply to those among them who think of investigating the
Buddha's Teaching. It might well happen that a doctor, reading the
Suttas for the first time, and coming across such a passage as this:
There are in this body head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone-marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, midriff, spleen, lights, bowels, entrails, gorge, dung, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, spittle, snot, oil-of-the-joints, urine <S. XXXV,127: iv,111, etc.>
would think to himself, 'As anatomy, this is
hopelessly inadequate; any first-year student knows a hundred times as
much; and besides, there is no sort of order about it'; and he would
congratulate himself that medical science has made such enormous
progress since the Buddha's day. His first reaction would thus be to
dismiss these primitive notions as trivial and obsolete. Then, turning
the page, he might encounter this passage:
He regards matter—or feeling, or perception, or determinations, or consciousness—as self. That is a determination.... In an uninformed commoner contacted by feeling born of nescience-contact, monks, there is craving arisen; thence is born that determination. Thus, monks, that determination is impermanent, determined, dependently arisen; and that craving too is impermanent, determined, dependently arisen; and that feeling too is impermanent, determined, dependenty arisen; and that contact too is impermanent, determined, dependently arisen; and that nescience too is impermanent, determined, dependently arisen. <S. XXII,81: iii,96-7>
Our doctor finds this
altogether incomprehensible—there is nothing about it in the textbooks,
not even in those on the shelves of the psychiatry department—, and
concludes that, presuming it does actually mean something, it is quite
beyond his powers of understanding. Thus his second reaction is baffled
humiliation. In this way he oscillates between the opposite poles of
superiority and inferiority to the texts, and is unable to find anything
on the same level as his own understanding—it is all either beneath him
or above him. The trouble is, as no doubt you will have gathered, that
our doctor has got things the wrong way round. He is accustomed, on the
one hand, to elaborate and intricate descriptions of the body and its
workings (whole textbooks—whole libraries, no doubt—are devoted to the
heart and the kidneys), and on the other hand he has never been required
to digest anything more than the most artless pronouncements about
consciousness. And this is because medical science puts the body first
and consciousness (if considered at all) afterwards.
But the Suttas put consciousness first and the body a bad second, for
reasons that I hope to have made clear; and it is to be expected that
statements about consciousness will be complex and those about the body
simple. If our doctor can manage to reverse the order of his thinking
(which needs practice), he may stand some chance of finding the Buddha's
Teaching at least partly intelligible instead of wholly baffling and
frustrating. The first passage quoted above is, of course, not a
primitive attempt at anatomical description, but is designed to lead a
person to disgust with the body; and exact physiology is obviously out
of place. The second passage is, admittedly, of extreme difficulty; but
the Dhamma, I am afraid, is difficult, and it serves no useful
purpose to pretend that it is not. (Those booklets that presume to
explain the Dhamma on a scientific basis do the greatest possible
dis-service to seriously interested enquirers. It is far better for a
man to understand that he does not understand the Dhamma, than
it is for him to believe falsely that he does understand it. The former
attitude may encourage progress, the latter can only obstruct it.) It is
in the hope of clearing away at least some of the preliminary obstacles
to a right approach to the Buddha's Teaching that I have written this
to you.
Footnotes:
[12.a] 'To depend upon' and 'to be the sum of' are not the same thing, but
Prof. J. does not notice this inconsistency. We shall refer to it again
later.
[12.b]
'With the recognition that there is no logical reason why Newtonian and
other classical principles should be valid outside the domains in which
they have been experimentally verified has come the realization that
departures from these principles are indeed necessary.' (PQM, p. 230)
[12.c]
No two people can observe the same pain. If a nerve, visible to a
number of observers, is stimulated, only one (at most) of the observers
(namely, the one who happens to own the nerve) will experience the pain;
and his report of the experiment ('stimulation of nerve causes pain')
will contradict the report of the other observers ('stimulation of nerve
does not cause pain'). Either, then, the same cause—the
observed stimulation of the nerve—can produce two different effects for
two different observers (which undermines the scientific hypothesis of
the invariability of cause-and-effect for all observers at all times and
in all places), or pain (and feeling in general) is outside
the scope of science. (Imagine the consternation and dismay in a
physical laboratory amongst a group of observers gathered round a piece
of electrical apparatus, if, whenever one particular switch was turned,
one of the observers reported that a certain bulb glowed brightly, while
the other observers all reported that the bulb remained dead. Might
they not send the freak observer to the pathological laboratory for
observation?)
[12.d]
Observe that scientifically speaking, this sentence and the next beg
the question. We have argued that feeling is outside the domain of
science, and we cannot now introduce scientific evidence that
feeling affects behaviour. This 'experimental evidence' is private to
each individual who experiments upon himself.
[12.e]
I do not wish to suggest that this is all that is necessary to maintain
the illusion. Denial of the two-way interaction of matter and feeling
is not the only weak point of the rationalist position; but it is the
only one that interests us here.
***
I enclose a cutting from a piece of the Daily Telegraph in which some dāna was wrapped (these scraps of newspaper provide me with a window through which I can see what is going on in the outside world—a strange landscape, with English football and the Belgian Stock Exchange occupying the foreground). The cutting provides a fair example of the muddled thinking about which I wrote to you earlier. You will see from it that, whereas you and I (and presumably Mr. Coghlan too, who wrote the letter) seek food when we feel hungry, a cat seeks food when its stomach is empty: it does not feel anything at all. All its actions—such, for example, as screeching and bolting when boiling water is poured on it—take place simply as a result of a stimulus to its cybernetic brain. It would, it seems, be a great mistake to suppose that a scalded cat suffers pain. The cat is perfectly indifferent to what is going on since it feels nothing—indeed this statement is excessive, since the cat does not even feel indifferent.
***
I enclose a cutting from a piece of the Daily Telegraph in which some dāna was wrapped (these scraps of newspaper provide me with a window through which I can see what is going on in the outside world—a strange landscape, with English football and the Belgian Stock Exchange occupying the foreground). The cutting provides a fair example of the muddled thinking about which I wrote to you earlier. You will see from it that, whereas you and I (and presumably Mr. Coghlan too, who wrote the letter) seek food when we feel hungry, a cat seeks food when its stomach is empty: it does not feel anything at all. All its actions—such, for example, as screeching and bolting when boiling water is poured on it—take place simply as a result of a stimulus to its cybernetic brain. It would, it seems, be a great mistake to suppose that a scalded cat suffers pain. The cat is perfectly indifferent to what is going on since it feels nothing—indeed this statement is excessive, since the cat does not even feel indifferent.
Actually, the 'cybernetic brain' is a considerable advance on Professor Jefferson, and is the subject of Dr. Ross Ashby's book Design for a Brain.
The principles of cybernetics, of teleological or end-seeking or
purposive behaviour (which can be expressed mathematically) are very
instructive provided the proper order is observed—consciousness
or experience first, and the body, if at all, a bad second. But Ross
Ashby and his disciple Coghlan follow the prevailing fashion of
'scientific common sense', and put the body first. The argument runs
something like this. Our own experience, and the observed behaviour of
others, is teleological (which is perfectly true); and since our
experience or behaviour is entirely dependent upon the state of our
nervous system (which is exactly half the truth, and therefore false),
our nervous system (or brain) must therefore be a cybernetic machine. It is then the simplest thing in the world to assert that our experience or behaviour is teleological because
our brain is a cybernetic machine (explicable, of course, in 'purely
physiological terms' as Professor Jefferson would say)—an assertion for
which there is no independent evidence whatsoever. Confusion is then
worse confounded by the unexplained addition of 'conscious intelligence
and will', whose connexion with the cybernetic mechanism of the nervous
system is left completely in the dark. However, enough of this.
