A History of the Mind

“Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of materials with which to bring consciousness into the world. The mind-body problem is the problem of understanding how the miracle is wrought.”12 McGinn’s unhappy conclusion is that the problem is probably unsolvable: either there actually is not a solution, or, if there is one, human intelligence must always be too limited to grasp it. (Location 287)

The theory that mental states in general are nothing other than mathematically defined computational states has come to be known as functionalism. (Location 328)

‘Consciousness’ is the name of a non-entity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing soul, upon the air of philosophy. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.” (Location 428)

So boundaries—and the physical structures that constituted them, membranes, skins—were crucial. First, they held the animal’s substance in, and the rest of the world out. Second, by virtue of being located at the animal’s surface they formed a frontier: the frontier at which the outside world impacted the animal, and across which exchanges of matter and energy and information could take place. (Location 504)

Yet, as the Roman poet Horace wrote, you can drive out nature with a pitchfork, and she will always return. (Location 880)

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. (Location 887)

Just as a wine taster may temporarily put to one side his pleasure in the gustatory stimulus in order to focus on the question of what the wine is made of, so someone may not notice the beauty of light when what concerns him is entirely what lies out there in the material world. (Location 913)

Aldous Huxley described his own experiment with mescaline: “Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. The books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence. Until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms. But now I knew contemplation at its height.”60 Lest (Location 919)

Roger Fry, the painter and critic, noted a very similar double experience in people’s response to paintings.65 Many great paintings, according to Fry, appeal to us both at the “dramatic or psychological level”—by which he meant their pictorial, storytelling content—and at the “plastic” level—by which he meant their aesthetic content determined simply by the arrangement of color and form. (Location 977)

But these two are frequently in competition, so that “we are compelled to focus the two elements separately… What in fact happens is that we constantly shift our attention backwards and forwards from one to the other”; but as a work becomes familiar the “psychological elements will, as it were, fade into the second place, and the plastic quality will appear almost alone.” (Location 980)

Suppose you were asked: “What is the square root of 143641?” If you know how to calculate square roots, you would eventually arrive at the answer 379. But suppose you were worried that you might have made a mistake in your calculations. Then the obvious way of checking on them would be to go into reverse and to ask yourself: “What is the square of 379?” Provided you ended up with the number that you started with, you could be pretty sure your answer was correct. Indeed if all you wanted was a rough and ready check, you might simply observe that since the last digit of 379 is a 9, and the square of 9 is 81, 379 can be the square root only of a number ending with a 1. By just squaring the last digit of your answer, you could in fact quickly detect on average 80 percent of all random errors. This strategy of “echoing back to the source” is a strategy of error detection well known to information technologists, who under a variety of circumstances may need to check that an operation has been performed correctly, or that a message has been decoded in the right way, or just that a signal has got through on a noisy channel. (Location 1556)