Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Eighteen: Do I Wake or Sleep?

Well, maybe they're right, the Churchlands and so on, people who think we don't have minds at all, we only think we do. Or 'think' we do. Maybe so. Maybe all this activity that feels like thinking, like having a mind, like being conscious, is just a by-product of something else - digestion, or breathing, or opposable thumbs. Just a spandrel. Maybe there's some odd quirk about being a bipedal primate that causes some particular physical event which feels like a mind but is really just an automatic function like any other, peristalsis or heartbeat or growing hair. Something about the hips or knees or spinal column, perhaps. Bipedal primates have backs that curve (hence all those pulled muscles and chronic bad backs) whereas quadrupedal ones have straight backs. Bipedal hips are angled differently, their knees work differently, their thigh bones and muscles are longer, their arms shorter, their skulls angled differently so that they look straight ahead when standing on two feet where quadrupeds' skulls face forward when they're standing on two hands as well as two feet. A lot of physical differences, a lot of items that could cause sensations that feel like a mind.

Or maybe it's the toes. Bipedal primates don't have opposable thumbs on their feet - maybe that's it. Maybe there's something about the energy saved from using our feet to pick up things, that gets channeled into having things we call 'thoughts.' Or maybe it's compensation. We're so much clumsier with these short straight toes that can't hold a pen or a knife - maybe the mutation that produced 'thoughts' was selected for because otherwise such absurd creatures would have died out. Who knows.

Or maybe not. Of course bipedalism may have nothing to do with it - it may not be the cut-off point at all. Maybe the dividing line - between creatures that think they think (or feel as if they do) and those that don't - is somewhere else. Or there are two dividing lines - or many. One between creatures that think they think, and creatures that think without thinking they do. Or rather creatures that do something, or experience something, that if we were doing it we would call 'thinking,' but that they don't call that, because they don't think about it, because that's that particular dividing line. That one, and another between creatures that 'think' - that do something that if we were doing it we would call thinking, except we wouldn't, quite, because it's such a low-level kind of thinking that it doesn't have language or concepts with which to call anything anything - it not only doesn't call thinking thinking, it doesn't even call eating eating or breathing breathing. Or something something or nothing nothing. It doesn't call anything anything. It just does things, it eats and breathes and (perhaps) thinks, without naming any of them, or thinking about them. So if we did experience it we wouldn't call it thinking either - so maybe it isn't thinking - maybe it's something else. Just consciousness perhaps but not thinking.

But what if we could experience it for just a minute. Or say five minutes. Then afterward we could call it thinking. But maybe we wouldn't. Maybe it would be so weird and different that we wouldn't. Like being heavily sedated, or sleepy, or feverish. Or maybe some of us would, and some wouldn't, and we would argue about it, and there would be schools of thought, and conferences, and journals, and books.

So maybe that's one cutoff, between thinking that the thinkers call thinking, and 'thinking' or sub-thinking or consciousness that no one who had it would call thinking. Or maybe that one is two or several or infinite, since people would disagree about what to call it. And either way we're not sure where it is - whether it's between bipedal primates and everyone else, or somewhere quite different. Primates? Mammals? Vertebrates? Who knows.

Or maybe there aren't any cutoff points, maybe there's only a continuum. Or maybe there are but they're infinite - one for every sentient being, or one for every object, or every molecule, or every atom - we don't know.

And in any case maybe it's all like dreaming. Random electrical firings in the brain that mean nothing at all (or perhaps they do, but not to us, perhaps they mean something to whoever or whatever is causing them, the Evil Demon or the mice or the computer) - that we then construct a narrative to make sense of. First the electrical activity, then the story, which we take to be thinking. We think we think, and we think we're the ones who do it, but it's an illusion, and if it's an illusion then 'we' are an illusion too. The mind, the self, free will - all an illusion. But it doesn't feel like an illusion, does it, so if it doesn't feel like an illusion, then in some sense it's not one - except we have that thought in dreams, too: now I'm not dreaming, now I'm awake -

What's that ringing sound?

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

Click here to return to the Philosophy Café

Interrogations will next be updated early December 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done
12. Mere
13. Influence
14. Other Minds
15. Mystery, Drama, Surprise
16. Work
17. Mutability

Join Our Café mailing list

To receive *very* short messages, letting you know when the Café has been updated, just fill in your email address below - and press submit.

[If you wish to unsubscribe from the mailing list, simply fill in your subscriber email address, select "Unsubscribe", and press Submit.]