The Mind in the Whirlwind

“In our last conversation about consciousness, Riccardo Manzotti and I arrived at a crux. Having found both brain- and action-based explanations of conscious experience unconvincing, Riccardo set out a radical alternative: our experience of the world (light, color, sound, smell, touch) is not a “movie in the head” provided by our neurons, nor the interaction between our bodies and our environment, but nothing other than the object itself.”

“When I see an apple in front of me, I am the apple.”

“To those of us used to supposing that our experience is locked inside our heads and that our minds begin and end with our bodies, this externalist approach initially seems completely unacceptable, even laughable.”

“Yet, casting around, one finds corroboration in surprising places. “I am what is around me,” wrote Wallace Stevens in his poem “Theory.” “You are the music while the music lasts,” reflected T.S. Eliot in “The Dry Salvages.” “What are called outside and inside are one and the same,” wrote Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuis. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a constant elaboration of this intuition: “She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that.” Nor are artists alone in arriving at these reflections: “Nothing can represent a thing but that thing itself,” thought the philosopher Edwin Holt in 1914. Two thousand years before him, Aristotle claimed that “actual knowledge is identical with its object.””

“What we want to do today is flesh out what Riccardo calls the “Mind-Object Identity Theory” and confront some of these immediate objections.

—Tim Parks”

“Riccardo Manzotti: Your objection is that the world appears to change while actuall”

“Parks: My experience of the world is different from moment to moment depending on where I am, where I look, how the light is, etc., yet the world seems to remain reliably there and unchanged. So how can my changing experience be the stable object I see?”

“Manzotti: You realize, of course, that you’re simply restating the traditional appearance/reality conundrum that has plagued human understanding since Plato. The world appears to be one thing, but I know it’s another. Right? And we all know where that debate leads: appearances get relegated to an inner mental domain—these days the brain—while outside the world stays real and largely unknowable. What I’m asking you to do is set aside the idea that there are appearances on the one hand and real objects on the other. There are only objects. Real physical objects. Your experience is those objects. There is no appearance/reality dichotomy.”

“Manzotti: Ok, let’s go back in time and do some basic thinking. Until the seventeenth century scholars believed that when a body or object was in movement, its velocity was to be considered an absolute physical property. A cannon ball was either moving or still. How could it be otherwise? A flying bird is moving and a mountain is still. It’s a no-brainer. Then Galileo came along and showed them they were wrong. Velocity is relative. The mountain is still with respect to the surrounding landscape, but it is moving with respect to the moon or indeed with respect to the flying bird. Eventually it was established that any and every object has infinite velocities, each relative to some further object. Velocity is always relative velocity.”

“Parks: This seems elementary.”

“Manzotti: Well, velocity is physical, is it not? It is not notional, it is not just “in the head,” it is not subjective.”

“Manzotti: My point is that despite being physical, it can’t exist by itself. It requires a relation with another physical system. You can’t say, or at least not in scientific terms, that an object has this or that absolute speed; you need to say it has this speed relative to that object. So let me put it to you: What if all physical properties were like velocity? Not absolute, but relative to other objects. What I’m asking you to contemplate is the notion of relative existence.”

“Parks: So not only is the apple neither still nor moving except in relation to other things, now it doesn’t even exist except in relation. You’re going to have to work hard to convince me of this. In relation to what?”

“Manzotti: The temptation is to say, in relation to you or me, but in that case we’d be resurrecting an immaterial subject, an insubstantial self, and getting ourselves into all kinds of trouble. The apple is relative to another physical object or objects, in the same way the velocity of the mountain is relative to the flying bird. So, what object is the apple relative to?”

“Many. If it’s a case of experience, a body. A human body. An animal. An insect. But an apple also exists in relation to the surface it lies on, a table maybe, or the tree it hangs from. Bodies are not metaphysically special. They are just objects, though very complex objects, in the sense that, through their sensory capacities, they bring into existence the world we are identical with, the sights, sounds, smells and so on that are our experience, are us.”

“Parks: Bring into existence! Surely an object exists regardless of the other objects or bodies around it.”

“Manzotti: A key is a key only relative to its lock. Relative to anything else it is just a piece of metal.”

“A face is a face only when in relation to a healthy fusiform gyrus, that part of the brain we know is necessary for face recognition.”

“The same physical stuff constitutes different objects, depending on the other objects it is in relation with.”

“Just as it has different velocities relative to different objects. Existence of this or that object is physical yet relative!”

“Manzotti: The table needs another object. At least one. After all, what would the velocity of an object be if there were no other objects around? A lonely atom in a void universe would have no velocity whatsoever. The table is surely something for the apple even when you are not there. Likewise, the apple is something for the table. But what they are relative to each other is not what they are relative to your body.”

“Let me put it another way: in the room we have a whirlwind of physical states. This whirlwind contains a lot more than a human being could ever perceive—atoms, neutrinos, photons, quarks, strings, quantum fields; a huge range of possibilities. When the body comes into the room, its sensory capacities carve out one possible subset of that whirlwind.”

“Or, looked at the other way round, one possible set within the whirlwind finds, relative to the body, a suitable causal path along which to roll. So the table and the apple are born! My body brought them into existence in the sense that it selected them and only them from the whirlwind. Entirely ignoring all kinds of other stuff.”

“Manzotti: Go back to velocities. Each object has infinite velocities. But this does not bother anyone, nor does it disturb our knowledge of physics. As long as you know what reference frame you’re in, multiple velocities is not an issue. It’s the same with the apple. My apple and your apple are each relative to a different body. So we have relative apples, as we have relative velocities.”

“Parks: But what about weight, color, size. Are they relative too?”

“Manzotti: Weight is relative to gravitational pull. Colors vary with light, sensory receptors, surroundings, surfaces, and so on.”

“Parks: And mass?”

“Manzotti: Mass is not something we experience. We experience weight. More generally, we perceive an object’s resistance to being lifted, pushed, or pulled. I’m not claiming that all physical properties are relative, only that the properties we experience are relative to our bodies.”

“Parks: What about size, though? We perceive size, but you’re surely not claiming that an object’s size changes.”

“Manzotti: If you insist on a fixed frame of reference, a ruler for example, you could say the size of an object remains the same in relation to the ruler placed alongside it. The apple will always be four inches high and the ruler will always give the same reading. But if you consider the object in relation to the body, obviously it changes with distance.”

“Parks: Sorry, I’ve done some homework here. In 1758, David Hume wrote, “The table which we see seems to diminish as we remove farther from it. But the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration. It was, therefore, nothing but its image which was present to the mind.” Respond in fifty words, please!”

“Manzotti: Hume was wrong. The real table he had in mind is akin to the pre-1600 notion of absolute speed. Adapting Bertrand Russell’s famous comment on the law of causality, we could say, Hume’s “real” table along with notions of absolute velocity are “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because they are erroneously supposed to do no harm.” The table, like any other object, is relative and, as far as we’re concerned, relative to our bodies. Since our bodies change and move, the world around us also changes, and so do we, since the thing that is our experience is the world around us.”

“each body brings into existence a world of relative objects, that are, nevertheless, external physical objects. Not things that emerge from your brain, or representations that well up in there. When the body stops working and dies, that world of experience, your consciousness, which is external to your body, ceases to exist as well. But not, of course, the whirlwind it was selected from.”

“Parks: Essentially, you’re turning everything inside out. The experience I thought was inside is outside.”

“Manzotti: That’s the idea. Look at the world, and you’ll find yourself. Look inside your experience, and you find… what? The world that surrounds your body.”

“Parks: Well, of course, we’ve talked over this many times and over the last year or so I have made a big effort—if only out of curiosity—to stop thinking of my experience as in my head and understand it instead as the very world I move in. And I’m going to confess that to a degree this works and is even cheering. I mean, it’s heartening to think that this tree I see, this cup I touch, is not a representation, not the concoction of my neurons, but simply reality, albeit reality relative to my body and my neurons.”

“However, our sense that consciousness is in the head does not arise, it seems to me, from our immediate sensory experience of the world, but from all the consciousness that has nothing to do with an immediate external object. By which I mean, language use, thinking, memories, and so on. And here it gets difficult to see how your approach can work. How can you claim that a dream is not in the head? The eyes are closed. The room is in darkness, and yet maybe I’m in my kayak negotiating an exciting mountain river. This, it seems to me, is where your whole house of cards comes tumbling down.”

“Manzotti: Ok, dreams it is. And, why not hallucinations, too. We will tackle them. We will consider how the brain-based approach explains them—very easily actually—and then how the Mind-Object Identity Theory explains them.”

“But before we do that, I’m afraid we’re going to have to sacrifice one other sacred cow. The now.”

“Parks: The now?”

“Manzotti: Just as there is no absolute object, so there is no absolute instant of time that is now. This is crucial.”

“Parks: Crucial, maybe, but definitely too much for me today. Right now, I need a break.”

“This is the sixth in a series of conversations on consciousness between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks.”