Being Human

Bodies, Minds, Persons

Rowan Williams

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781467451505
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

What is consciousness? Is the mind a machine? What makes each of us a person? How do our bodies relate to our minds?

In this deeply engaging exploration of what it means to be human, Rowan Williams addresses these frequently asked questions with lucid meditations that draw from findings in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and literature. Then he presses on to ask, Might faith be necessary to human flourishing? If so, why? And how can a traditional Christian practice—namely, silence—help us advance on the path to human maturity?

The book ends with a brief but profound meditation on Christ's ascension, inviting readers to consider how, through Jesus, our humanity in all its variety and vulnerability has been transfigured and taken into the heart of the divine life.

Being Human is a book that readers of all religious persuasions will find both challenging and highly rewarding. Questions at the end of each chapter encourage personal reflection or group discussion.

1

What is consciousness?

The study of human consciousness encompasses an exceptionally wide range of questions in neuroscience and philosophy, as well as some questions that impact very directly on many of the things that theologians or ethicists most want to talk about. So although I won’t be talking very much in this chapter about theology as such, I hope that some of the trails I lay might suggest some of the theological possibilities that arise in thinking through the fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness and what it is to be human.

But before embarking on the detailed questions, there is a general point worth remembering. ‘The question of consciousness’ is now a question that is best and most effectively addressed on the frontiers of different disciplines, so that the sort of book that has this kind of title will very often draw from physics, neuroscience in particular, philosophy, psychology, literature and many other fields. It’s a helpful reminder that some of the rigid divisions of subject matter that so often afflict the academy won’t quite do when fundamental issues of this sort are at stake. This has both positive and negative effects: positive, because conversations between different academic areas are among the most fertile discussions that happen in universities; negative, because the literature that can come out of this may be lacking in the rigour that applies in any one of those areas left to themselves. Some of what I say here will, I hope, help to identify those areas where lack of rigour is a problem, and doubtless a great deal more will illustrate the problem of lack of rigour in other ways. But I think it is worth beginning by reminding ourselves of this very significant fact in the current intellectual climate. While we talk, and talk freely, about ours being a very specialized era where people go more narrowly and deeply into questions than once they did, it is perhaps also the case that the biggest issues that confront us as a human race are issues that require a certain amount of multidisciplinary skill if we’re to tackle them effectively.

The biggest issues that confront us as a human race are issues that require a certain amount of multidisciplinary skill if we’re to tackle them effectively

Is the mind a machine?

Let me begin with two negative points about recent discussions of consciousness in some of the literature. There is a consensus in many quarters, philosophical and scientific, that one thing we can confidently say about consciousness or the mind is that it is a kind of machine. A recent book on the problem of consciousness by Stanislas Dehaene concludes by saying, ‘There is really no problem in describing human beings as machines with free will.’¹ I’ll give some reasons for thinking there are problems in a moment, but let me dwell for now on why this metaphor of the machine is interesting. Consciousness is mechanical, the brain is a kind of machine, the brain is a kind of computer, we frequently hear. Therefore what we most need to know about consciousness is what this machine’s operations are. The other frequent ‘consensus’ perspective that is offered by philosophers and scientists follows from this: if consciousness is machine-like in important or definitive ways, then of course it is a mistake to think that consciousness is, of its nature, something that registers what is the case. At its most extreme, this leads some writers to say that the idea of consciousness is itself a mistake. Others have said, less radically, that there are no thoughts that are thoughts of anything. A ‘thought’ is an operation within the machine’s workings.

To start off, I want to try and clear away the confusion that seems to me inherent in both of those ways of thinking about the question, beginning with the metaphor of the machine. The problem with thinking of consciousness as machine-like, or the brain as a computer, is that this is precisely a metaphor, and a metaphor with a set of particularly complicated associations. A machine exits in order to solve problems; problems that are extraneous to itself. We design mechanical processes in order to produce specified functions. A machine fails if it does not deliver the function we have specified for it, so that an internal combustion engine which fails to drive a car but which very satisfactorily boils eggs is not a good machine. But in what sense can we say that consciousness in general, or the brain in particular, is a ‘machine’ in that sense? Is it something that exists in order to solve problems extraneous to itself? Prima facie the answer has to be no. At the very least, at the most reductive, the brain is an organism; and an organism is not exactly a machine. Organisms solve their own problems: in evolutionary history, organisms develop in order to deal with their own crises of adjusting to the environment. They are not there in order to solve problems outside themselves but modify what they are as well as what they do so as to maintain successful interaction with a diverse set of conditions.

As soon as the language of the machine comes into play, we have a major conceptual or definitional problem; and as soon as such language occurs in this discussion, it needs at once to be flagged with all kinds of warning signs. It is also interesting (and I’ll come back to this a bit later) that the machine model tends to assume that the fundamental form of causality in the world is mechanical. The most important, the most basic, cause of relations is mechanical, entirely matters of input and output, not even exactly of stimulus and response. And that elides the many difficulties that still lie around the very notion of causality, in science and elsewhere. It carries with it a set of assumptions too about materiality, which once again I’ll return to later; and it rather ignores the extremely complicated questions of how information and the exchange of information, both in natural and constructed systems, works causally. It ignores the issues of the ‘emergent’ properties of more and more complex systems, and it ignores the perspective offered by what is usually referred to as holism, that something may be more than the sum of its parts and have properties as a whole which do not correspond to the properties of any of its component parts.

Is the mind a mistake?

The machine model is one that we ought immediately to question. And of course if we do so question it there is less incentive to think that the language of consciousness might be a mistake, or that we might have to conclude that thoughts are thoughts about nothing in particular. But as soon as we’ve articulated this question in terms of a possible mistake, we see that there are intrinsic problems with it. Being mistaken is something that happens to, or in, consciousnesses. Internal combustion engines don’t make mistakes. Machines do not make mistakes: they malfunction. But the notion of a mistake is that of a perception, a categorization of the world, being a bad fit with what is the case; and this is something we associate with consciousness itself. If you’re at all interested in how to represent propositions logically, it’s not possible to represent coherently the idea that consciousness is a mistake. If you define consciousness, as we are bound to, as precisely the sort of thing that makes mistakes, there’s an infinite logical regress. The same applies to ‘thoughts of nothing’. If I say my thoughts are thoughts about nothing, of course I am articulating a thought, which is about thoughts. And again I cannot get out of that particular loop; even within our thinking about thinking, we can make a distinction between thinking of different sorts of nothing – bear with me. I can say I am thinking of a square circle, but I am there quite literally thinking of no thing – there is nothing that can conceivably correspond to that, there is no coherent logical way of representing that thought. I could say I am thinking of a unicorn: I can think of a picture of a creature that doesn’t exist. I am thinking about nothing that is instantiated in the world, but something that has a symbolic or legendary identity. Or I could think about things that are really there. I could think not about unicorns but about zebras, and then I’m thinking of something. The point of this rather laboured excursion is simply that our thoughts are, as thoughts, ‘intentional’. The concept of a thought is the concept of something that is about something. Once again we are back to the question of definition. If consciousness is a mistake, I am already importing consciousness into the word ‘mistake’. If thought is of nothing but itself, I am exporting from thought the assumption we always make about our thinking – that it is about something, even if it is sometimes about something that has no actual instances.

My point in starting with these two negative categorizations is simply to put down some very clear markers about the easy mistakes that are sometimes made by those who don’t approach this question with enough philosophical rigour. ‘Consciousness is a machine’ and ‘consciousness is a mistake’ may both have a certain glamour, a certain seductive simplicity about them as statements. Neither of them can be made to make sense. So, whatever we say at the end of the day about the relationship between consciousness and the material world, between the self and the brain, we cannot reduce it to either of those propositions.

But if those two negatives are set aside, if the reductionist consensus is rejected, what then are the positives we might suggest? In the next part of what I want to say, I’d like to draw attention to four aspects of our language and thinking about consciousness that might go a little further towards answering the rashly ambitious question that forms the title of this chapter.

Consciousness is located

First of all, when we speak of human consciousness, we speak of something that is located somewhere. My consciousness is this point of view. It is what’s characterized by the first person singular. It is a strategy by which this material identity here charts a path through a material environment. It has sometimes been said that human knowledge begins in the experience of bumping into things: quite literally, as a child, one finds one’s way around things, so that one stops bumping into them sooner or later. But of course it is not just about the material self charting a path through material objects. I mentioned a moment ago the ways in which information works in our world. The world of cause and interaction in which we live is not, with due respect to seventeenth-century and indeed sometimes twenty-first-century models, a world in which small solid objects bump against each other, as if the world is a very large snooker table. Change happens and interaction happens because information is exchanged. And information may be exchanged at very simple, basic molecular levels, and it may also be exchanged in slightly less materially confined ways by words being spoken or read, associations being awoken in those hearing or reading, and fresh configurations of language appearing. My location as a consciousness is not just my ability to map a world of things and stuff around me; it’s also my capacity to map a world of communication; to place myself within a network of interchanging information from the molecular level to the level of speech and the concept. I live in a world where I don’t simply bump into things, but a world where I bump into signs – that is, things that communicate, that trigger further symbolic communication, that produce further utterance and make a difference at that level. Consciousness is located: within the material world and within the world of language, about which more later.

When we speak of human consciousness, we speak of something that is located somewhere

To try and think through what we mean habitually and non-technically by ‘consciousness’, without registering that fundamental reality of a location – what one philosopher called a ‘zero point of orientation’² – is to misunderstand the nature of the question. But if consciousness is located, localized, to this point of orientation, it’s a matter of charting lines of relation with other material agents, realities, processes and symbolic processes; and then the notion of relatedness becomes equally key to the idea of consciousness. So the second positive point I want to make about consciousness has to do with relationality, the way in which having a point of view here, my ‘zero point of orientation’, takes for granted that there are other points of orientation. To be immediately aware of being here is also to be aware of others being there.

Consciousness is relational

To take this a bit further: if my presence here is a matter of my decoding the signs that are given to me materially and in other ways around me, then decoding those signs, registering and organizing the information I receive, requires me to do some imagining – to imagine another point of view. My consciousness is not simply registering a lot of impressions that are coming to me from a mechanical world generating impressions outside; I don’t simply register stimuli and receive passively: I engage in a kind of systematized guesswork. I put myself in the position of another. I understand that while I can’t see the back of my head, you can. I understand that while I am speaking, you may be imagining many things, and raising all kinds of interesting questions in your mind about when this chapter is going to finish, or when it’s going to begin to make sense, or whatever. I as author imagine my readers. I imagine what makes sense; but much more than that, much more basically than that, to have a sense of any object (including my own body) is to presuppose a number of points of view. I construct a ‘synoptic’, a ‘walking around’ picture, of an object, a person, something that I encounter, by imagining other points of view. But I can’t even imagine my own body as a unit without imagining another point of view. To think of myself as a body, to be conscious of myself as a body, is to be conscious of other people’s consciousness.

To think of myself as a body, to be conscious of myself as a body, is to be conscious of other people’s consciousness

That’s my second positive point. Consciousness as we normally think about it has a relational dimension. I can’t think without thinking of the other. I can’t even think of my body, this zero point of orientation, without understanding that it’s an object to another. I am seen, I am heard, I am understood; and whether I am talking about myself in a general and vague sense, or talking about my body as a specific organic unit, I am bound to be imagining what is not exhausted by one solitary viewpoint. To have a point of view is to understand that the world is constructed out of diverse points of orientation.

And this means that my consciousness is mobile, engaged, incomplete: because I can’t construct the idea of any object without supposing a diversity of points of view, I know that my point of view is always partial, and to be conscious of myself is to be aware of myself as a node point in a web of information exchange, which corporately constructs the idea of objects, selves, persons. To be conscious is, primitively, to be able to find my way around a material environment without bumping into things. It is the ability to calculate distance and speed – as, for example, when another physical object, like a human body, is coming towards me (am I going to bump into that person?). But it’s also about how I ‘read’ a face: what are the signs that are being given by the person that I am speaking to or listening to? It’s about being able to argue to a wider context than that which is simply defined by what is registered primitively as stimuli for my senses now...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 What is consciousness?
• 2 What is a person?
• 3 Bodies, minds and thoughts
• 4 Faith and human flourishing
• 5 Silence and human maturity
• Epilogue: Humanity transfigured
• Notes
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements