Reducing all that's made
John Cornwell
THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: THE SCIENTIFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL by Francis Crick Simon & Schuster, £16.99, pp. 384
It is characteristic of ageing brain scientists to turn their minds to the problem of consciousness. While their ambition is admirable, the result is usually lamentable.
This much-quoted and misquoted aphorism (`senile' has crept in for 'ageing') is the opinion of the redoubtable psycholo- gist Stuart Sutherland, who believes that consciousness will remain by definition insoluble.
That Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the Double Helix, has launched forth on these dangerous seas — dangerous no less for sanity than for reputation — is a matter of considerable interest. His ambition is not to be doubted. The result, by no means lamentable, is alas no unqualified success.
It was at the end of his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, published in 1988, that Crick announced he would spend his declining years studying the mind-brain problem: how our mental processes relate to the physical grey matter inside our skulls. 'It is essential to understand our brains in some detail,' he wrote, `if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.'
Since its origins in the late 19th century, brain science, or neurophysiology, has laboured under a severe handicap. Unable to explore the living cortex without massive destruction of what they probed, the neuro- physiologists were overshadowed by the behavioural psychologists, who studied the mind merely in terms of stimulus and response, ignoring the contents of the mys- terious black box of the brain itself. Even as late as the early Eighties students of the physiology of vision, like the scientific genius David Marr, who died tragically aged 35, opined that brain cells were no more crucial to an understanding of vision, than feathers were necessary to understand
the phenomenon of flight. All that changed in the mid-1980s with the invention of non- invasive forms of measuring and imaging live brains, and the so-called Neuroscience Revolution was born.
For some years Francis Crick has been charting the world-wide consequences of that revolution with mounting excitement, not so much as an experimental scientist at the coal-face but as a theory critic. He has read both deeply and widely, and travelled the world, keeping abreast of the prolifer- ating data. The Astonishing Hypothesis is the fruit of his voyagings, providing a useful overview of the basics of brain science: the problems, the experimental work, the direction of research programmes. But this ancient and distinguished mariner has been emboldened to cast for fatter, more succu- lent fish: and therein lies the problem.
The question of consciousness, the riddle of our unique self-awareness, poses some very thorny philosophical problems. Not least is how to formulate a complete defini- tion of a 'subjective' state with an objective description. In other words, a physiologist may tell you precisely what happens physi- cally in the eye and brain of a cat when it sees a mouse, but this does not include the phenomenon of what it is like for a unique cat to see its mouse.
The peculiar nature of subjective states, known in philosophy as 'walla', underpins the view, shared by Sutherland and many others, that consciousness is ultimately an Imponderable. Crick's astonishing hypothe- sis is that there is no such mystery: con- sciousness is 'no more' than the buzzing of your brain cells when they oscillate at a specific number of cycles per second. Such a viewpoint is known in philosophical circles as reductionism, understanding the whole solely by reference to the parts. Reductionism as an experimental method has been hugely successful in modern science and technology; as a philosophy of life, however, it would reduce experience.
The predicament of the radical reduc- tionism, as it happens, is poignantly drama- tised in Peter Brook's The Man Who, Currently playing at the Cottlesloe. In one striking cameo a neurological patient with visual agnosia' sees a video of the sea- shore: all he can identify are the geometri- cal patterns and the motion; his condition deprives him of complete understanding of what he sees. At the play's end all the cast watch a video of a brain scan — the geo- metrical, computer-generated patterns made by the molecules. The inference is that scientific reductionism, as a complete explanation of our experienced world, is a kind of philosophical 'visual agnosia'.
I know of no better illustration in drama or literature of Crick's predicament, save for the opening lines of George Herbert's well-known hymn: A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heaven espy.
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