In a provocative essay that is still relevant today, the English scientist (physical chemist, actually) and novelist C.P. Snow lamented what he saw as a yawning gap between those intellectuals who worked in the arts and humanities and those who work in the sciences and engineering.  In his view, many in the arts and humanities were, simply, scientifically illiterate, while may in the sciences and engineering had no interest in the arts and humanities, and failed to consider the social and ethical implications of his work.  This had not always been the case, in his view.  Intellectuals once comprised a common culture, and this was no longer the case.  There are reasons to think that the situation that Snow described in the 1950s still obtains today.

Which raises the question: how does a scientific approach to consciousness relate to other approaches to consciousness, which are characteristic of the arts and the humanities.  Let's ponder this question, setting aside the discipline of philosophy, which is usually considered a humanistic discipline, but which is also a component of cognitive science -- and thus, a willing if sometimes critical participant in the scientific approach.

What we really want to know is what writers and artists have to say about consciousness, that may complement what scientists have to say. 

David Lodge's Thinks...

David Lodge's novel, Thinks..., is in no small degree animated by the kinds of concerns expressed by Snow.  Lodge is an important English writer (and former English Literature professor), famous for academic satires like Changing Places and Nice Work, and for novels about modern Roman Catholics like The British Museum is Falling Down and Therapy. I suppose that Thinks... belongs in the former category, as its set in the fictional University of Gloucester, a newer "redbrick" university (as contrasted with ancient institutions like Oxford and Cambridge), and features a bunch of academics  

Lodge holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, and taught there for many years, retiring as Professor of English Literature in order to devote himself to writing full-time.  Still, he continues to publish scholarly works on literature, among which is a collection of essays entitled Consciousness and the Novel.

• Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist, is the director of the Holt-Belling Centre for Consciousness studies at Gloucester.
• Helen Reed, an up-and-coming novelist, is visiting Gloucester as a writer-in-residence. leading a group of scientists working on consciousness.

They meet, and Ralph explains that the goal of his research is to provide an objective, "third-person" account of consciousness.  Helen offers a quote from The Wings of the Dove (by Henry James, brother of William -- a nice touch!) to demonstrate that  this, indeed, is just what novelists do.  Ralph replies that what James does is fiction based on "folk psychology", and that novelists merely "pretend" to know about consciousness. 

I suppose that Lodge could just as easily have chosen another James novel, What Maisie Knew (1897), told from the perspective of the titular child, as she tries to make sense of her family's complicated arrangements: divorced parents, and step-parents who are engaged in an affair with each other. 

Helen, for her part, argues that novels actually constitute "thought experiments" in how to represent consciousness.  And that without this representation of consciousness, novels wouldn't be novels, and wouldn't be satisfying for anyone to read.  (In fact, her description of what a novel would be like without representations of consciousness closely resembles what some cognitive scientists call the "functionalist" approach to behavior -- descriptions that don't stray from "behaviour and appearances", without saying anything about the characters' inner lives.)

Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, and Point of View

Helen's dissertation project was on point of view in Henry James.  In literary studies, "point of view" refers to the way the story is told -- that is, whose consciousness is being described.  We can identify three different points of view, or narrative stance, with some variants.  For a fuller discussion, see The Rhetoric of Fiction by C. Wayne Booth (1961).

• In First-Person point of view, the narrator is also a character in the story, and reveals his or her own internal mental states.
• Second-Person point of view, in which the narrator addresses the reader, is rarely used.  One function of second-person point of view is to allow comparison between the mental states of the narrator and the reader.
• In Third-Person point of view, the narrator is not a character.  This is perhaps the most frequently employed perspective encountered in fiction, and it comes in a number of varieties.
• An omniscient narrator describes the actions and mental states of all the characters in the story.
• A limited narrator describes the mental states of some (often just one), but not all of the characters.
• An unreliable narrator is just that -- while the narrator may describe the actions and mental states of various characters, these descriptions may prove to be wrong or misleading.

If, as Helen claims, fiction wouldn't be satisfying without some representation of the conscious mental states of the characters, narrative stance is related to intersubjectivity.

• As noted earlier, in the lectures on Introspection, subjectivity has to do with one's own private subjective experiences.  subjectivity is a characteristic of a first-person narrator.
  
• I can say that I believe it's raining, or that I feel miserable, or that I want to be alone.
• Intersubjectivity has to do with our perceptions of other people's mental states -- that is, with social cognition (the topic of another series of lecture supplements).  In the present context, intersubjecivity is what a third-person narrator has.
  
• I can think that someone else believes that it's raining, or feels miserable, or wants to be alone. 
  

Intersubjectivity is higher-order intentionality.  And perhaps this is the time to remind ourselves of the two quite different meanings of the word "intentionality".

• In English, intention has a motivational sense, referring to the goal-directedness of behavior. 
  
• When English philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham (1780) or G.E.M. Anscombe (1957) discuss "intentionality", they mean the word in this motivational sense.
• But in German, intentionality has an epistemic sense, and refers to the "aboutness" of mental states.
• When the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano discussed "intentionality", he meant the word in this epistemic sense - -that mental states are always "about" something other than themselves.
• In particular, intentionality in the epistemic sense has to do with a person's beliefs about the world.  These beliefs are subjective.
• But we can also have beliefs about someone else's beliefs -- and this is what intersubjectivity is all about.

So:

• Subjectivity entails 1st-order intentionality -- what Person A believes, perceives, remembers, feels, wants, etc.
  
• Intersubjectivity, at the very least, entails 2nd-order intentionality -- what Person B believes that Person A believes.
  
• And there are even higher-order levels of intersubjectivity, entailing higher-order levels of intentionality.
• At the 3rd order, what Person C believes that Person B believes about Person A's belief.
• At the 4th order, what Person D believes that Person C believes that Person B believes about Person A's belief.
• And so on.
  

Robin Dunbar (2000; Kinderman et al., 1998) has calculated that we can keep track of only about five levels of intentionality.  This is consistent with what we know about the limited capacity of short-term memory (e.g., George Miller's "Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two") or the capacity of working memory (closer to 4 or 5 items).

Interestingly, there can be more than two levels of intentionality, even if only two people are involved -- as illustrated by this New Yorker cartoon.

I go through all this because Lisa Zunshine (2006, 2012), a literature scholar who has been greatly influenced by psychology and cognitive science, has argued that intersubjectivity plays a big role in the English novel.  In fact, she argues that intersubjectivity in the novel was essentially invented by Jane Austen, whose novels are full of narratives in which A believes that B believes that C believes X. 

This is different from the intentionality in earlier (English) novels. 

• Other early novels in English, like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), or Henry Fielding's Joseph Andres (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) are, mostly, fairly straightforward narratives of (somewhat improbable) events.
• First-order intentionality in the novel really begins with Samuel Richardson, in Pamela (1740-1741), an epistolary novel presenting the narrative from the individual points of view of each of six characters.  In particular, Pamela is focused less on the events in the protagonist's life and more on her interior life.  According to some literary scholars, the English novel as we know it today really begins with Pamela.  
  
• In the 18th and 19th centuries, most narrators were omniscient, in that they knew everything about all of the characters (what is sometimes called "the author as God")..
• Vladimir Nabokov, who was a great literary scholar as well as a first-rate novelist, identified a variant of the omniscient narrator as the "sifting agent", who takes the perspective of one character at a time.  But throughout, the thoughts and emotions are those of the narrator.
• In the 20th century, we get modernism in literature, with its emphasis on depicting one individual's consciousness.  Zunshine argues that Austen's technique presages the modern novel in this sense.
• Recently, Elliott Holt has argued that omniscience is making a comeback ("The Return of Omniscience", New York Times Book Review, 09/11/2016).
  

 

For example, there is an important episode in Persuasion (1818) in which Elizabeth and Anne, encounter Wentworth, to whom Elizabeth had once been engaged, but who had been persuaded (hence the title) to break it off. Anne saw that Wentworth saw Elizabeth. Anne saw that Elizabeth saw Wentworth. Anne saw that Wentworth saw that Elizabeth saw him, but pretended not to do so. Episodes like this proliferate in Austen's novels -- much more so than in her 18th-century predecessors, like Defoe, Richardson, or Fielding. Interestingly, an article commemorating the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death discussed a computational analysis of Austen's works by Franco Moretti, founder of the Stanford Literary Lab and a proponent of computational criticism, a branch of digital humanities (DigHum, in Stanford parlance) which seeks to bring the techniques of "Big Data" to bear on the analysis of works of literature ("The Word Choices that Explain Why Jane Austen Endures" by Kathleen A. Flynn & John Katz, New York Times Book Review, 07/16/2017).  For example, Moretti employed principal components analysis to plot a number of modern English novels, published between 1710 and 1920, on a pair of axes.  Austen's work was nearly isolated from the others, for its reference to time markers and states of mind and avoidance of "muscular" prose.  Another analysis, essentially a word-count, found that Austen tended to use "intensifying" words like very, as well as more words referring to women.  And so it went, with its word-counts and contingency coefficients, leading to the conclusion, in the words of Flynn and Katz, that Austen was preoccupied with "states of mind and feeling, her characters' unceasing efforts to understand themselves and other people".  OK, but that's a lot of computational firepower to pick up what Zunshine noted with her naked eyes, which was Austen's invention of free indirect narrative and multiple levels of intentionality.  So much for DigHum!
Which is not to say that there aren't predecessors.  As Robin Dunbar (92004) has noted, Shakespeare's Othello depends precisely on multiple levels of intersubjectivity. Shakespeare desired that The Audience understand that Iago intended that Othello would believe that Desdemona loved another man.
And there are similar episodes in homer's Odyssey, such as when Odysseus and his men are held captive by the cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus knew that if Polyphemus were blinded he would not be able to detect his men escaping the cave by clinging to the bellies of his sheep. Odysseus knew that when Polyphemus cried for help, no one would come if Polyphemus said that "nobody" had harmed him. Link to a reading of Book IX of Homer's Odyssey (the "Cyclops Episode").
And, for that matter, there are similar episodes in the Hebrew Bible: Rebekah knew that Jacob could fool the blind Isaac by pretending to be Esau (Genesis 25: 29-34).
Or, for that matter, after Adam and Eve tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 3, 5-12), they realized that they were naked (which is to say, they manifested subjectivity) and they believed that God would not see them if they hid in the bushes (which is to say, they manifested  intersubjectivity).
But of course, intersubjectivity is essential to the novel, as Helen Reed argues in Thinks....  Zunshine's claim is more interesting: that higher-order intersubjectivity in the novel was essentially the invention of Jane Austen. Zunshine goes on to argue that much modern literature, of the 20th and 21st centuries, is full of multiple levels of intersubjectivity.  Zunshine has estimated that Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925), involves 6 or 7 levels of intersubjectivity -- far in excess of what Dunbar has estimated most readers can handle.  Moreover, Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway in what literary scholars call free indirect discourse.  She rarely uses quotation marks to indicate dialogue, so that it is difficult to make a distinction between what people think and what they say. No wonder we need CliffsNotes!

Zunshine's analysis, while innovative, is not completely unique.  Louis Menand, a literature scholar at Harvard reviewing a number of books about Austen in the New Yorker ("For Love or Money", 10.05/2020), notes that:

All of Austen's novels are about misinterpretation, about people reading other people incorrectly.  Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, reads General Tilney wrong.  Elizabeth Bennet reads Mr. Darcy wrong.  Marianne Dashwood, in Sense and Sensibility, gets Willoughby wrong, and Edmond Bertram, in Mansfield Park, gets Mary Crawford wrong.  Emma gets everybody wrong.

Wordsworth's The Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, An Autobiographical Poem (1850)

Perhaps the single most important poem in the English Romantic tradition, The Prelude is about nothing less than consciousness -- specifically, Wordsworth's consciousness.  Begun in 1798, and essentially finished in 1839, the poem went through several different versions, as befits an autobiographical work, and in fact received its title by Wordsworth's wife only when it  was published posthumously.  As a young man, Wordsmith had been an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution -- a stance he came to regret during and after The Terror.  In trying to understand how all of this came to pass, Wordsworth reviews his life in one long epic poem (14 books!), which was intended to be only a part of an even longer one, portraying the various episodes in his life that influenced the shaping and re-shaping of his mind. 

1. Introduction--Childhood and School-time
2. School-time (continued)
3. Residence at Cambridge
4. Summer Vacation
5. Books
6. Cambridge and the Alps
7. Residence in London
8. Retrospect--Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man
9. Residence in France
10. Residence in France (continued)
11. France (concluded)
12. Imagination and Taste; How Impaired and Restored
13. Imagination and Taste; How Impaired and Restored (concluded)
14. Conclusion

In an extensive analysis of The Prelude, see  by Helen Vendler, reviewing a new edition of the 1805 version of the poem (containing 13 of the 14 books of the final version), calls the poem "a unique document of modern consciousness in its constant mobility -- of times, thoughts, feelings, prospect, and retrospect" and "a reenactment in real time of the volatile inner life of a human being".  Vendler further notes that "Wordsworth's momentous -- and surpassingly expressive -- document belongs in any account of the evolution of modern secular consciousness in all its frailty, its tenacity, its bitter self-reproach, its existential doubt, its exaltation, and its stern accommodation to the vicissitudes of life" ("'I Heard Voices in My Head'", New York Review of Books, 02/23/2017).

The Stream of Consciousness in Joyce and Faulkner

Woolf also wrote in a style known stream of consciousness (also known as interior monologue; they're not exactly the same thing, but this isn't a course in literary techniques!), which was essentially the invention of James Joyce (yes, Joyce had his predecessors, but we've really got to give him credit).  The goal in this style is to replicate the features of William James's stream of consciousness, with little or no punctuation and apparent leaps from one thought or image to another.  In Ulysses, sometimes the characters' attention is focused outward, on the sights and sounds they experience while walking through Dublin; other times, their attention is focused inward, on their thoughts and feelings.

The classic example is Joyce's Ulysses (1922), a novel inspired directly by Homer's Odyssey, which traces the thoughts and actions of its main character, Leopold Bloom, as he moves through Dublin in a single day (June 16, 1904, a date still celebrated in literary quarters as "Bloomsday".  And within Ulysses, the classic example is Chapter 18 ("Penelope"), which records the thoughts of Bloom's wife, Molly, as she goes to sleep at the end of the day.

Link to a reading of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses.

A somewhat different example is found in Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake (1939) which, famously begins and ends in the middle of a sentence, and is littered throughout with puns and logical leaps.  That includes the title, which lacks the usual apostrophe to indicate possession: it could refer to "Finnegan's wake", or funeral; or it could be a pun on "Finn is again awake".  Actually, the traditional interpretation of this book is that it is an attempt to represent dream-consciousness -- and, in fact, not just the dreams of a single dreamer, but rather the dreams of a fairly large number of dreamers, all intermingled.  And somewhat like a Mobius strip, the first line picks up where the last line left off, so that the "dream-process" (if that's what it is) starts up all over again.

Link to a reading of the first pages of Finnegans Wake.

Link to an annotated online text of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

As for Woolf herself, Michael Cunningham (whose novel, The Hours, later turned into an excellent film by , is based on Mrs. Dalloway wrote an appreciation in the New York Times Book Review ("Michel Cunningham on Virginia Woolf's Literary Revolution", 12/27/2020):

In “Mrs. Dalloway” we follow Clarissa, a society hostess, well-heeled and gracious, a little false, no longer young, as she walks through London on a balmy day in June....

In “Mrs. Dalloway”’s London, consciousness passes from one character to another in more or less the way a baton is passed among members of a relay race. If, for instance, a young Scottish woman, newly arrived in London, wanders lost and disconsolate through Regent’s Park, we briefly enter her mind, feel her unhappiness (“the stone basins, the prim flowers … all seemed, after Edinburgh, so queer. … She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen”) until she is noticed by an older woman, at which moment we switch to the consciousness of the old woman, who, envying the first woman’s youth, mourns the loss of her own (“it’s been a hard life. … What hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too.”) until we are snapped back to Clarissa, as she returns home to learn she has not been invited to an exclusive, politically inspired luncheon.

Maybe the book’s most singular innovation, however, is the alternating stories of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who do not know of each other’s existence until the very end, when Septimus arrives at Clarissa’s party as a true ghost, not only disembodied but nameless, nothing left of him but his suffering and his violent end. At the very last moment, their lives converge, but only across the divide of mortality itself.

While Septimus is still alive, though, we move back and forth between the utter veracity of Clarissa’s domain, which can run to the banal, and the tumultuous delusions of Septimus’s, where a little banality might be a welcome relief.

On this side of the Atlantic, William Faulkner employed the stream-of-consciousnes technique in The Sound and the Fury (1929).  Tracing the decline of a Mississippi family, the Compsons,the story is told mostly through the voice of Benjy, the youngest son, who is either brain-damaged or mentally retarded, and whose perceptions and memories come out in a disorganized flow -- to which other family members also contribute, so that we get constantly shifting perspectives and locations in space and time.  In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner wrote that "I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period.  I'm still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead.

Of course, neither Joyce nor Faulkner invented the interior monologue.  Soliloquies, in which a character speaks his thoughts out loud, go back at least as far as Shakespeare's Hamlet ("To be or not to be, that is the question...") and Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/To the last syllable of recorded time...).  Soliloquies are different from monologues, in which the actor is really speaking to another character, or to the audience.  In the soliloquy, the character is speaking to him- or herself. 

In the 20th century, the soliloquy was developed further by Eugene O'Neil's Strange Interlude (1923; also a 1932 movie starring Normal Shearer and Clark Gable, and a 1988 television adaptation starring Glenda Jackson and David Dukes).  In this play, the actors will occasionally step out of the action and speak their thoughts out loud to the audience -- thoughts that may be quite different from those conveyed by the dialogue or action.  In the film version, the soliloquies were done as voiceovers.  As of 2016, Strange Interlude had not been released on video, but you can watch it on YouTube.  The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1928, the year it was first produced.

Going Joyce and Faulkner one better, in 2019 Lucy Ellman published Duck, Newburyport, a novel consisting, mostly, of a single sentence of more than 426,000 words spread out over more than 1000 pages.  Parul Seghal, reviewing the book in the New York Times ("A Thousand-Page Novel -- Made Up of Mostly One Sentence -- Captures How We Think Now", 09/04/2019), noted that the form of the book "mimics the way our minds move now: toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry".  "In just a few lines, the narrator [an Ohio mother of four] can hurtle from toilet training her son to Howard Hughes, her weak ankles to white supremacy."  Seghal concludes that "The capaciousness of the book allows Ellmann to stretch and tell the story of one family on a canvas that stretches back to the bloody days of Western expansion, but its real value feels deeper -- it demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.

Recollective Experience in Proust

Another literary exploration of consciousness is to found throughout Marcel Proust's massive, seven-volume, 1925 novel, Remembrance of Things Past (that's the title of the original English translation, and still my preference; the new translation is entitled In Search of Lost Time).  The series is an extended meditation on involuntary memory, when some object or event unexpectedly stirs up a memory.  The classic example, from Swann's Way, the first volume, is the "madeleine episode", in which the first taste of a cookie dipped in tea brings back a rush of memory of the protagonist's childhood.

Link to a reading of the "Madeleine Episode" from Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past).

Jonah Lehrer, a prominent popular-science writer, wrote a book titled Proust was a Neuroscientist (2007), in which he argued that many modern scientific discoveries about the mind and brain were anticipated by Proust and other literary, musical, and artistic figures.  But Proust wasn't any kind of neuroscientist, or even a psychologist.  That's Lodge's point in Thinks...: that you don't have to be any kind of scientist to have interesting, valid things to say about consciousness.

Edward Rothstein, reviewing "Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary" an exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York City, comments on Proust's depiction of conscious recollection ("Proust, for Those with a Memory", New York Times, 02/15/2013).

"Perhaps I am as thick as two short planks," reads one [prepublication review], "but I cannot understand how a man can take 30 pages to describe how he turns round in his bed before he finally falls asleep."

But anyone who reads that first volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, translated as Remembrance of Things Past, has no problem understanding how 30 pages might be required to capture the turnings of self-consciousness and their cascades of recollection.

Somewhat ironically, Rothstein notes that the exhibit makes clear that the "Madeleine Episode" didn't start out thta way.  In a draft from 1909, the narrator dips toast in his tea; in a 1910 version, he dips biscottes.  So much for the reliability of memory! 

For more, see "Cognitive Realism and Memory in Proust's Madeleine Episode" by Emily Troscianko, Memory Studies, 2013.

Notes on Lodge's Thinks...

The structure of Thinks... reflects some of these literary trends.  First, the book alternates among three different points of view: Ralph (speaking into his tape-recorder), Helen (writing in her diary), and an omniscient narrator.  It strikes me that Ralph's exterior monologues (exterior because they're spoken into a recorder) are something of a parody of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses.

There are some breaks in this plan.

• Chapter 20 is a record of email correspondence; but that's objective so it doesn't really violate the 3rd-person narration.
  
• Ralph's Chapter 26 is written, not oral.
• Helen's Chapter 27 is written in the 3rd person.
  
• Samples from Helen's writing assignments to her seminar, which were directly inspired by her conversations with Ralph.
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
• Mary, the Color Scientist
  
• "Mary Comes Out" is a take-off on the Henry James quote that Helen offers to Ralph.
• Query: Do you find the denouement of "Mary Sees Red" convincing?

Along the way, Lodge manages to hit most of the salient ideas in contemporary consciousness studies.  But there also appear to be a couple of major topics missing.  Hmm, I wonder what they might be.  Wait! That might make a good exam question!




Although the University of Gloucester is fictional, there actually exists something like the Holt-Belling Centre: the Sackler Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Sussex (which hosts a great psychology department).  The architecture doesn't seem to be as symbolic, but hey, you can't have everything! 





And I don't know whether the Sackler Centre has anything like the Karinthy Mural, but Olga Tymofiyeva, at the time a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at UC San Francisco and now (2023) an associate professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF, who is also a talented artist and published author (her young-adult novella Just City is based on the moral philosophy of John Rawls), sat in on this class a couple of years ago and was inspired to do her own version, entitled "A Dream About Psychology".  See if you can identify the various images.

Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem (2015)

Tom Stoppard, the English playwright famous for exploring philosophical and social commentary topics in his work: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) was inspired by the Gulag archipelago, while Arcadia (1993) dealt with chaos theory, among other things (including landscape architecture).  The Hard Problem (2015) takes its title from David Chalmers's analysis of the mind-body-problem: Why do we have subjective experience, and how does subjective experience happen?  I saw its West Coast Premiere at the American Conservatory Theatre, in San Francisco, in 2016, where the stage set reminded me a little of the architecture of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, a famous center for the study of the mind-body problem (if that was intentional, then someone was doing their homework). 

But the play also deals with the Prisoner's Dilemma (in fact, it begins with a scene in which two main characters, Spike and Hillary, try to solve the problem), altruism vs. egotism, and -- wait for it -- the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.  Hillary is an English university student seeking a post-graduate fellowship at the Krohl Insitute for Brain Science.  While waiting for her appointment, she learns from Amal, another applicant, that the head of the Institute is mostly interested in "The Hard Problem"; Hillary, at first, doesn't even know what that is.  Once she finds out, she discusses the problem with Spike, a die-hard materialist, insisting (alluding to Morton Prince and others) that there is a difference between mind and body, and there must be some "mind stuff that doesn't show up in a scan" (as I say, Stoppard does his homework).  But like most everyone else, Hillary finds The Hard Problem unsolvable: "Every theory proposed for the problem of consciousness has the same degree of demonstrability as divine intervention".

Amal, for his part, proposes to study Libet's "unconscious readiness potential" while people are solving the PD.  Amal eventually abandons brain science for high finance, and gets caught up in the Financial Crisis.  I won't tell you what happens to Hillary (or Spike) -- except to say that I found the ending to be a completely unconvincing and unnecessary coincidence.

I will tell you, though, that Stoppard doesn't stick with The Hard Problem very long.  The play, while entertaining, is sort of a mishmash: it's telling that, in the ACT playbook, Stoppard tells us that he originally intended to write a play about the Financial Crisis.  The Guardian, reviewing the English production (02/01/2015), criticized Stoppard for seeming to promise, but not delivering, a serious exposition of and commentary on The Hard Problem.  Vinson Cunningham made a similar complaint, reviewing the New York revival of The Hard Problem in the New Yorker (12/10/2018).  Reviewing the ACT production, the San Francisco Chronicle called the play "a string of nonevents".  Somehow, consciousness slipped in, but the play is really more about morality and altruism -- which is probably why it begins with the PD.  But maybe that's Stoppard's point: for all the attention to the mind-body problem, maybe the real hard problem is how to behave morally in a materialist universe.

For my money, Lodge did a much better job of dealing with these issues, and with putting them into literature.

Link to a YouTube video of Stoppard and Nicholas Hyntner, director of the London premiere, discussing "The Hard Problem" -- and The Hard Problem.

These trends in painting have their counterparts in music -- the "impressionist" compositions of Ravel and Debussy, for example, or the expressionism of Schoenberg (who was also an expressionist painter).  And, of course, there's psychedelic music -- think of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Cub Band" by the Beatles (1967), or "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly (1968).

A more interesting musical representation of consciousness, perhaps, is provided by the Russian late-Romantic composer Alexander Scriabin, who had tone-color synesthesia.  That is, each tone on the diatonic scale was, for him, associated with a different color, and he saw those colors when he heard those tones.  Although this synesthesia was a private experience for Scriabin, he attempted to share it with his audiences in his Symphony #5, subtitled Prometheus: Poem of Fire (1915).  For this work, Scriabin added a part for a 'Luce", or color-organ: when certain keys were depressed, corresponding colors would be displayed in the performance space.  Unfortunately, given the technology at the time, the best that performers could do was to project the various colors on a screen behind the orchestra.  Occasionally, orchestras substituted modern art for Scriabin's color scheme.  But in 2010, Anna Gawboy, a graduate student in musicology at Yale, together with Justin Townsend, a lighting designer, reconstructed Prometheus more along the composer's original intentions, complete with a full color-organ, and presented the piece in Yale's Woolsey Halal, in a performance with the Yale Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Toshiyuki Shimada.





Helen Reed, in her keynote speech to the International Conference on Consciousness Studies ("Con-Con"), rightly called consciousness the modern equivalent of the Philosopher's Stone.  Discovering the Big Bang gave us the key to the Universe; discovering the structure of DNA gave us the key to life; uncovering the nature of consciousness will give us the key to the mind, what Morton Hunt has called "The Universe within".  But, as Helen (and Lodge) would have it, this discovery is not solely the province of science -- psychology or neuroscience.  The arts and humanities to play a role here, too.  Or so we can hope.

Continue to the Conclusion.