Book review

HANNAH CRITCHLOW, Consciousness. A Ladybird Expert Book (Penguin, 2018, 56 pp)

No, this is not one of the irresistible Ladybird ‘How It Works’ Books for Grown-Ups (The Hangover, The Dad, Mindfulness, and many more delights, a staple of family Christmas present giving in some households, including the Master’s Lodge). This is a perfectly serious revival of the old Ladybird format, in the shape of crisply written and rather startlingly illustrated brief introductions published by Penguin/Random House dealing with complex issues in science and policy, climate change, nuclear physics, evolution and so on. Our greatlyadmired colleague Hannah Critchlow (described by one broadsheet in impeccably patriarchal terms as ‘a female Brian Cox’, which is, I suppose, an attempt at a compliment) has produced one of the latest volumes, a breathlessly vivid and completely engaging essay on neuroscience and specifically on what neuroscientific research has to say about the nature of consciousness.

Given that both philosophers and neuroscientists regularly refer to this as ‘the hard problem’ – also the title of a recent Tom Stoppard play on the subject – Hannah has given herself a tough job. It involves setting out first the sheer scale of the question: we know that the brain contains not far short of 100 billion nerve cells and that there are something like 100 trillion connections traceable between them. We know how to track brain activity and to distinguish between different sorts of patterns in the brain depending on different states of mind and/or body. We know something of both the specialisation of particular areas of the brain and the extraordinary capacity of the brain to shift tasks sideways if the usual pathways are destroyed or obstructed – but we also know how a lot of what we would unthinkingly regard as intrinsic to ‘human personality’ depends on a complex of material interactions which are vulnerable to disruption and dissolution in the wake of trauma. We can construct images of feeling, in the sense that we can provide visual representations of when and how emotions and thoughts arise in the organ where they are registered, the brain. The rate of discovery is dizzyingly rapid; the complexity of the issues raised is at once exhilarating and intimidating.

All this Hannah sets out with exemplary clarity – and with obvious delight and enjoyment. She introduces us to the actual working of the brain, summarises

key experiments over the last few decades, touches briefly on the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence and by those experiments (like the notorious Libet experiment) that appear to put a fundamental question to our ideas about free will, and tantalisingly sketches the areas where the major philosophical problems arise, without attempting to offer an authoritative resolution. She very understandably wonders whether we really know what we mean in using the (very modern) term ‘consciousness’ in the first place, and ends by musing in an almost Zen-like mode that perhaps the simplest thing we can say about it is that it is what makes it possible for us to ask questions about consciousness.

Philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter (co-editors some thirty years ago of what is still one of the most varied, literate and provocative collections of essays, fictions and dialogues on the subject) got us used to thinking of consciousness as a sort of elaborate feedback loop: somehow or other, our performance of an activity – or, in less question-begging terms, the occurrence of a set of processes – becomes itself the object of that activity or those processes. A ‘first-person perspective’ is generated. Not only does something happen, but there is another level of happening in which there is an awareness of awareness itself. Unfortunately, there is no formulation of this that does not drop us deep into philosophical molasses. To say, as some thoughtlessly do, that consciousness is a ‘mistake’ imports a conscious mental category into what’s meant to be a strictly third-person, mechanistic and descriptive account. The very ideas of ‘giving an account’ could be said to be already tied up with mental happening. And even with the Libet experiment and its challenge to over-optimistic formulations about free will, it seems to be (as Hannah notes) impossible to dispense with the idea of some sort of choice and ‘self-moving’ if we are to manage our complex social relations and to make sense of our language. It may be evolutionarily advantageous to believe that we are free and conscious; yet this does not immediately tell us that we are ‘only’ automata and that such beliefs are fictive. There is something logically odd in any case about such a belief, as it would dissolve the very possibility of dependable research and any way of distinguishing between true and false belief. If there were true propositions, we could not know that we knew them, because our mental acts would be determined by non-mental factors.

We can go on elaborating the ‘Moebius strip’ aspect of all this; but the teasing conclusion is that – at the very least – evolution has produced a magnificently self-subverting conundrum in the cluster of phenomena we call consciousness. Hannah’s book does not try to cut the Gordian knots here, only to give us a feel for the vastly sophisticated research that has focused these questions in a new way. I for one look forward hugely to her next book, which is planned as a further treatment of issues around free will. But meanwhile, this is a splendid dish of hors d’oeuvres for that fuller discussion.

I confess to being less than completely happy with some of the more dramatic illustrations, which are not always easy to decipher or even to connect helpfully to the text. More’s the pity, given how very lucid that text is, even for a scientific illiterate like this reviewer. But forget that; this is a really impressive example of how scientific research can be made accessible and appealing, and it will fulfil a seriously important function in opening up such research to potential students as well as a wider interested public. R D W

The Master and Dr Critchlow testing brain connections at the Hay Festival in May 2018

The gardeners’ cottage