Consciousness, Self-awareness, and C.P. Snow's Two Cultures
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| A gate protein, also called an ion channel, that controls flow of potassium ions (K+) across the membranes of nerve cells. White: protein chains; green: K+ ions; blue and red: electric fields due to charged groups on the protein surface (blue is positive, red is negative). |
All of our senses depend on proteins like this one to transmit information to our brains. While each sensory apparatus has its own specialized way to detect and respond to an input like light, sound, touch, taste, or smell, the end result is a series of nerve impulses that travel to the brain, where, in some still mysterious way, interpretation occurs.
A nerve impulse travels along a nerve fiber, carrying the signal of something seen or heard, by sequential opening and closing of gates like this one. The blue and red surfaces indicate the presence of positive and negative charges on the protein, and shows the reach of their effects. Transmembrane charge, like that of a concentration gradient, controls the opening and closing of this gate by providing opposing or attracting charges to change the protein’s shape. The green potassium ions are shown occupying the selective entry area that permits entry of potassium, but rejects other ions.
Jorge Luis Borges: "Borges and I"
Read the essay at the end of this page.
Third-person processes, first-person experiences
In an earlier Reflection, I told a story about seeing a loon silhouetted against winter ocean and sky. It was a scientific story about the cascade of physical, cellular, and molecular events that transform light diffracted from the scene—somehow, magically—into personal awareness. But within this story, I found two mysteries, the photon and the self, which seem to defy our efforts to explain, at least in the way scientific theories aim to explain.
In the essay “Borges and I,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges reflects playfully on one of these mysteries, the self. He explores two selves, public and private. The private Borges (“I”) sounds like a typical scholar. He likes maps and certain authors, and you can readily imagine him in a library, quietly poring over beloved readings, or walking beside a stream, thinking about connections among the works he has read. On the other hand, the public Borges is the teacher, the public speaker, the author who might sign his books at a bookstore, or appear on late-night television to talk about his latest work. The private Borges recognizes himself more in the books he loves than in the books the public Borges writes. He disapproves of the public Borges’s “perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying ” things that he quietly discovered out of real interest and love of scholarship. Of course, all along, we are reading the public Borges’s well-known essay about the private Borges, an account that may falsify and magnify the concerns of the private one—what are we to believe? Which is the real Borges?
Any teacher readily recognizes these two selves: the quiet, studious one who reads or perhaps does research in a beloved subject, but who also scores the exams, outlines the lecture, collects or designs the slides, and rehearses; and the animated performer in the lecture hall, drawing a diagram on the board, moving the cursor across an illustration, spinning and zooming protein models on the computer screen, asking or answering questions, handing back exams, and striding confidently back to the office. A self has many facets: public and private; in vacant, pensive, and expansive moods; energetic and exhausted; shaken by external events (looking out over Portland, Maine on 9/11/2001 at a sky absolutely free of jet contrails, thanks in part to security breaches at Portland’s airport, just two miles away from my office), and confident about the task at hand. At times you look back at your own rash, maudlin, inspired, or otherwise unexpected action and ask, “Was that me?” Sometimes when I read a passage in my crystallography book, I ask, “Who wrote this? I don’t remember having this command of the subject.” Of course, I must admit that I find it very well done.
The idea of self implies being able to distinguish self from other. A recent issue of Science (1) contains a report claiming to bear on this question. The results support the notion that perceived ownership of a body part, such as your hand, relies in part on the action of neurons in the pre-motor cortex of the brain, two regions lying just below the surface of the brain just forward of the ears, above lines running straight back from the eyes. These regions become active when there are correlations between the sensory inputs of vision and touch. For example, if you see, in a video monitor, an arm being touched, and at the same time, you feel the touch, you are strongly convinced that the touched arm is yours. Seeing the touch but not feeling it can convince you that the arm is not your own. Feeling a touch, but seeing an arm with nothing touching it, can also convince you that the arm you see is not yours.
If this cluster of cortical cells is uniquely activated when correlation of sensory stimuli reveals self-ownership, then it is tempting to say that the pattern of nerve action in the pre-motor cortex is equivalent to, or is the neural correlate of, the feeling that you own the arm. The next logical experiment is to artificially stimulate these cells to see whether one feels self-ownership in the absence of sensory inputs.
But in fact, our knowledge of increased activity of this cluster of cells tells us little about the feeling of ownership. With feelings, as with the self (another feeling?), we are in a mysterious realm. Even if we can recognize in full detail the pattern of brain activity that corresponds to recognition of a body part; even if we can evoke convincingly that feeling of recognition by artificially producing the full pattern of brain activity, the self that is recognizing a part of itself is still a mysterious entity.
Why? Why is this kind of explanation inherently unsatisfying? Part of the answer must be the vast conceptual gap between the feeling itself and the molecular and cellular foundation of that feeling. Self-recognition does not feel like a bunch of cells receiving correlated inputs of light or mechanical stimulation; it does not feel like neurotransmitters flooding into synapses, causing ion channels to open; it does not feel like electrical impulses propagating along axons.
The feeling and the explanation seem to be not only two different things, but (like science and religion) two entirely different kinds of things. And some sort of insoluble mystery seems to surround the kind of thing that feeling is. Where, in all this molecular and cellular machinery, is the owner, the me who withdraws my arm suddenly after reaching over the candle for the biscuits? The stinging arm is certainly mine, but the ownership of the burned arm does not evoke images of conversations between pre- and post-synaptic nerve cells—anything but. And that’s why your friends who majored in literature might never be satisfied with structural biology’s explanations of feelings, or of responses to art.
If feelings and the correlated nerve actions are two entirely different kinds of things, and the latter are the kinds of things that scientists delight in exploring, then what kinds of things are feelings? About all I can say is that feelings are the kinds of things that writers write about, musicians compose about, artists paint about; and they are the kinds of things evoked in us by convincing writing, moving music, and stunning art. The scientists run around stamping out ignorance about feelings where they can, leaving the true mystery of them undisturbed. On the other hand, artists and their ilk seem to take delight in rubbing our noses in the mystery of our feelings, being much more interested in the experience of feelings than in explanations.
Scientists want to understand feelings at the molecular level; writers and their kin want to experience them and evoke them in others. You would think that never the twain could meet, but fortunately they can, and do. They meet in scientists who go home at night and read Emily Dickenson or Jorge Luis Borges, or go to the opera. They meet in poets who set aside an unfinished piece and sit down to read Scientific American. Are there any such folks around today? Well, you have read this far, so you are apparently interested in readings and subjects like this one, and in the creative works that are the heart of many of these Reflections. And, as I hope I have convinced you, the people who produced those delightful works know more than just a little science. Maybe C.P. Snow (2) was wrong when he argued that science and the humanities are two isolated cultures that fail to understand each other. At least for those who know that there is only one Borges, maybe there is really only one culture.
And maybe the creativity that we find throughout our One Culture is much the same on either side of perceived boundaries between science and the humanities.
And maybe the creativity that we find throughout our One Culture is much the same on either side of perceived boundaries between science and the humanities.
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(1) Science, August 6, 2004, p. 875.
(2) C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959)
•••••
Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges
(translated from the Spanish by Antonios)
It’s to that other one, to Borges, that things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause, one could say mechanically, to gaze at a vestibule’s arch and its inner door; of Borges I receive news in the mail and I see his name in a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live so that Borges may write his literature, and this literature justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other. Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.
Spinoza understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Borges, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognise myself less in his books than in those of many others, or in the well-worn strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’s and I will have to conceive of other things. Thus my life is a running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.
I do not know which of the two is writing this piece.
••••••
•••••
Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges
(translated from the Spanish by Antonios)
It’s to that other one, to Borges, that things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause, one could say mechanically, to gaze at a vestibule’s arch and its inner door; of Borges I receive news in the mail and I see his name in a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live so that Borges may write his literature, and this literature justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other. Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.
Spinoza understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Borges, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognise myself less in his books than in those of many others, or in the well-worn strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’s and I will have to conceive of other things. Thus my life is a running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.
I do not know which of the two is writing this piece.
••••••
