Patrick House (Wildfire)
TRANSLATION is a difficult task. Words mean different things to different people, not only between languages but within them. This is particularly true of difficult concepts in the arts and sciences: terms like altruism and love spur huge debates between people of all backgrounds.
Patrick House, a neuroscientist concerned with the mind, makes clear how far-reaching this issue is in his new book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness. The 鈥渨ays鈥� are like different translations of the underlying concept of consciousness, writes House, and the number takes its inspiration from a translations of Wang Wei鈥檚 Deer Park, a poem where even the words for colours have ambiguous meaning.
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House relies on this ambiguity of translation in his engaging discussion of what consciousness is. Is it a simulation? A narrative? An accidental consequence of the long evolutionary road we have taken? For House, it is all of these and none. What matters is how we look at consciousness, and the biases we take along the way.
As with other complex ideas, debate around what consciousness is, how the mind works and whether the mind and brain are separate isn鈥檛 new. The mechanistic problems are, for the most part, of less concern to House than the overarching question of how we might define consciousness at all 鈥� and the tools we can and should use to do so.
In each chapter, he returns to the story of Anna, a teenager who laughed during brain surgery when a doctor artificially stimulated her neural activity. The story forms a kind of window through which we are meant to view these varying 鈥� and sometimes quite out-there 鈥� ideas of consciousness, such as whether it is actually a simulation, much like a video game. One approach sees him exploring the neurological events leading to Anna laughing; elsewhere, he uses the anecdote to examine how thoughts, feelings and language coevolved. Each way of looking at consciousness shares this understandable hook, and so the connection between the surgeon鈥檚 stimulation and Anna鈥檚 laughter is examined in 19 different ways.
House shows great ability as he translates these complex ideas 鈥� philosophical, neurophysiological and evolutionary 鈥� into simple language by adjusting his writing style between chapters and making good use of this deceptively simple example. I do have a few minor complaints, though. Because many of the ideas House discusses are so complex, and so old, their overlap can make the chapters seem a bit repetitive. We are, after all, covering a whole 19 ways of looking at consciousness. This makes it hard not to let out a groan when we hear about Anna鈥檚 surgery for the fifteenth time, even if the perspective is new and interesting.
House also attempts to find an overarching explanation of consciousness that blends the hypotheses he discusses. Whether this is successful is a second and more challenging issue. At the outset, House invites us to think of something approaching the true translation of Deer Park鈥� whatever that means 鈥� as a blend of the 19 translations presented in the 1980s. Consciousness may, analogously, be a combination of the 19 views that House presents. But whether that combination is possible 鈥� much as whether it is possible that one word in a poem simultaneously means green, blue and black 鈥� is left for the reader.
None of this, however, prevents Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness from being an informative read that makes us look at ourselves and the human mind in a series of fascinating ways.
Jonathan R. Goodman is at the听Leverhulme Centre for Human听Evolutionary Studies
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