“BLISS was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”
said Wordsworth of the French Revolution. And I might perhaps feel similar
excitement if I were a young psychologist beginning a research career and I
received a copy of Andy Clark’s Being There.

Psychology has seen several revolutions in its short
lifetime—behaviourism, Gestalt psychology, information theory, cognitive
science, neuroscience—but no theoretical insight has ever seemed so likely
to change the landscape permanently as the one in this brilliant, although
technically demanding book.

What exactly is this revolutionary insight? Quite simply, the realisation
that instead of treating cognition as a purely cerebral activity, psychologists
will have to begin thinking holistically and interactively. In particular, they
must abandon their obsession with disembodied rationality. Like all animals,
humans are bodies first and minds second, and their brains have evolved not so
much to think as to do. Natural selection has never cared about mental activity
as such, only about how it results in biologically successful engagements with
the external world. The mind is by its very nature an “embodied and embedded
mind” whose role is to play “catch and toss” between the brain and the physical,
social or cultural environment.

The biological reality is, says Clark, that humans are “good at Frisbee, bad
at logic”. The very same mind that is so good at throwing and catching a Frisbee
is the mind people use for hunting, building, making love, bargaining and even
doing science. If we want to understand our minds at any of these levels, we had
better not forget how they evolved.

Though Clark is a professional philosopher, Being There is the most
unlikely philosophical text you can imagine. Rather than relying on fanciful
examples, Clark’s argument is almost disconcertingly practical and
down-to-earth—built around stories about slime moulds, termite mounds,
cockroach-emulating robots, tuna fish and master players of the computer game
Tetris. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, noted how revolutions are typically led by Young Turks in
revolt against the old guard. Clark comes across as the archetypal Young Turk,
engaging in a kind of punk philosophy, fresh and irreverent, but nonetheless
seriously committed to shedding new light on the big issues of mentality and
selfhood. His book is so good that, after recommending it, there is not much
more a reviewer can do but criticise it.

The writing is at times messy and repetitive. And there are still some major
problems with the theory that need to be resolved. In particular, with his
rejection of traditional ideas about human linear rationality, Clark fails to
deal adequately with the surprising fact that people actually are thinking
logically, that this may be precisely what makes the human mind so special
and—dare I say it—superior. Better at Frisbee than logic maybe, but
good enough at logic to make all the difference between being there and being
here.

Still, even if paradoxically it is our individually evolved logical minds
that are best placed to appreciate the ideas that Clark has thrown us, there can
be no question that they will be the better and bigger for it.

Revelation states: ‘No man might buy or sell, save he that hath the
mark, or the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom.
Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is
the number of a man, and his number is six hundred, three score and six.’

But why 666? Why is it ‘the number of a man’? And why, according to
some other ancient authorities, was the correct number not 666 but 616?
The questions have been endlessly debated. But so far as I know, no one
has noticed that a curious passage in Plato’s Republic may hold the answer.

In this passage, Socrates is discussing how the Guardians should organise
a breeding programme for the citizens: ‘Though the Rulers you have trained
for your city are wise, reason and perception will not always enable them
to hit on the right and wrong times for breeding; some time they will miss
them and then children will be begotten amiss.’

Fortunately, says Socrates, it can all be worked out by mathematics:
‘For the number of the human creature is the first in which root and square
multiplications (comprising three dimensions and four limits) of basic numbers,
which make like and unlike, and which increase and decrease, produce a final
result in completely commensurate terms.’

If that is all Greek to you, you are in good company, for even early
classical commentators found it difficult.

It is, however, now generally agreed that the number in question – ‘Plato’s
number’ – was 216. For 216 days is 7 months, which the Greeks regarded as
the minimum period of gestation (normal gestation being calculated as 216
+ (3 X 4 X 5) = 276).

Now, 216 is 63. The number 6 represents marriage and conception, because
6 = 2 X 3, and 2 represents femininity and 3 masculinity. Six is the area
(a square measure) of the well-known Pythagorean triangle 3-4-5. And 63
is the smallest cube that is also the sum of three cubes, namely the cubes
of 3, 4 and 5: that is, 216 = 63 = 33 + 43 + 53.

It was this last property (with hints of the others) that Plato was
apparently trying to specify. But lacking a word for ‘cubing’ the best he
could do, so scholars suggest, was to employ the clumsy expression ‘root
and square multiplications (comprising three distances and four limits)’.

If you are prepared to take that suggestion on trust (and there seems
no reason not to) then note, if you will, the following coincidences:

Revelation says: ‘For it is the number of a man’; Plato says ‘For the
number of the human creature is . . .’

Revelation gives the number as 666; Plato gives it as 6 X 6 X 6.

The alternative number of the beast is 616; the alternative way of expressing
Plato’s number is 216.

Plato wrote The Republic 400 years before the Revelation appeared. The
author of Revelation (possibly John the Divine) wrote in Greek and, though
relatively uneducated, he would probably have had at least second-acquaintance
with Plato’s ideas. I suggest he simply misunderstood Plato’s numeric formulation
and took the three sixes in the wrong combination. Other authorities then
corrected the last two digits, to put back the 16.

Nicholas Humphrey is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Cognitive
Studies at Tufts University in the US.