Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
Trevor has found this item in the newspaper about a jeweller who has made a baby rattle in the form of a Klein bottle for the newborn of a physicist friend.
'It says here that there is no distinction between the inside and the outside,' he says.
'That's right.' Rupert understands such things. 'A Klein bottle is the three dimensional equivalent of the Mobius strip.'
'But if the inside is the same as the outside, it wouldn't make much of a rattle, would it? All the beads or whatever would be on the outside.'
'It just means that beads wouldn't necessarily stay in there.'
'Not very safe for a baby,' Amanda says. 'It might swallow something and choke.'
Rupert is about to say that logically if you swallow something you can't choke on it but Trevor interrupts him.
'If the inside is the same as the outside, then if we're on the outside we are also on the inside.'
'Logically, yes.'
'Nothing clever about it at all then, really,' Trevor says. 'Any gin bottle can do that.'
Amanda is giving me a hard time about this blog. It's all the philosophising that has set her off. She has a principled objection to anything that is unremittingly abstract. Don't get me wrong. She's not a philistine or (particularly) anti-intellectual. She likes ideas, as long as they have a practical application, and she writes poetry, which is not too bad, despite (or perhaps because of?) its political themes. When it comes to anything that smacks remotely of metaphysics, however...
'Why a blog?' she asks.
'I don't know,' I say, evasively. 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
'But blogs are for people who have interesting lives or significant opinions.'
'Or significant lives and interesting opinions?'
'That, too.'
'Don't I have interesting opinions?' I am not sure I want to hear her answer to this.
'Well,' she says. And she gives me that look - out of the corners of her eyes with a little half-smile on her face. I know what she thinks. She doesn't have to say anything.
'People might be interested,' I say.
'Who?'
'I don't know.'
'How many people visited in the month of December?' This is a problem with Amanda. She understands statistics. She thinks they are important.
'Ten,' I say.
'Ten.' Her sigh is almost audible. 'And how many hundred people have you told about it?'
'I'm not sure. Maybe three?'
'Three hundred?'
'No. Three people.'
'You mean just me, Rupert and Trevor?'
'No, not you guys. You don't count.' I know as soon as I've said this that it's dangerous. You don't tell Amanda that she doesn't count. I hold my breath, waiting for the onslaught. It doesn't come, though.
'Why have you only told three other people?' she asks. She sounds very curious.
I'm in two minds about it, really,' I say. 'Part of me doesn't want anyone to read it. You know, it's very liberating being out there and being able to say what you like and not having to worry about what people think. The Internet's a very private place. Nobody could possibly find anything in all the crap there is around. If I wrote this stuff down in notebooks, anybody could come along and pick it up and read it.'
'Like who?'
'Well, the family. My wife, for example. It's much safer on the Internet.'
'But if you write anything, you have to have some sort of audience in mind, don't you?'
I could argue with this. I could suggest, along with Kit Wallace, that no, you don't have to have an audience and as soon as you start to consider one you distort the truth. This wouldn't wash with Amanda, though.
'Yes,' I say. I'm a coward.
'Well, you ought to be telling people about your blog. You ought to spreading the word far and wide.'
'I know,' I say, 'but I get embarrassed. I don't want to suggest to anyone that they might be interested in case they're not.'
'But you must believe there's someone out there who would be interested.'
'Of course,' I say. 'I believe that passionately.' Do I? Maybe I do.
'Who are you writing for?' she asks.
It's an interesting question. It takes me by surprise.
'Well,' I say, 'people like me, I suppose.'
She laughs, not unkindly, I have to admit. 'Then it's hopeless,' she says. 'There isn't anybody like you. You're unique.'
Should I be flattered? I'm not sure.
I got the expected reaction from Rupert to yesterday's blog - a rationalist diatribe, full of little scornful barbs about mumbo jumbo and wishful thinking. In Rupert's view, the brain and its functions can give a perfectly adequate explanation of any and all of the subjective qualities of experience. We have been through these arguments many times and I'm really not in the mood to rehash them again here. What struck me most forcibly, though, was the fact that we were talking about explaining something. Explanation, of course, makes an object out of the thing explained and, as I said yesterday, this doesn't work in the case of the subject of a point of view. As soon as it becomes an object, then it ceases to be a subject. It loses precisely those characteristics that I am most interested in. Given this, it is all too easy for Rupert to explain it away.
When I told Rupert that I'd only discuss this with him if he abandoned all attempts at an explanation, he stared at me astonished for a full second and then he turned and walked away. He's got a point. If I give up on explanation, then I have to give up all thought of understanding this problem. And yet understanding is precisely what I want.
They are all out of the house and I've got time to think, at last. The idea that keeps bugging me goes something along these lines.
According to Thomas Nagel, in his essay What is it like to be a bat?, being conscious means no more and no less than having a point of view, which involves, in its turn, a particular way of seeing the world. Nagel emphasises that the characteristics of a point of view are determined, to some degree at least, by the sensory apparatus of the thing doing the seeing. They are species dependent. He wants, therefore, to claim an irreducible difference between the characteristics of the point of view of, say, a bat (with its sensory system based on echolocation) and the characteristics of the point of view of a member of another species - a cat, say, which relies on sight and smell. The point of all this, in case you're wondering, is to give the subjective quality of experience an objective reality so that it can't be talked out of existence by people like Rupert, who believe that everything is, in principle, reducible to statements about physics or chemistry or biology.
There is another point to be made here, though, and one that is more interesting to my mind. Consciousness is an individual thing and so a point of view is unique to an individual. We can say that a point of view consists of two parts: an object, which is the focus of the point of view, and a subject - whatever it is that does the focusing. There's a problem here, though. The subject, when we start to think about it, turns out to be a very elusive beastie.
Consider this sentence; 'There's a bird in the tree outside my window'. How do I know? I can see it. So, we might say that the bird is the object of the point of view and I am the subject. We might want to express this situation as 'I can see a bird in the tree outside my window.' Now, though, we have a different case. The object seems to be me watching the bird. It consists of two things and not one. So is the I that is watching the bird the same as the I that is thinking about the I that is watching the bird? Merely, framing this question gives us a third, even more complex case, with something that is thinking about something that is watching something. But, stating this, we have a fourth case...etc.
What we want to say here is that the object changes but the subject remains the same. But what is this thing that remains the same? As soon as we focus on it, it becomes another object and not the thing the thing we want to focus on.
Jurgen has this problem in Black Earth/White Bones, when he struggles over the reference of the word 'I'. Not only does the reference change depending on the person who is using the word, it may also change depending on the object of the point of view. In the sentence 'I see a bird' it refers to a whole person. In 'I hate my body' or 'When I die my soul will go to heaven' , it refers to only part of a person and a different part in each case.
The word 'I' isn't much different to other words in this respect. It is just that somehow we want it to be different. After all, what could be more permanent, from my perspective, than my sense of myself? If I don't exist, then (again from my perspective) nothing exists.
In any case (so to speak) this business of writing sentences has really got nothing to do with the experience of looking at birds in trees. What we have here is a point of view, the object of which is the words on this screen. Should anyone ever read them, then that will bring into being a different point of view of which the same words will be the object.