#whatireadovershabbat Tim Parks's Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness (NYRB, 2018)
Is everything I experience just in my head? That’s the question neuroscience has said “Yes!” to for at least the past half-century. The problem with this enthusiastic affirmation is everything it leaves unanswered.
If the brain—or mind, in a running debate—generates the color, taste, sound, and odor that fills our experience of a reality that is, in fact, devoid of any of these qualities, what’s to say there’s anything out there at all? And if you prefer not to go down that rabbit hole, then there’s the question of how neurons “firing” in the head actually translate into experience. Since neurons and electrical impulses are evidently not a rainbow, or a sweat-drenched back, or these words on a screen, what is the exact mechanism that makes one the other, or gives its illusion?
The debate over questions like these rages on, and for every school of thought there are several different theories. But not an inconsiderable number of researchers think we are far from any possible answer. The science just isn’t there. A few theorists even believe that there are things the brain simply can’t know about itself. Though more is known than ever, we remain a mystery to ourselves.
Could this sense of mystery, however, be a form of self-flattery? This is the deflating question Tim Parks asks in Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness. Parks, inspired by his friend, philosopher-roboticist Riccardo Manzotti, thinks the answer to the mystery of consciousness is right in front of us. Much of the appeal of neuroscience, he argues, is that it doesn’t provide us with this answer, keeping human beings in a realm of specialness, exceptionality. Only we defy the ability of science to explain things.
Parks, following Manzotti, offers a theory of consciousness that dispels this air of mystery. Consciousness isn’t located in the brain or mind—or in the body as a whole in its relation to the world, as the minority “enactivist” position holds. Consciousness, experience exists in objects. If a Kermit the Frog plush looks green, feels velvety to the touch, and bends with minimal pressure, then, in Parks and Manzotti’s view, it is green, velvety, and bendable. Those qualities aren’t supplied by the brain, they are the object’s actual qualities, and experience is located in that object, as we apprehend it. The brain is an instrument of apperception, not of conjuring.
The obvious advantage of this view is that it accords with typical experience. It’s a theory consonant with life rather than the counterintuitive theorization of scientists with research budgets, tenure woes, lab mice, and a highly specialized vocabulary. Manzotti’s theory, Parks emphasizes, gives consciousness and its understanding back to ordinary people. And in the process demystifies the peculiar experience of being human. That’s not to say there are no problems left to solve, but the answers aren’t locked away inside us, having to do, for instance, with some mysterious matter, as one philosopher speculates, which we can’t yet see or identify.
Of course, the arrogance of a novelist to counter the prevailing theories of consciousness is notable. Parks’s deference to Manzotti, whose credentials seem impeccable, helps his case. So, too, does the form the book takes. A thickly detailed personal narrative of his meetings with various prominent neuroscience theorists and researchers, Out of My Head locates itself squarely in Parks’s experience of his own life and consciousness. At least as these are mediated by language, a topic to which he turns repeatedly, even challenging Manzotti and others to attend to language as an overlooked component of their theories. The examples he’s able to bring from his interaction with the world frequently give much-appreciated concreteness to the abstract claims bandied by the researchers. (Depending on how you feel about the reflections of a sexagenarian on his relations with his 31-year-old wife, you will find many of these examples either charming and intriguing or, as I gather others have felt, off-putting and distracting.)
Much about the ideas and narrative of Out of My Head, I’m unable to justice to. But the most important of my omissions is Parks’s and Manzotti’s explanations of how dreams and time function in their theory of consciousness. These phenomena have vexed many a philosopher, and indeed some of the researchers Parks speaks to indicate they’ve laid them aside as too perplexing to be productive. Whether or not you buy the theory Parks is peddling, or if the science ever backs it up, the explanation he gives of dreams and time is a tour-de-force. It’s hard to imagine viewing these things the same way after.
Maybe that’s the most wonderful thing about this book. It changes how you can understand consciousness. You don’t have to buy the theory, but once you’ve heard it, you won’t forget it. And if Parks and Manzotti are in any sense right, then the world becomes a different, though rather familiar, place. Personally, I’m enjoying the new view.
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