The Ghost in the Machine (33 page)

It is now six o'clock in the evening, I have just had a drink and I
feel a strong temptation to have a couple more and then go and dine
out instead of writing this essay. I have fought myself over this
issue for the last quarter of an hour and finally I have locked the
gin and the vermouth in the cupboard and settled down to my desk,
feeling very satisfied with myself. From a deterministic point of view
this satisfaction is entirely spurious, since the issue was already
settled before I started fighting myself; it was also settled that
I should feel this spurious satisfaction and write what I write. Of
course in my heart of hearts I do not believe that this is so, and I
certainly did not believe it a quarter of an hour ago. Had I believed
it, the process which I call 'inner struggle' would not have taken
place, and fatality would have served me as a perfect excuse for going
on drinking. Thus my disbelief in determinism must be contained in the
set of factors which determine my behaviour; one of the conditions
for fulfilling the prearranged pattern is that I should not believe
that it is prearranged. Destiny can only have its way by forcing me
to disbelieve in it. Thus the very concept of determinism condemns
a man to live in a world where the rules of conduct are based on
As Ifs and the rules of logic on Becauses.
This paradox is not confined to scientific determinism; the Moslem,
living in a world of religious determinism, displays the same mental
split. Though he believes, in the words of the Koran, that 'every
man's destiny is fastened on his neck', yet he curses his enemy and
himself when he blunders, as if all were masters of their choice. He
behaves on his own level exactly like old Karl Marx, who taught that
man's mental make-up is a product of his environment, yet showered
invectives on everybody who, in obedience to his environmental
conditioning, couldn't help disagreeing with him. [24]

 

The subjective experience of freedom is as much a given datum as the
sensation of colour, or the feeling of pain. It is the feeling of making a
not enforced, not inevitable, choice. It seems to be working from inside
outward, originating in the core of the personality. Even psychiatrists
of the deterministic school agree that the abolition of the experience
of having a will of his own leads to collapse of the patient's whole
mental structure. Is that experience nevertheless based on an illusion?

 

 

The majority of participants at the symposium on 'Brain and Conscious
Experience', mentioned above, were of the opposite opinion. One of the
speakers, Professor MacKay, a communication theorist and computer expert,
whom one would expect to incline towards a mechanistic outlook, concluded
his paper as follows (his italics): 'Our belief that we are normally
free in making our choices, so far from being contradictable,
has no
valid alternative
from the standpoint even of the most deterministic
pre-Heisenberg physics. . . .'* [25]

 

* Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, one of the foundations of modern
physics, suggests that on the quantum level strict determinism
no longer applies.

 

MacKay based his argument partly on the indeterminacy of modern physics,
but mainly on a logical paradox to which I have already alluded:
determinism implies predictability of behaviour, which means that an
ideal computer, given all the relevant data about me, could predict what
I am going to do; but these data would have to include my belief that
I am free, which would have to be fed into the computer. At this point
the argument becomes highly technical, and I must refer the reader to
the original paper.

 

 

But arguments from logic and epistemology seem to me rather less
convincing than the hierarchic approach. The fixed canons which govern
the activities of a holon leave it a number of alternative choices. On
the visceral level these choices are decided by the closed feedback-loops
of homeostatic regulations. But on higher levels, the variety of choices
increases with increasing complexity; and the decisions depend less and
less on closed loops and stereotyped routines. Compare playing noughts
and crosses with playing chess. In both cases, my choice of the next
move is 'free' in the sense of not being determined by the fixed rules
of the game. But while noughts and crosses offers only a few alternative
choices, determined by simple, almost automatic strategies, the competent
chess-player is guided in his decisions by strategic precepts on a
much higher level of complexity; and these precepts have an even larger
margin of uncertainty. They form a delicate, precarious web of pros and
cons. It is this upward shift to higher levels which makes the choice
into a conscious choice; and it is the delicate balance of pros and cons
which lends it the subjective flavour of freedom.

 

 

From the objective point of view the decisive factor seems to me to be
that the 'degrees of freedom', in the physicist's sense, increase in
ascending order. Thus the higher the level to which decision-making is
referred, the less predictable the choices; and the ultimate decisions
rest with the apex -- but the apex itself does not rest. It goes
on receding. The self, which has ultimate responsibility for a man's
actions, can never be caught in the focal beam of his own awareness -- and
consequently its actions can never be predicted by the perfect computer,
however much data it is fed: because the data will of necessity always be
incomplete.* In the end, they will again lead to an infinitely regressing
series of loops within loops, and becauses inside becauses.

 

* This is related to MacKay's arguments and also to Karl Popper's
proposition that no information system (such as a computing machine)
can embody within itself an up-to-date representation of itself,
including that representation. [26]  A somewhat similar
argument has been advanced by Michael Polanyi on the indeterminacy
of the boundary conditions of physico-chemical systems. [27]

 

 

A Sort of Maxim

 

 

If we reverse our steps and move downward in the hierarchy,
decision-making is taken over by semi-automatic, then by fully
automatic, routines, and with each shift of control to lower levels the
subjective experience of freedom diminishes, accompanied by a dimming of
awareness. Habit is the enemy of freedom; the mechanisation of habits
tends towards the 'rigor mortis' of the robot-like pedant
(
Chapter VIII
).
Machines cannot become like men, but men can become like machines.

 

 

The second enemy of freedom is passion, or more specifically, the
self-assertive, hunger-rage-fear-rape class of emotions. When they
are aroused, the control of decisions is taken over by those primitive
levels of the hierarchy which the Victorians called 'the Beast in us',
and which are in fact correlated to phylogenetically older structures in
the nervous system (see below,
Chapter XVI
).
The loss of freedom resulting from this downward shift of controls is
reflected in the legal concept of 'diminished responsibility', and in
the subjective feeling of acting under a compulsion: 'I couldn't help
it . . .', 'I lost my head', 'I must have been out of my mind'. It is
once more the Janus principle. Facing upward or inward, towards that
unattainable core from which my decisions seem to emanate, I feel
free. Facing the other way, there is the robot -- or the beast.

 

 

It is at this point that the moral dilemma of judging others arises. How
am I to know whether or to what extent his responsibility was diminished
when he acted as he did, and whether he
could
'help it'? Compulsion
and freedom are opposite ends of a graded scale; but there is no
pointer attached to the scale that I could read. The safest hypothesis
is to assign a minimum of responsibility to the other, and a maximum
to oneself. There is an old French adage, Tout comprendre c'est tout
pardonner -- to understand all is to forgive all. On the above hypothesis
it should be altered to: Tout comprendre, ne rien se pardonner --
understand all, forgive yourself nothing. It sounds like moral humility
combined with intellectual arrogance. But it is relatively safe.

 

 

 

The Open-Ended Hierarchy

 

 

While the self-assertive emotions
narrow
the field of consciousness
(passion is not 'blind', but blinkered), the self-transcending emotions
expand
it, until the self seems to dissolve in the 'oceanic feeling'
of mystic contemplation or aesthetic entrancement. The self-assertive
emotions tend to constrict freedom of choice, the self-transcending
emotions tend towards freedom
from
choice in the peace that passeth
all understanding.

 

 

This un-selfing of the self seems to be the opposite of the quest for
total self-awareness. In the literature of mysticism, however, they
appear to be closely related. The aim of Hatha Yoga, for instance,
is to attain a higher level of self-awareness by getting viscera and
individual muscles under voluntary control. But these practices are
considered as only a means towards the end of attaining to a state of
'pure consciousness, without object or content other than consciousness
itself'.* In this state, the transient individual self is thought to enter
into a kind of spiritual osmosis with the Atman, the universal spirit --
and to merge into it. Other mystic schools attempt to reach the same end
by different routes; but all seem to agree that the conquest of the self
is a means towards transcending it.

 

* See The Lotus and the Robot, Part One.

 

I am aware that in this chapter I have indulged in some momentous
question-begging. I did not attempt to define consciousness which,
being the precondition of all mental activity, cannot be defined by
that activity; and I agree with MacKay that 'my own consciousness is
a primary datum, which it would be nonsense to doubt because it is the
platform on which my doubting is built'. [28]

 

 

We cannot say what consciousness is, but we can say whether there is more
or less of it, and also whether it is of a coarse or refined texture. It
is an emergent quality which evolves towards higher levels of complexity,
and is inseparably married to the activities of the brain. Classical
dualism regarded mental and bodily activities as different categories,
enlightened monists regard them as complementary aspects of the same
process; but this still leaves us with the problem how the two are
related. The hierarchic approach turns this absolute distinction into a
relative one, it replaces the dualistic (or double-aspect) theory by a
serialistic hypothesis, in which 'mental' and 'mechanical' are relative
attributes, the dominance of one or the other deriving from a change of
levels. This still leaves a host of problems unanswered, but at least it
poses a few new questions. It could, for instance, provide a new approach
to the phenomena of extra-sensory perception as an emergent level of
supra-individual consciousness -- or, alternatively, as an earlier
version of 'psycho-symbiotic' awareness, preceding self-awareness,
which evolution has abandoned in favour of the latter. But this is a
subject outside the scope of this book.

 

 

The related concepts of the 'open-ended hierarchy' and of 'infinite
regress' have been a recurrent leitmotiv in these pages. Some scientists
dislike the concept of infinite regress because it reminds them of
the little man inside the little man inside the little man, and of the
tiresome paradoxa of logic, like the Cretan liar. But there is another
way of looking at it. Consciousness has been compared to a mirror in
which the body contemplates its own activities. It would perhaps be a
closer approximation to compare it to the kind of Hall of Mirrors where
one mirror reflects one's reflection in another mirror, and so on. We
cannot get away from the infinite. It stares us in the face whether
we look at atoms or stars, or at the becauses behind the becauses,
stretching back through eternity. Flat-earth science has no more use
for it than the flat-earth theologians had in the Dark Ages; but a true
science of life must let infinity in, and never lose sight of it. In
two earlier books [29], I have tried to show that throughout the ages
the great innovators in the history of science had always been aware
of the transparency of phenomena towards a different order of reality,
of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine -- even such a
simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar. Once a scientist
loses this sense of mystery, he can be an excellent technician, but he
ceases to be a
savant
. One of the greatest of all times, Louis Pasteur,
has summed this up in one of my favourite quotations:

 

I see everywhere in the world the inevitable expression of the
concept of infinity. . . . The idea of God is nothing more than
one form of the idea of infinity. So long as the mystery of the
infinite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples be raised
to the cult of the infinite, whether it be called Brahmah, Allah,
Jehovah or Jesus. . . . The Greeks understood the mysterious power
of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the
most beautiful words in our language -- the word 'enthusiasm' --
en theos -- a god within. The grandeur of human actions is
measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who
bears a god within, and who obeys it. The ideals of art, of science,
are lighted by reflection from the infinite. [30]

 

It is a credo one is happy to share, and a fitting conclusion for this part
of the book.

 

 

I have tried to explain in it the general principles of a theory of
Open Hierarchic Systems (O.H.S.), as an alternative to current orthodox
theories. It is essentially an attempt to bring together and shape into
a unified framework three existing schools of thought -- none of them
new. They can be represented by three symbols: the tree, the candle
and the helmsman. The tree symbolises hierarchic order. The flame of
a candle, which constantly exchanges its materials, and yet preserves
its stable pattern, is the simplest example of an 'open system'. The
helmsman represents cybernetic control. Add to these the two faces of
Janus, representing the dichotomy of partness and wholeness, and the
mathematical sign of the infinite (a horizontal figure of eight), and
you have a picture-strip version of O.H.S. theory. Readers less given
to the picturesque are again referred to the summary of principles in