RE(AD) ME; RE(AD) MYSELF

by JUSTIN LEIBER

The motto for this essay is from that old inversionizer, Oscar Wilde: "Nature imitates Art."

I write, as Robert Graves put it in his Oxford poetry lectures, both matador and judge, both as a novelist and as philosopher and literary theorist. Considering the present aggressive stance of literary theorists, detonating, denuding, and deconstructing the humble scrivener's offerings as if works of fiction were the shoulders of midgets on which the giants of critical theory may grind their jackboots, you will think me rash to confess to the jejune offense of novel writing, but I mean not only to confess but also to explain and justify--even, indeed, to revel--in the inversion of fiction and life that is our lot, revel, that is, in an inversion both more enduring and more significant than that between fiction and literary theory.

The familiar analogy, "I can read him like a book" (along with its pedestrian communication's miniature, "Do you read me?") suggests not only a paradoxical paradigm of intelligibility but also an intriguing conception of what it is to understand a human being, what it is to find out what it's like to be a particular human being, what it's like to have consciousness and a subjective existence. If you are particularly transparent-your real motives and your inner life unusually, even naively and vulnerably, open to view-then you meet the standard of accessibility established by written narratives, whose leaves of consciousness may be turned by any eager reader. More deeply, what goes on in reading a narrative is structurally analogous, or even identical, to what goes on in understanding, in grasping, what it is like to be a particular human being, whether a stranger, a friend, or most intriguingly, oneself.

My use of the phrase, "what it is like to be" as an evocative criterion for the nature of subjective experience, for being a person, for having consciousness, thought, and feeling, I owe to the philosopher Thomas Nagel, and particularly to his essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"2

Professor Nagel is not in the least interested in bats, nor in what it's actually like to be one; rather, like Montaigne in his "Apology for Raymond Sebond," he is interested in mocking the human pretension, particularly of scientists championing mechanistic and physicalist expectations, to hope to understand our universe. So Nagel wants to insist that (1) bats have a lively inner life, that there definitely is something that it is like, being a bat, but that (2) we have not the slightest hope, no matter what research we do, of ever knowing what being a bat is like. Though Nagel suggests that flounders and wasps may not have a similarly intense, conscious inner life, in his more recent book, The View from Nowhere, Nagel outdoes Montaigne's championing of ant consciousness by writing, "We will not know exactly how scrambled eggs taste to a cockroach even if we develop a detailed objective phenomenology of the cockroach's sense of taste."3 Since Nagel has nothing to say in defense of his blithe assumption that there is not nothing at all but some exact way, among many possible ways, that scrambled eggs taste to cockroaches, one wonders whether he is equally committed to thinking that there is a way that green algae tastes to paramecia or a way that sandy soil feels to oak tree roots or a way-why not?-that sharp rocks feel to Niagara Falls.

Nagel's slightly more prolix attempt to make it out that bats have a lively but inexplicably alien inner life is through insisting that bats navigate by listening to high-pitched echoes of their own shrieks: it is this perceptual experience that Nagel finds incomprehensible. Either the bat's experience is that, like the blind human's, of perceiving spatial distributions (while indeed unconsciously hearing sounds), or the bat's experience is that of hearing high-pitched echoes, and, from these echoes, quickly deducing the location of various objects. In other words, the distinction between conscious cognitive processes and unconscious cognitive processes is absolutely central to the notion of inner life, to the notion of what it is like to be a something or other. But while bats obviously have sensory and cognitive processes, which is simply and only to say that their brain neurons fire in systematic ways, coordinating sensory inputs with motor outputs, I do not think the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes has any purchase whatsoever. What is it that makes such a distinction operative?

Familiarly, Rene Descartes, who founded neurophysiology and the attempt to explain animal, and most human, behavior in a mechanical and finite fashion, had an answer, albeit a dramatic and problemposing as well as solving one. As we know, he proposed that consciousness, the mental site of thought, emotion, and will, is an independent, indivisible, dimensionless unity, the mind's I, exemplified in the famous Cogito, a substance quite independent of the mechanical and physical body to which it is in some dubious fashion attached. So, for Descartes, the metaphysical distinction was simple. We have, indeed we are, minds, somewhat fortuitously attached to bodies, while animals are simply bodies. That's why, for us, there is a clear distinction between purely reflexive, or unconscious, processing, and conscious, which is to say mental, experience. Descartes exemplified this contrast by distinguishing our purely reflexive or routine actions from those to which we consciously attend or initiate. Indeed, Descartes championed the rather startling theory, subsequently propounded without attribution by William James, and recently taken up by split brain researchers such as Michael Gazzaniga, that our emotions are complicated perceptual inferences by our conscious minds about our bodily conditions.4

Since Descartes held that both human and animal bodies were machines, he naturally had to consider how we might tell whether some other human body that we might encounter was, indeed, conscious and minded, or was rather an unconscious finite machine of meat or metal. This was no trumped up issue for Descartes, for in his earliest writings he speculates about the construction of electromagnetic metallic statues that might duplicate the physical behavior of humans.5 It would be simple enough, so Descartes proposed in the early seventeenth century, to construct a robot which would look like a human and walk about like one and react to pressure on its structure with simple vocalizations such as, "I am in pain," etc. Descartes did, however, arrive at what he considered the one true test for distinguishing an automaton from a genuinely conscious being. The test was simply whether the thing in question could, much as we do, "arrange speech in various ways, in order to reply appropriately to everything that may be said in its presence."5

Descartes's test, as I am sure you realize, is virtually the same as what we today call the Turing test, one proposed by Alan Turing in a 1950 article as that which, if a computer could pass it, that is pass mentally as a human, would prove that the computer could genuinely think.7 The only difference here between Descartes and Turing is that Turing presumably thought that we will soon construct such a computer, while Descartes felt this to be unlikely.

You will notice that Descartes's one sure test emphasizes linguistic ability. Indeed, he often remarked that animals might surpass some or all of us in many respects but that even the "lowest of humans" natively possessed this infinitely productive language faculty, while all animals lacked it. What I think we may now conclude is that Descartes may well have confounded the sign and the essence. That is, Descartes took the ability to carry on an infinitely various conversation as the sign that one had a (substantial) mind. Perhaps, rather, the possession of such a linguistic ability is simply all there is to having a mind, all there is to being conscious. Further, as we functionalist Cartesians say these days, the mind is not an independent substance, rather it is the abstract, nonphysically and independently describable software realized in the hardware brain.

In my first novel, written, not unnaturally, when I was a Visiting Scientist at Chomsky's MIT department of linguistics and philosophy, I dramatized the new Cartesianism in the most blatant way I could imagine. If the mind is the abstract program and data store of the hardware brain, then it ought to be possible to offload it onto disk and, at some later time, onload it onto another brain. Mind implant is what I called it. So I imagined my main character awaking, postoperational, to find an unfamiliar body. I could not resist having my male-body-remembering protagonist awake with a female body. The problem was to get used to the situation. Again, not unnaturally, the title of the novel was Beyond Rejection.8

Having got my protagonist on stage I had to figure out what to do next. Inevitably, perhaps, I found myself embarked on a version of the oldest and most powerful story of identification. What could be more natural than to have my protagonist go looking for the former body? A body, I came to see, that was stolen by an ancient mind that needed a healthy new body. In the penultimate chapter my protagonist finally finds the villain, indeed wakes up from a drugged sleep to find herself being raped by the old body. She kills the old body. And so I found myself compressing Sophocles's Oedipus: Sally Forth, for so she comes to call herself, is raped by himself and kills himself, thus, if you will, setting herself free from the lure of an older bodily identity. (As the eccentric use of pronouns may suggest, the English language pronomial system had its effect on the story.)

In the final chapter I break one of the most basic rules of popular fiction. My main character wakes up to find that, while she has had the mind implant all right, the rest of the story has been a psychodrama, arranged by psychodramatists called harmonizers, a psychodrama designed to get Sally Forth beyond rejection, mind and body, she.

By this time in the writing, as so often happens to writers, I had the feeling that my character was writing the lines as much as I. Why not? We all need a little help from our friends. There simply is no mechanical causal question here.

Indeed, Sally even decided to address the reader directly, asking whether the reader felt disappointed to learn that her experiences had only been inner experiences and that the physical killing, etc., had not occurred. After all, Sally pointed out, the reader knew that this was a work of fiction, so the physical events described could not have occurred whether or not the last chapter was left in. (Parenthetically, these final paragraphs blew the fuses of Judy-Lynn Del Rey, at Ballantine Books, and she demanded that I cut them.) But, to continue, if the physical events did not occur, what about the mental ones? Does Sally Forth, as a minor member of the community that includes Oedipus and Sherlock Holmes, mentally exist?

Michael Gazzaniga has noted that the conscious, language-using left brains of split-brain patients can create, without blushing or any sign that they know they are fabulating, the most marvelously concocted explanations for actions taken by the disconnected right brain. What Gazzaniga proposes is that this is what the conscious, language-using module is doing all the time in normal humans. In keeping with the Cartesian tradition, consciousness tries to perceive and explain what is going on with the much larger unconscious part ot our cognitlve activity. It is concocting a story, often a very good story, about what is going on, rather than running everything. If this is true, then in a sense my consciousness is just as much or even more a narrative fiction than Sally Forth. Indeed, again invoking Oscar Wilde, we have probably learned how to have an inner life by listening to stories. In the beginning there were Homer's characters, and only after a time, ourselves.

The pronouns tell this inverted tale, too.

When I got to the point, in my third-person narrative, where Sally had to wake up at the beginning of her story, I had to shift into first person. Why? Because if I had remained in third person I would have had to sex the pronouns that referred to him/her/it. But the whole point of the narrative was that my protagonist had a problem about selecting a sexual identity. So I had to go into first person.

It was something of a shock for me to learn that Beyond Rejection could not possibly be translated into an Arab language like Berber. In Berber, first-person pronouns are necessarily sexed, as are second and third person as well. My character cannot exist in Berber, for my character cannot tell the self story in such a language.

eforced me to . *ba es c
lgned hyoperation ctt
protagonist goes loemas t I personal ilmaking the
unfamiliar body of a different sexalso an ung i ma ed rea

This was first read to Intertextualities: the 13th Annual Conference on Literature and Film, Florida State University, 22-24 January 1988. The final, unspeakable words were a machine contribution.This paper was first published by Philosophy and Literature

1. Robert Graves, Oxford Addresses on Poetry (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood,1969).
2. Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435-50.
3. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 25.
4. Michael S. Gazzaniga and Joseph E. LeDoux, The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum Press, 1978). See alsoJoseph E. LeDoux, "The Neurology of Emotion," esp. pp. 302-303, in Mind and Brain, ed. Joseph E. LeDoux and William Hirst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
5. Rene Descartes, Oeurres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1908), vol. 10, p. 231.
6. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 116.
7. Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind (1950). Also in The Mind's 1, ed. D. Hofstadter and D. Dennett (New York: Random House, 1984).
8. Justin Leiber, Beyond Rejection (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980).