Endnotes to chapter 4 - Dawkins (1989)

p. 59 Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.

....The philosopher Daniel Dennett has offered a theory of consciousness that takes the metaphor of computer simulation further. To understand his theory we have to grasp two technical ideas from the world of computers: the idea of vitual machine, and the distinction between serial and parallel processors. I'll have to get the explanation out of the way first.

A computer is a real machine, hardware in a box. But at any particular time it is running a program that makes it look like another machine, a vitual machine. This has long been true of all computers, but modern 'use-friendly' computers bring home the point especially vividly. At the time of writing, the market leader in user-friendliness is widely agreed to be the Apple Macintosh. Its success is due to a wired-in suite of programs that make the real hardware machine - whose mechanisms are, as with any computer, forbiddingly complicated and not very compatible with human intuition - look like a different kind of machine: a virtual machine, specifically designed to mesh with the human brain and the human hand. The virtual machine known as the Macintosh User Interface is recognizably a machine. It has buttons to press, and slide controls like a hi-fi set. But it is a virtual machine. .....

I now turn to the other background idea that we need to import from computer science, the idea of serial and parallel processors. Today's digital computers are mostly serial processors. They have one central calculating mill, a single electronic bottleneck through which all data have to pass when being manipulated. They can create an illusion of doing many things simultaneously because they are so fast. A serial computer is like a chess master playing twenty opponents but actually rotating around them. Unlike the chess master, the computer rotates so swiftly and quietly around its tasks that each human user has the illusion of enjoying the computer's exclusive attention. Fundamentally, however, the computer is attending to its users serially.

Recently, as part of the quest for ever dizzying speeds of performance, engineers have made genuinely parallel processing machines. One such is the Edinburgh Supercomputer, which I was recently priviledged to visit. It consists of a parallel array of some hundreds of 'transputers', each one equivalent in power to a contemporary desk top computer. The supercomputer works by taking the problem it has been set, subdividing it into smaller tasks that can be tackled independently, and farming out the tasks to gangs of transputers. The transputers take the sub-problem away, solve it, hand in the answer and report for a new task. Meanwhile other gangs of transputers are reporting in with their solutions, so the whole supercomputer gets to the final answer orders of magnitude faster than a normal serial computer could.

I said that an ordinary serial computer can create an illusion of being a parallel processor, by rotating its 'attention' sufficently fast around a number of tasks. We could say that there is a virtual parallel processor sitting atop serial hardware. Dennett's idea is that the human brain has done exactly the reverse. The hardware of the brain is fundamentally parallel, like the Edinburgh machine and it runs sofware designed to create an illusion of serial processing: a serially processing virtual machine riding on top of parallel architecture. The salient feature of the subjective experience of thinking, Dennett thinks, is the serial 'one-thing-after-another', 'Joycean' stream of consciousness. He believes that most animals lack this serial experience, and use brains directly in their naive, parallel-processing mode. Doubtless the human brain, too, uses its parallel architecture directly for many of the routine tasks of keeping a complicated survival machine ticking over. But in addition, the human brain evolved a software virtual machine to simulate the illusion of a serial processor. The mind with its serial stream of consciousness, is a virtual machine, a 'user-friendly' way of experiencing the brain, just as 'Macintosh User 'Interface' is a user-friendly way of esperiencing the physical computer inside its grey box.

It is not obvious why we humans needed a serial virtual machine, when other species seem quite happy with their unadorned parallel machines.....

Adapted from Dawkins, R. (1989) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. pp 278-280


What do you think?

Read the last line in the extract and say why you think the mind needs a serial virtual machine.


Vocabulary

attending to something = dealing with something, seeing to something

atop = on top of

bottleneck = something that constrains flow

dizzying = something that amkes your head spin, that makes you dizzy

farming out = giving work to someone else

orders of magnitude = multiples of ten

Transcript

Analysis: Emotion, cognition and consciousness
October 10, 2003 from Talk of the Nation/Science Friday IRA FLATOW, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY.
I'm Ira Flatow.
What is consciousness? It's a state of mind most of us take for granted; we don't even think about it. But there are people who do think about and study consciousness. Some are researchers, some are philosophers and some are poets. And the juncture where they meet, the meeting of those minds on the subject of the mind, is what we'll be exploring this hour.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has used the tools of his profession, brain imaging, to study the human brain in action. He's shown that feelings and emotions are necessary for decision-making and, in fact, for our survival. He also maintains they play a key role in our construction of self; that conscious awareness arises from the brain and its network of neurons.
This hour we'll talk with Dr. Damasio about what the science of neurology is telling us about consciousness. We'll also talk with German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, whose theories of the self seek to bridge the gap between philosophy and science. And we'll talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham about how the process of writing a poem is also the process of constructing a conscious experience. Could it be that she's known all along what the neurologist and philosopher are trying to prove? We'll find out.
My guests today are joining me from the second Utah Symposium in Science and Literature on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. So if you'd like to join our discussion, give us a call. Our number, 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. And if you're in the audience at the university, you can step up to the mike with your questions.
Let me introduce my guests. Antonio Damasio is the author of "The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness," published by Harcourt in 2000, also "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain," out from Harcourt this year. He's an adjunct professor at The Salk Institute and the Van Allen distinguished professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Welcome back to the program, Dr. Damasio.

Dr. ANTONIO DAMASIO (University of Iowa): Good to be here. Thank you.

FLATOW: Jorie Graham is the author of several collections of poetry, including "Never," published in 2002 by HarperCollins, and "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994," winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She's the Boylston professor of oratory and rhetoric at Harvard University in Cambridge.
Welcome to the program.

Professor JORIE GRAHAM (Harvard University): Thank you.

FLATOW: You're welcome.
Thomas Metzinger is the author of "Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity," published this year by MIT Press. He's a professor and head of the department of philosophy and the director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Welcome to the program.

Professor THOMAS METZINGER (Johannes Gutenberg University): Thanks for inviting me.

FLATOW: Well, you're welcome.
Dr. Damasio, let me begin with you because, you being a scientist, we're sort of on familiar territory with you a little bit in this program. When we talk about consciousness, when we talk about feelings, you have said what feelings are--you can speak with confidence about what feelings are, where they come from, how they happen, what they are made of biologically. How can you be so sure?

Dr. DAMASIO: Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I am not so sure. But the fact is that we can relatively easily today--with the tools we have available in neuroscience, we can find out about what is going on in the brain and what is going on in an organism as a whole when we are engaged, for example, in emoting or when we are engaged in feeling an emotion. So it is possible to studying this phenomena from the point of view of what happens in the behavior of an individual, from the point of view of what that individual is experiencing and can tell us he's experiencing, but also from the point of view of what is going on in the brain at that same moment, because we have these new tools that allow us to look--in an indirect way, but nonetheless to look--into what the brain is doing at that moment.

FLATOW: Tell us how you do that. How do you actually monitor and what kinds of tests do you give your subjects to see what's going on in the brain?

Dr. DAMASIO: Well, there are a variety of tools, some old, some very modern. The old ones you probably have heard about for a long time. They used to be known as brain wave tests. And, in fact, they use the electrical activity of the brain which is captured by an apparatus that allows you to find out how that activity is distributed in the brain at a given time. But there are very modern tools. For example, tools such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography that actually allows to look into the structure of the brain and into the activity patterns of the brain at a given moment. These are very modern.
In fact, as you've probably heard, the Nobel Prize for medicine in physiology was just awarded to two of the developers of magnetic resonance imaging. And they allow you still an indirect but nonetheless far closer view of what is going on both in terms of the structure, because you can reconstruct the very anatomy of the brain at the computer screen and create an image from it, but also allows to determine the level of activity that the brain is having in a particular part, in a particular system, thanks in large part to the fact that there are differences in the blood flow in different areas of the brain when we are engaged in different tasks.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Well, now that you see that the brain is lighting up when you give it different tasks to do, how do you make the jump from watching the brain operate to talking about consciousness? How do you then--How do you define consciousness?

Dr. DAMASIO: Right. Well, the first thing that's important to know for your listeners and for all of us is that it cannot do any of this without having prior theory and prior hypothesis. The way science proceeds is not really by having an instrument to measure something willy-nilly and expect (technical difficulties). It proceeds by having a prior idea of what may be going on, creating a hypothesis about a certain mechanism and then using these modern tools or any tools to find out whether or not your hypothesis is correct. You make predictions and you check, and you may be correct or incorrect or somewhere in between. That's the way it works.
So we begin, to answer your question specifically, by having an idea of what we want to study--for example, the fact that in consciousness we're interested in understanding, how is it that we have a notion of existence, the notion that we are in a given moment, the notion that we can perceive what is going on and that we can refer that to something that traditionally we have called the self? So in dictionary definition, you have to talk about, how is it that we are aware of ourself and of our surroundings? And then we dissect this idea a little further and we ask, for example, questions about what a certain area that we presume is involved in the construction of, say, the self will be doing in a certain task, in certain circumstances?
And we can also do something quite interesting, which is ask ourselves, how in a certain patient, a neurological patient for example, who has lost the ability to be conscious, the ability to have a sense of self--what has been lost in that patient? And you can--that is a very important means, perhaps the golden means, of understanding what is going on in the brain, especially when you start your inquiry, is how is it that a person with damage in a particular part or parts of the brain will be deprived of the ability to have a self, the ability to emote, the ability to have feelings, the ability to use language?
And that is a very important question to ask, and lo and behold, we have answers from those questions when we study neurological patients. And very often that leads the way into the further investigations we can undertake when we have all these modern tools that we just talked about.

FLATOW: Yeah. And you've said before when we've spoken that the self is related to the monitoring ability of our life functions, that we're sort of unconsciously monitoring everything that's going on around us all the time and making judgments about them?

Dr. DAMASIO: That's quite correct, Ira. What really happens, from our perspective now, is that if we did not have the possibility in our brains to represent in great detail and in myriad fashion what is going on in our bodies, we probably would not be conscious individuals. We can actually say that we are conscious and have a self as a byproduct of this enormous ability of our brains to monitor the very different functions of our bodies. And the magnificent thing is that the brain is doing this literally for every department of our organism.
It's monitoring what is going on in the chemistries of, for example, our endocrine systems and our metabolic regulation, but it is also monitoring what is going on in our viscera--for example our heart and lungs and gut and the very skin that forms the membrane and limit of our bodies. And it is monitoring also what is going on in the muscular activity. So, for example, when you move about or when you have a facial expression of a given emotion, all of this is being represented in the brain whether you want it to or not.
I like to say that the brain is the captive audience of our body because it really has--it's entirely at the mercy of this constant barrage of signals that represent the body. And it is that very fact, this ability to represent continuously, even when we are doing all sorts of things and having all sorts of ideas that are not about our body, that probably forms this basic connection, this anchor that allows us to generate a self and that allows us, in fact, to maintain a continuity of self over a lifetime, as we all know we do.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Jorie Graham, you're a poet. You have a different perspective on the idea of consciousness. And you have a poem called "Prayer" in your most recent collection. Do you think you could read it for us?

Prof. GRAHAM: Sure, Ira. I'll try. I'm now thinking of it as a act of monitoring my own bodily functions, but I...

FLATOW: I may want to ask you--we have a break coming up in about exactly three minutes. I don't want you to get into your poem and then have to interrupt you for the break. But I want to come back and have you read your poem. But how do you react to what Dr. Damasio was saying? Are you now monitoring your bodily functions more?

Prof. GRAHAM: Well, there is a way in which the imagination is an instrument for trawling through an experience in the world with a sort of charged emotional, intellectual openness, attention that Keats called negative capability. And he did add `without irritable reaching after fact and reason,' meaning by that, that you don't necessarily know what you're looking for but you know that you are looking. And it's a certain quality of attention that the term `monitoring' seems to capture very well.
It does seem crucial in a poem that--and the best poems exhibit this. One only has to think of someone like John Keats--that what is being monitored is not only a phenomenon in the outside world, but what one's own heart is feeling, what one's own muscles are doing, the entire list that Tony just underwent for us. And the poem is, in fact, an undergoing of an experience. It's not the report of an experience.
The speaker in a poem is the protagonist of the poem, not the narrator of an event. So it is very much an--as Stevens would say, a poem is an act of the mind in the process of finding what will suffice. He also says that a poem is the cry of its occasion, and he doesn't say that it's the report of its occasion or the interpretation of its occasion. He says it's a reaction to and an undergoing of, which is what the dramatic term `cry' would lead one to believe and feel.
And in that sense, it's very moving to hear Dr. Damasio's descriptions because it's not fair to say that poets knew it all along, although one certainly would have to say that from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Keats, there's no doubt that these people knew how to access consciousness and to create very complicated constructed selves. There is sort of an illusion and a fascination with biographies of poets and one thinks that the John Keats who is the dying young man is the John Keats who is writing the "Ode to a Nightingale." They're actually obviously not the same.

FLATOW: Jorie...

Prof. GRAHAM: And the construction of these persona of the speaker is something which all the techniques of poetry are in service of.

FLATOW: All right. We're going to take a short break and come back with Jorie Graham, Antonio Damasio, and Thomas Metzinger will jump into the fray. And stay with us. We'll be right back with a nice poem. Don't go away.
I'm Ira Flatow, and this is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)

FLATOW: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
We're talking this hour about consciousness with a poet, a philosopher and a scientist. My guests are Jorie Graham, author of several collections of poetry, including "Never." She is the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Thomas Metzinger, author of "Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity," out this year from MIT Press. Antonio Damasio, author of "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorry and the Feeling Brain," out this year from Harcourt. Our number: 1 (800) 989-8255.
Jorie, you were going to read us a poem. Can you set this poem up for us at all, give us any background?

Prof. GRAHAM: Sure. It takes place--the speaker is standing over a dock railing looking at minnows. You have to imagine in the poem an original shock much further out at sea which would be a kind of metaphor for something like a big bang that gives way to a series of ever outward expanding wakes and they finally reach this particular set of railings and pilings, and they carry minnows within them and in their current.
I'm going to read a poem which is in two parts, although it's all one block, and the first half is all one sentence with nesting parentheses and attempts to, in fact, capture an act of consciousness which has so much simultaneous activity in it, which is why I use parentheses and brackets to sort of indicate the amount that one is thinking about while one is also feeling and doing and looking and remembering. And they cannot really be carded out from each other.
And then at a certain point there's a turn in the poem and a series of pressures that the bodily experience of the witnessing of the minnows compels the speaker to suddenly undergo, and they become feelings and then emotions and then they lead to a kind of thinking, and then eventually to a sense of a moral or ethical predicament, which I think is something that Dr. Damasio maps quite brilliantly in his work. Obviously we just do it instinctively. I'll read the poem "Prayer."
`Over a dock railing I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a miniscule muscle but also without the way to create current, making of their unison, turning, re-enfolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison, making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest factions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally arriving boat wakes there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself. It has those layers, a current, a real current, though mostly invisible, sending into the visible minnows' arrowing motion that forces change. This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed more and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say, "Take this. This is what I have saved. Take this. Hurry." And if I listen now, listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot, of course, come back, not to this, never. It is a ghost posed on my lips, here, never.'

FLATOW: Very pretty.
Dr. Damasio, you're a fan of Jorie Graham so much that you have one of Jorie Graham's poems in front of your book "The Feeling of What Happens." So she's expressing ideas that speak to you?

Dr. DAMASIO: Oh, absolutely. You know, I think Jorie is in the tradition of many poets that have, in fact, as she pointed out, been there before we were. It is not that scientists interested, for example, in self and consciousness are breaking ground in this field without others, and especially poets, having treaded there before. I mean, you think of Shakespeare and you think, for example, of the soliloquies of "Hamlet," and what is that but, in fact, an enormous attempt to grasp what is going on in the internal monologue of a conscious self.
And you also find wonderful--you know, there's a passage that I just wrote here as we were talking, when Jorie talked about poets having been there. Wordsworth, for example, talking about emotion in relation to--in one of his poems, the "Tintern Abbey" poems. He talks about `sensations sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart.' Now this is one of my preferred verses, almost as much as Jorie's verses, because here he is honing in on something that people at that time did not even know, and that is that there were chemical molecules being poured into the bloodstream to affect changes in our body. And he is referring to it very specifically when he talks about `felt in the blood' and also `felt along the heart,' referring, of course, to something that we've known for millennia and written about, which is the fact that when we emote we very often have changes in our heartbeat.
So there is this great tradition, and Jorie Graham and other poets who are generally described as metaphysical poets have actually added on to that. For example, in the beautiful poem she just read, I underlined the following line: `What you get is to be changed.' This almost describes to me what is really happening when we construct a self. Self is about the constant change that is occurring in our bodies. And we only develop the self and we only know that we exist because we have this way of capturing the fact that our body has just undergone change as a result of interacting with the world or interacting with our own structure.
So you have a very good example of this connection between poetry on the one hand and science, which is not terribly surprising because good art in general and science are really aiming at the same thing. We really want to know about human nature in one way or another. The immediate purpose tends to be slightly different, but in the end, that's what distinguishes great science and great art.

Putting it all together

Girl with Pearl Earring by-passes our ‘virtual machine’


Reading and listening to stories is a serial experience, whereas looking at certain paintings is a parallel one. Vermeer was capable of putting all the facets of his daughter in one single image. When an artist does this it is known as ‘simultaneous vision’ or ‘ambiguity’. When we look at the painting all these messages are received simultaneously by the brain and stored.

Our response is emotional. When asked to express what the painting communicates to us requires the transformation of this data into a serial form of language. What we consider ambiguous art, it appears to be a form of communication that appeals directly to the parallel processor nature of our brain. That is it transcends the virtual machine and goes straight to our CPU. When this occurs we receive aesthetic pleasure. We could say that it has the same affect as Nature has on the brain; it overwhelms us with information and signals.

Computer analogy - Answers

Serial and Parallel Processors and the Virtual Machine (after Dawkins, 1987)

Another interpretation can be derived from the work of philosopher Daniel Dennett and his work on human consciousness. Dennett developed a means to explain consciousness from an analogy of the way a modern computer works. The computer can be divided into two basic components: the Central Processor Unit (CPU) and the User Interface. The CPU is the complex inner workings of a computer. Most computers have serial processors, that is they work on tasks one after the other at high speed. It operates so quickly that we have the impression that it is working on these jobs simultaneously. That is it gives us the illusion that it is parallel processor. Parallel processors are effectively several serial computers connected together in order to complete a single task. The task is broken down into smaller parts and each one is dealt with at the same time. The parallel processor is clearly much faster than its serial counter part.

The User Interface is what we see on the screen. It is composed icons and buttons, which we could call the “virtual machine”. When these virtual keys on the screen are pushed or moved with the curser through the mouse, they activate many complex operations with in the CPU. Without the virtual machine the computer would be only accessible to the specialist. The Virtual Machine renders the computer “user friendly”.

The mind operates on two different levels. The first is the simultaneous reception and analysis of information in its surroundings. For example we all possess at least five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. Our sense organs receive and process data constantly and simultaneously: that is, it works in a parallel fashion.

The second is best described as our thoughts or inner voice, and it is analogous to the virtual machine. Our inner voice puts into words what we are feeling and the analyses of these sensations. Our thoughts occur in a serial way, occurring one after the other, and giving us a commentary on what is happening around us. It can also enter into an internal dialogue and make decisions thus giving the body instructions on what to do and how to act in response to a certain situation. The inner voice is aware of itself and its surroundings, in other words, it is our consciousness. It seems that the key to this question is language. Information passed through language is serial.

The fact that we can serialize thought and transform them into words means we can pass on interpretations and descriptions of our environment, give instructions and generally share hard earned knowledge. This leads to the group gaining greater control over the environment. Additionally, there is considerable advantage in sharing knowledge with kin. This would boost the chances of continuation of parental genes, which is thought to be the essential goal of evolution. Furthermore, Pinker (1997) argues that coherence and eloquence may be interpreted as a sign of intelligence and thus a factor that determines mate selection.

The Law of Constancy, Abstraction & The Toll on the Individual

1) The Law of Constancy

According to neurologist Semir Zeki of London University, the brain searches for constancy in an environment that is ever changing. It does this so that it is able to recognize objects irrespective of variations in light, perspective, distance. this is also true for situatins and people. The brain can recognize an individual regardless of their emotion and a situation irrespective of its mood or ambiance.

In other words, the brain seeks what is the essence of things. For example, the essence of an object should enable you to identify that object under any circumstances. In order to do this the essence of an object or person or situation should somehow contain all variations possible, and yet still be recognizable. It is this recognizable state that the brain seeks. The question that now interests us is, what would these essences created by the brain look like?

Zeki gives the example of the early cubist painters such as Picasso and Braque. Picasso's Démoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is the first example of 'simultaneous vision'. The face of the figure on the far right is distorted. Here the artist has attempted to portray several angles of the face on the same plane. A very dramatic example of this is in Picasso's later work, Frauenbildnis. This technique was used extensively and is exemplified in the painting Man with Violin.

Both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso produced paintings using similar colors and techniques. It is as though the subjects had been broken up and the pieces then scattered onto the canvass. It was the hope, according to Zeki, that the spectator would be able to reconstruct the image.

This technique has very limited success and most observers of the painting would not know what the subject was without the title. So, for Zeki the cubists failed to extract and represent the essences, although others may well have succeeded both prior to and after their period.

Vermeer’s Girl with Pearl Earring is the essence of the artist’s daughter. That is, it contains all the emotions she is capable of displaying in a single two dimensional representation.

When this painting is shown to a class of students asked to describe what the girl is feeling and thinking, there is rarely any agreement. Answers are usually extremely variable. They range from happiness, boredom, surprise, fear, love, to sadness and on the verge of tears. How is this possible?

When students were asked to explain their answers, their classmates were able to see what they meant. The most frequent explanation given by students is that the girl reflects the emotion expressed or felt by the spectator. This means that the way we interpret the painting is ever changing.

However, Zeki’s explanation is that we are able to see a certain number of expressions in the painting and agree with other people, but not entirely. It is the lack of complete agreement that reveals genetic variability from individual to individual. He comments that according to Charles Darwin any organ that shows such a high degree of variation is one that is evolving very quickly.

In regard to Vermeer's famous painting Zeki's explanation is unlikely given the fact that people can usually see what others see. If interpretation was genetically determined I cannot imagine that this would be possible.


The Law of Abstraction

Abstraction is the process of generalization; that is, it is the reduction of a complex forms to their most basic elements. It differs from the search for constancy described in the previous unit, in that it is concerned with global reality whereas constancy is concerned with the particular.

In a sense abstraction is the search for the “essence of global reality”. With this we could explain everything. Physicists are in search of the formula that will explain everything, the silver bullet or Holy Grail of science. Such a formula will take into account the elements that conform to the general models but notably those that do not, the outlying points.

The easiest way to understand this is the abstract paintings of landscapes. Landscapes are extremely complex. Each one is replete with millions of particular elements. These include its geology, physical geography, its natural history which is comprised of all its biological components including plants and animals and so on. If it is an urban landscape or “cityscape” it includes architectural and urban planning features. It may also comprise elements relating to social phenomenon, such as the living conditions of different social groups. It is impossible for the brain to focus on all these 'particulars', simply because it has a limited capacity. Instead what it does is it tries to get a general impression of the assembly or the totality of all the objects and life forms present. It is this that painters from Cezanne to Mondrian attempted to do.

The abstract artists focused on either/or the line, the edge and the circle believing that these were the most basic of forms. Malevich believed that his paintings could be understood and appreciated by all people irrespective of culture. This was because the basic forms that were contained in his paintings were innate. What did he mean by this?

In order to understand this it is necessary to go into to some philosophy. We will firstly look at Plato’s world of perfect ideas followed by Aristotle’s perfect reason. this will be the subject of the next lesson.

The toll on the individual

Creation of synthetic ideals generates malaise. This is because the individual is surrounded by particulars, and not elegant generalities or abstractions of reality that our minds create. These ideals give us a discontentment with reality and lead to the pursuit of perfection and betterment, but also theymay engender consumerism.

Zeki believes that art exists to provide relief. In reproducing these ideal forms we can a last see them in the real world.

Analysis of Jorie Graham's 'Prayer'

Vocabulary

Nouns

Minnow: small silver colored salt-water fish
Dock: a wooden structure designed to receive boats.
Railing: top horizontal part of a wooden barrier.
Unison: At the same time e.g. to sing in unison
Dockside: area beside a dock
Downdrafts: currents of air or water going downwards
“Upswirls”: to swirl upwards, to swirl is to move in a graceful arc or spiral
“Arrowing” : gerund of the verb “to arrow”
Longing: a strong lingering desire for something often unattainable
Thread: filaments twisted together for sewing

Verbs

To freight: to carry
To sway: to change the direction of something moving, to bend something over, in incline something, to influence
To hit resistance: to encounter an opposing force
To burst: for a pressurized sac or container to break open and the contents spread outwards
“To arrow”: to move like an arrow
To long: verb of ‘longing’
To glisten: to shine when wet
To thread: to pass through something in a way comparable to passing thread through cloth when sewing
To sift: to put something through a sieve



Analysis


This is not so much a difficult but a complex poem that merits your attention as it will not disappoint you. It is a beautiful study of the way our minds work as well as a study of our perceptions of time and eternity. It both describes the conscious mind as both serial and parallel, but sets out its preoccupations with self, chaos and death.

The poem can be divided into four parts, each one interconnected. The first is an account of what the speaker saw. The second is a reflection on this. In the third part the speaker observes herself giving a sort of verbal conclusion to her experience and the reflection it has provoked. Then she thinks about what she has said to herself. She concludes that nothing was actually said, there were no words. It was an event, an idea.

Let's look at each part in greater detail.

a) Over a dock railing, ...arrowing motion that forces change

The speaker, the protagonist in the poem, is observing minnows over a dock railing. She notices how they move with the current and in fact make the currents visible. They are not strong enough to make current with their bodies. They shine in the light. The currents and the school of minnows are disturbed by a boat wake. This make them change direction and go with the force of this wave.

b) ...this is freedom...the aftershocks of something at sea.

What the protagonist has seen now becomes metaphorical for her notions of faith and may shed some light on the poem's title. The line "...this is freedom." possibly refers to the exhilirating sensation the fish might feel as they are pushed by the boat wake. This introduces the ambiguous notion of 'freedom'. (See also 'The Red Queen' principle in evolutionary theory). Where the minnows do not control the direction inwhich they swim, as they are not strong enough, but are carried by the current and the boat wake. In calling the boat wake "...the force of faith", her meaning could be that the sensation of freedom comes when allowing oneself to be carried or eve controlled by a force. The fish, like the protagonist, are powerless to change or resist the force. This "force of faith" whatever it may be, does not deliver the purity she desires. Instead when it comes it causes her to change in some permanent way.

c) What you get is to be changed ...the aftershocks of something at sea

In this the third part the metaphor and the image of what she saw become completely interwined. She speaks about the nature of this 'force of faith' on her life again using the analogy of the boat wake and the minnows. In the use of the phrase "...each glistening minute..." she compares each minute in our lives to each of the hundreds of tiny fish. At this point the metaphor and the experience of the minnows are the same thing for the protagonist.

"..., through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, ..."

She goes on to say that just like the boat wake that carries the minnows, so the eternal force of faith and nothingness can be felt in each minute of our lives.

"...the aftershocks of something at sea..."

In this line the poet tells us that for her the present, past and future are moving vertically, upwards and downwards, just like the minnows, in an ocean of eternity. The boat out at sea, we could say it represents God, passes phantom like and produces a wake that pushes the protagonist into another direction and changes her irreversibly.

d) Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind...Never

Her comment, "...hands full of sand...sift...through in the wind..." is almost the beginning line of another poem on the same subject. The grains of sands are the equivalent of the minnows which are metaphors for time, the wind the same thing as the current, which is a metaphor for waves of eternity created by the boat, which is a metaphor for God.

"...I look in and say take this, this what I have saved..."

The poem takes a turn now. She reveals that she is aware of her experience and her reflections that result from it. She also exposes that there are two inner voices in our minds and that we are capable of an internal dialogue.

"...this is what I have saved..."

This line is difficult to interpret. The poet seems to be speaking about the overarching metaphor summarized in terms of sand described above, which she offers herself as a mental landmark.

"...And if I listen now? Listen I was not saying anything..."

Now the speaker listens to herself and realizes that there were no words spoken. She questions the internal dialogue as to whether they are constructed of words or just ideas. This is reminiscent of "mentalese" as Steven Pinker calls it the "mindscript" of E.O.Wilson.

In the NPR 'Science Friday' interview Antonio Domasio interprets these last statements as that we know we exist because we are experiencing constant change. Our brains, he says, are the captive audience of our bodies. They monitor the world with its ever changing light and sounds and it is this that reminds us constantly that we exist. 'The self' is a constantly changing and evolving construction of all these sensations. Here the self can be seen as a river or current that is always changing, and as ancient Greek natural philosopher Heraclitus says, "Everything flows," and "we cannot step twice into the same river".

I am free to go

This line gives the impression that the poet's contemplation has provided her with a kind of liberty, perhaps from delusion and illusion of previously held beliefs about time and eternity. But she knows that this moment of clarity, a sort of ephiphany for her, has left her changed. It is an affirmation of selfhood.

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

This is one of the most mysterious lines in the poem. What does she mean by it? Here are a couple of ideas. You are more than welcome to add your own.

The 'ghost' could be the non verbal idea that is later translated into words. Graham may see this idea as spirit and I have the impression it is the substance of what we understand to be soul. Because it is pure idea and not made of words, it is not "serial" but "parallel" (you will understand what his means after listening to Group 2) and to a certain extent transcends time, giving it an almost eternal character. This may be exemplified by the last to words, Here: Never. The idea was both on her lips and never on her lips, much like an apparition which is paradoxically both there but not really there.

Alternatively, the closing line restates the idea that the internal monologue/dialogue is there to interpret and communicate deeper and more precise sentiments which are largely beyond words. But in being consistent with the poem's multilayered meaning, the ghost also may also allude to the Spirit which is imparted to her, "...posed on my lips", by the passing force that has answered her prayer.

What do you think?

Add your own interpretation to the last line of the poem by leaving a comment.

References

Gaarder, Jostein (1994) Sophie's World. Chapter: 'The Natural Philosophers'. Berkley Signature Edition. New York

Pinker, Stephen (1994) The Language Instinct. Chapter 3 'Mentalese'. HarperCollins, New York.

Wilson, E.O. (1998) Consilience. Chapter 6 'Mind'. Abacus. London.

What art reveals about consciousness

Girl with Pearl Earring by Jan Vermeer painted around 1664. It reveals much about ourselves and the way we see the world.

Part 1:
Instructions

Look at the painting and write down what you think the girl is feeling. Compare your answers with the group, and then try to explain the results.

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Use the language of speculation and hypothesis:

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Modal verbs:

"The results of the class survey of the painting may be/ might be/ could be explained by ...... I think this because...."

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Expressions:

"It is possible that the results of the class survey are due to....."

Homework

In class you noticed how nearly everyone interpreted Vermeer's painting 'Girl with the Pearl Earring' differently.

In the next class we will try to explain this. The class will work in two groups.

Group 1

Listen to the first 22-23 minutes of the NPR broadcast from 'Science Friday' entitled The Passionate Mind. I'd like you to listen in particular to what Jorie Graham and Antonio Domasio have to say about consciousness and how it is expressed in poetry. Your task is also to present and interpret Jorie Graham's poem entitled Prayer to the rest of the class. The transcript of this part of the talk has been posted. Use it while you listen if you like. There is a commentary of the poem for you as well, just follow this link: Prayer Commentary

Group 2

Read the extract from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene' (Endnotes pp.278-281). Explain to the class Daniel Dennett's computer analogy of consciousness. Use the following terms in your explanation where possible: The virtual machine, Serial processor, Parallel processor, Mouse, Keyboard, Screen, Central Processor Unit, Monitor, User friendly.

Once you have done this answer the What do you think? question at the end of the extract.

Class Seminar

In class we will conduct a seminar in which student representatives will expose their findings, and then as a class try to explain the phenomenon exhibited by Vermeer's famous painting.

Answers

Either click on the following link Answers or on the 'Blog Archives 2007' link at the top right corner of this page. For further clarification go to Ariadne's Thread and read the post The Ecology of Vermeer.

Part 2:

Instructions

The class should be divided into three groups. For homework read the article Artistic Creativity and the Brain by Semir Zeki . In your group prepare a talk on one aspect of it (see the list of topics below). Illustrate your talk with examples of paintings mentioned in the article. You should also speak briefly about the artist and the history of the paintings you show.

Group 1: The Law of Constancy

Group 2: The Law of Abstraction

Group 3: The Toll or Price on the Individual

A written summary of the main points of the article can be found at the following post: Answers

References
Dawkins, R. (1989) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D.C. (1989) The evolution of consciousness. In Reality Club (ed J. Brockman). New York: Lynx Publications
Kennedy, X.J & Gioia, D (1994) Literature: an introduction to fiction, poetry and drama. Seventh Edition. Longman, New York
Pinker, S (1997) The Big Bang. In Evolution (ed. Mark Ridley). Oxford Readers. Oxford University Press
Zeki, S. (1999) Inner Vision: the exploration of art and the brain. Oxford University Press.
Useful websites
Girl with Pearl Earring: an in depth study
The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Haag, The Netherlands.
Nature, Art & Language
© All Copyright, 2007, Ray Genet