CHAPTER V

_Physics and Mind_

If a psychologist who was not a behaviourist had been listening to this conversation he might break in:

“Does the physicist seriously propose that we should try to leave mind out of our picture of the human organism? Even if we can eventually explain the unconscious purposes of the lower organisms as ends towards which they are driven by physical laws, yet man has the supreme distinction of a conscious mind, he can select his aim, and if he likes renounce it again for something else. You must therefore allow in your picture for the emergence of mind at some point during the course of evolution.”

“Wait a moment,” replies the physicist. “Your whole outlook towards consciousness betrays not only an anthropomorphic standpoint, but one limited to a single stage in man’s development. There is no single condition adequately described by the word ‘conscious’. There are in fact a great many different states of awareness which may grade into one another, or may form a series of distinct conditions. We do not know much about them yet, but their variety is most striking. There is the dim sentience as we awake from chloroform, the awareness of the dreaming state, the passive experiencing that accompanies any intensely rhythmic activity such as running. Again, quite different states are known in day-dreaming, intellectual concentration and the delicately-balanced semi-consciousness of creative thought.

“Consider especially the states of awareness associated with love, or with the supreme creative activities of the mind. Free-will, or the deliberate choice of a purpose, is completely lost in a whole-natured falling in love, as it is also in the artist’s need to follow some dimly-conscious intuition of a task he must attempt. At these important occasions free-will disappears before a sense of inner organic necessity.

“These examples seem to me to make it clear that ‘conscious purpose’ is not in any sense the ultimate or highest criterion of human behaviour, and that free-will need not be taken necessarily to mean the power to over-ride any laws of nature. In my view ‘free-will’ is simply the apparent characteristic of organic behaviour when no complete integration of the personality has been achieved and the mind seems to be able to oscillate from one purpose to another. We really have to deal in human beings with a whole series of forms of behaviour of increasing complexity and integration: reflex and instinctive actions, deliberate activity, and finally the intuitive whole-natured creative functioning which leads to ends which could not have been intellectually foreseen. To each of these must correspond a certain type of awareness, and in my view, a brain process of a definite degree of complexity. By analogy with our own experience of different modes of consciousness, we may be able to infer from the structure of the central nervous system of an organism what sort of awareness it can experience.

“Eventually we must expect to be able to give a complete scheme of all organic behaviour in terms of the organic processes and their laws, but none the less it will remain a great deal more convenient in some cases to refer to what happens to human beings by using words that suggest their conscious experience. The behaviourist denies the scientific significance of all but the very barest elements of conscious experience, but of course he has to start from the human perception of light and colour. Science cannot get on without ideas which obtain their whole meaning from the qualities of conscious experience, and hence the extreme behaviourist position merely arises from a prejudice which prevents clear thinking. But as a campaign to put more stress on the direct observation of what really happens to living beings in terms of physical movements, behaviourism can only do good by bringing more unbiassed knowledge about life.

“My own interpretation of the question may be put in this way. The thing that is given in nature is a process in time. According to its complexity and degree of co-ordination an organic process has different degrees of awareness. There is no one condition called human consciousness, because the human organism can function with different degrees of co-ordination, and if we ask if an atom in absorbing light is conscious, the question has no definite meaning. But in a few years those who are studying the physiology of the central nervous system will be able to indicate how many steps of synthesis and integration occur between the simplest cell and the creative thinker, and to each of these stages will be ascribed a mode of awareness. But below a certain degree of organic complexity this ‘awareness’, will cease to be anything that can be consciously imagined by man, e.g. below the dimmest sentience one might allow an undifferentiated knowledge of mere continuance, based in turn on the rhythmic pulsation of the elementary cells.”

“Your scheme is of course still rather vague, but in its main outlines it appears satisfactory”, replies the psychologist. “But tell me outright, can mind influence matter? If I understand you rightly, you suggest that matter certainly influences mind.”

“On the contrary, I do not! You are back at the meaningless questions on which philosophers have wasted much time. To ask if mind can influence matter does not mean anything until you know what you mean by mind and matter, and to a scientist that means knowing the laws they obey. Now, on the one hand, relativity and modern quantum theory indicate that there is no matter in the old sense of particles made of some unchanging stuff, and physical science recognizes atomic and other _processes_ as fundamental in the place of ‘matter’. On the other hand, you really mean by ‘mind’ one particular form of conscious activity: the deliberate selection of a purpose. Therefore to give your question real meaning I have to ask instead ‘Does the conscious selection of a purpose alter the physical processes going on in the human organism?’

“But that is an absurd question. It is like asking: Does a dint in the outside of a hat _cause_ an alteration in the shape of the inside of the hat? To which the only reply is that the dint on the outside is merely another way of describing the dint on the inside. There is no _causing_ of the one by the other any more than if you fold a bit of paper you can say that the crease on one side causes the crease on the other side. They are identical and the double method of description used in the question creates a meaningless problem.

“‘Conscious selection of a purpose’ is one way of describing a particular process, and after this process has occurred the brain will be different from before. The old theories of the correlation or interaction of mind and matter presupposed that they were separate things in themselves. The important questions become quite different when one realizes that mind and matter do not exist independently, but that they are both somewhat inadequate ways of describing certain _aspects_ of one organic process. The spatial aspect of organic process is called the physical organism. The temporal aspect of organic process corresponds to the content of its consciousness. The physical body is a group of spatial characteristics. Consciousness is a system of temporal elements; memory, anticipation, deliberate repetition, creative longing, hope and fear are all things set in time.

“Professor Alexander has said ‘Time is the mind of Space.’ He attempts to explain space and time by an anthropomorphic analogy. It is a very suggestive idea, though for the searcher whose goal is the nature of consciousness itself it is more valuable to put it the other way round: mind is the temporal aspect of process, body the spatial aspect. But it is very important indeed to notice that we have not yet found the adequate terms for describing these two aspects of process. Matter is unsatisfactory for the spatial aspect, because there are no unchanging particles. But nor is mind sufficient for the temporal aspect, because there is a temporal aspect to the combination of hydrogen atoms and to chemical and colloidal processes, and yet we must not speak of these as having mind. When the new words for these two aspects are invented they will form the foundation of the scientific synthesis which I am expecting.”

To which the psychologist may answer: “Well, at heart I have always been a thorough-going determinist like you, at least in dealing with my patients. Moreover I find it works, because I have always included in my picture of the patient a life-impulse of some sort, which can be influenced by my personality. Thus if the behaviour of my patient is absolutely determined, the conditions which determine what happens to him include some inner life tendency, and also the effects produced on him by all the people he meets.

“But if one attempts to formulate such an absolute determinism, or to apply it to oneself, one gets into deep waters, and I haven’t the courage to try it. It seems you must be right at bottom, but that only a god could believe it without its upsetting his mental balance or his sense of moral responsibility.”

“There I agree,” replies the physicist, “as long as one does not simultaneously revise one’s whole view of life in terms of this new organic knowledge. That is a very big task, but I should like one day to attempt it. Two things especially would attract me to such a revision of human values. One is that people who ought to know better still go about making moral judgments about their acquaintances. Now that we know how profound is the influence on a child of the treatment it receives during its first five years of life, moral judgments become rather old-fashioned and only show that the person making them has himself not yet learnt to find emotional fulfilment in healthier ways. An analysis of human behaviour along the lines of organic determinism might do something to show that moral condemnations, whether of bolshevism or of the sins of one’s children, are never effective unless immediately accompanied by positive example or creative suggestion.

“But there is another more attractive reason why I should like to attempt this transvaluation of values. If organic determinism is valid, then the artist’s aspiration to create is a natural consequence of some organic law. Creative aspiration may then be looked on as the natural destiny of certain human beings, though they no more know where they are going than did the two hydrogen atoms. But organic determinism allows us to understand why it is of no importance that the artist doesn’t know what he is going to create before he does it. It seems that in some matters our organic body is wiser than ourselves, or rather wiser than our very immature consciousness. When we have developed our consciousness by the discovery of the organic laws of our own natures we may be able to make human life more beautiful.”