Tom Stoppard’s new play shows there’s more to the mind than we think
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Version 0 of 1. There is a lovely exchange in Tom Stoppard’s play about consciousness, The Hard Problem, when an atheist has been sneering at his girlfriend for praying. It is, he says, an utterly meaningless activity. Right, she says, then do one thing for me: pray! I can’t do that, he replies. It would betray all I believe in. So prayer can have meanings, and enormously important ones, even for people who are certain that it doesn’t have the meaning it is meant to have. In that sense, your really convinced atheist is much more religious than someone who goes along with all the prayers just because that’s what everyone does, without for a moment supposing the action means anything more than asking about the weather. The Hard Problem of the play’s title is a phrase coined by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers to describe the way in which consciousness arises from a physical world. What makes it hard is that we don’t understand it. What makes it a problem is slightly different. It isn’t the fact of consciousness, but our representations of consciousness, that give rise to most of the difficulties. We don’t know how to fit the first-person perspective into the third-person world that science describes and explores. But this isn’t because they don’t fit: it’s because we don’t understand how they fit. For some people, this becomes a question of consuming interest. To illuminate consciousness, a play has to do so by showing the workings of character, as much as the clash of ideas It isn’t new, of course. A long piece by Galen Strawson in the TLS last month traced these arguments back deep to the 19th century: they must in fact arise naturally as soon as it seems that the scientific perspective can expose and anatomise everything interesting. There’s a very good treatment in Arthur Koestler’s novel of cold war Paris, The Age of Longing, where the villain is sustained by his faith in materialism. And to be sustained by a faith in the meaninglessness of faith is, I think, the inevitable destination of anyone who is determined to treat consciousness, free will, and all the other qualities of a first-person perspective as illusions. Strawson in his TLS piece quotes the philosopher CD Broad, who wrote in 1925 that behaviourism was “a theory which may be held at the time when one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an inmate of a lunatic asylum would think of carrying into daily life”. Denying the reality of consciousness entails also denying the reality of many of the emotions and insights that conscious life presents us with. It is, I think, inevitable that Stoppard’s characters argue not just about machine intelligence, but about the possibility of altruism as humans experience it, rather than as evolutionary biologists can analyse it. Consciousness can’t be reduced to brain mechanisms, says the heroine, and love can’t be understood entirely as self-delusion, or as a tarpaulin thrown over the horrible mechanisms of genetic selfishness to conceal our real motives from ourselves. Related: There are as many atheisms as there are gods | Andrew Brown Despite the brilliance, and indeed the humanity of the writing, The Hard Problem doesn’t really work as a play of characters. As a play of ideas it is really excellent. Stoppard does a wonderful job of unravelling tangles of meaning and holding philosophical puzzles to the light. But I’m not sure now that the hard problem can be understood purely in terms of ideas. The central problem of consciousness is that there is something it is like to experience the world, and this quality can only be apprehended by a being who themselves experiences the world. So a play which seeks to illuminate the reality of consciousness has to do so by showing the workings of character, as much as the clash of ideas. There’s a sense in which any play, or any work of history or fiction, is an examination of how consciousness fits into the world. We all know that it does, since we are interested in what it would be like to be those characters, or to have to deal with them, and if we are not interested the play does not work. In the end, the central character is too consistently good, and her goodness too easily spreads itself to those around her. The reason why that is unrealistic? Now that is the really hard problem. |