a novel by David Lodge
Secker & Warburg, 2001
ISBN: 0 436 44502 6 (Hardback)
Price GBP 16.99
352 pp.
Reading David Lodge's novel Thinks..., I came to the words "It was the Second Sunday of Lent, I discovered." Looking at my calendar, I discovered it was the Second Sunday of Lent. The coincidence was appropriate, since Lodge has never shied away from placing coincidence at the heart of his plots. In this as in other respects, Thinks... is a characteristic work, exploring Lodge's preoccupations with sex, death, religion and the lives of academics. What makes it peculiarly interesting to readers of AISBQ is that here he also sets out to address questions about consciousness, as framed by AI and cognitive science.
The central characters are Helen Reed and Ralph Messenger. Helen, newly widowed and good-looking, is standing in at the University of Gloucester to teach prose narrative to a group of wonderfully intelligent and nice MA students. Ralph, the charismatic and womanising head of the University's Centre for Cognitive Science, is experimenting with tape-recording his own vocalised stream of consciousness. When they meet, Ralph decides that he would like to extend his study and explore Helen's consciousness, as well as her body. Magus-like, he gives her an introduction to some of the themes of cognitive science, aided by an extraordinary mural depicting crucial computational and thought experiments such as Searle's Chinese room and Schrödinger's cat. Intrigued by both Ralph and his studies, Helen tries to give some of these ideas a new perspective by pursuing them in her writing class, while Ralph pursues his own scientific and unscientific goals. Helen's equilibrium is rocked when she discovers a coincidental link between one of her students and her dead husband; Ralph's world too is shaken when the legacy of a youthful indulgence catches up with him. As we wait to discover how their relationship will develop, the realities of their environment come to overwhelm their explorations of the workings of their minds.
Whilst Helen is attractive as a writer and teacher, Ralph is a sorry specimen of a scientist. He fantasises about winning honours, and dreams of receiving a Nobel Prize, not of making the discovery that might lead to it; his fear is that a colleague might achieve recognition first. His dismissal of Turing is revealing: "... a truly great mind ... but a totally screwed-up human being, a lonely, repressed, unhappy homosexual, eventually killed himself in a dreary flat in Manchester ...". Ralph has no conception of what it must have been like to hold, for a while, the keys to our intellectual and technological development. There is no reason, of course, for Lodge to present us with an example of shining scientific virtue, but in Ralph Messenger he has given us someone who does science publicly whilst having no genuine scientific purpose. It is a pity that in a novel bold enough to take science seriously, the scientist-character should only be interested in acclaim, money, power and sex; that there is nothing to communicate the pleasure of making even the most modest discovery.
If scientists fare badly at Lodge's hands, what about science? Lodge has certainly done his homework, helped by Aaron Sloman, Professor of AI and Cognitive Science at Birmingham University. The bibliography at the end of the book covers a wide range of sources, which give an excellent introduction to studies of consciousness. Lodge has mined these selectively but fruitfully. The device of the mural (reminiscent of the carved doorway in Eco's The Name of the Rose) is an effective and graphic way to present a diverse, powerful set of ideas. The half-dozen pages where Ralph shows it to Helen are well worth considering as seminar material. Later Helen asks her students to explore two of the ideas illustrated, from Nagel's "What is it Like to be a Bat?" and from Jackson's "What Mary Didn't Know" (which is about a scientist who has been kept in a monochrome prison, but has learnt all that can be learnt about colour without having experienced it). The students write pieces on these themes adopting the styles of various modern novelists, and the results, to which two chapters are devoted, amount to a stylistic tour de force. Alongside this overtly academic strand of the novel, Ralph's and Helen's perceptions of each other, of themselves, and of the events around them, recorded on Ralph's tapes and in Helen's diary, invite us to consider Ralph's statement of the problem of consciousness: "How to give an objective, third-person account of a subjective, first-person phenomenon."
Lodge thus presents cognitive science as science is rarely presented in novels: seriously, as something that can and should be thought about by non-scientists, and that affords real interest in its own right. Nevertheless, he is marking out intellectual territory: "I've always assumed, I suppose, that consciousness was the province of the arts, especially literature, and most especially the novel," writes Helen shortly after meeting Ralph, "I sort of resent the idea of science poking its nose into this business, my business." Later she addresses a scientific conference: "... literature is a written record of human consciousness, arguably the richest we have." Yet if Lodge shares Helen's feeling that scientists are reluctant to recognise this, he is surely wrong; a scientist with as limited a view of literature as Ralph is (one hopes) a rare animal.
In the end, rather than seeking to break down the science/arts divide, Lodge sustains it. Helen falls into the trap of opposing a literal-minded reductionism to a humanistic viewpoint: "We are told that ... each of us is `just a pack of neurons' ... or just a parallel processing computer running by itself without an operator. As a human being and as a writer, I find that view of consciousness abhorrent - and intuitively unconvincing." She fails to realise that the word "just", in the sense she means it, is inserted not by the scientist, but by the non-scientist who does not see how a rich superstructure can be built on mechanistic foundations.
Nonetheless, Thinks... does have a message for cognitive science, even if it is not the one articulated in Helen's conference address. Earlier she notes that novels can, in a sense, be called thought experiments. Thought experiments are a vital tool of scientific investigation, yet, as the example of Maxwell's demon in physics shows, they give the wrong answers unless they reflect reality sufficiently accurately. (The demon seems to be able to break the Second Law of Thermodynamics by deflecting fast-moving molecules, but the thought experiment neglects the energy needed to see the molecules.) How far can we trust thought experiments like that conducted on Mary the colour scientist? Only to the extent that we can have confidence in every significant detail. It is debatable whether or not Lodge's rewritings of the experiment shed any light on the logic of the argument about qualia, but it seems to me that the exercise gives us a clear warning about missing out the equivalent of the demon's light source. Imagining Mary seeing colour for the first time tells you nothing, unless the Mary you imagine might be real.
It is easy to recommend this book. If you like Lodge's work you will enjoy it, despite the fact that it feels less personal than his early books, and you have to wait a long time for most of the action, which is squeezed up towards the end. As a picture of university life it is of course highly entertaining. If you are interested in a view of cognitive science and AI from an extraordinarily well-informed outsider, it is fascinating. And if you happen to be reading this on 24 February 2002, have a look at your calendar.