The mind’s I

The quasi-religious zeal with which certain popularising neuroscientists claim that man is no different, essentially, from the animals, and that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon, strikes me as distinctly odd. The popularisers seem to take a sado-masochistic delight in it, in the way that some people get a thrill from envisaging the end of the world. They also seem to imply that we now understand almost everything about ourselves, apart from a few odd details to be filled in by ever-more-sophisticated scanners. In other words, man has finally come to understand himself.

Here is an addition to the fast-growing genre of books that claim scientific authority for the idea that we are, at base, not much different from the bacteria. Of course, this idea depends on what we consider important, and importance is a non-natural quality. Over and over again, the author stresses the insignificance of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. He is both right and wrong to do so. It is perfectly true that an awful lot goes on in our nervous system (and elsewhere in our bodies) of which we are unaware; it could hardly be otherwise. But it is also true that a plug is only a tiny proportion of a bath’s mass or volume. This does not make it unimportant, at least for a bath’s most obvious functions.

Professor Eagleman explains scientific ideas with exemplary clarity. His style is lucid; his metaphysics is crude. He reminds me rather of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, or of the mid-19th century physiologist Jacob Moleschott, who said that ‘the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.’

He starts with an unfortunate demonstration that consciousness is not all it is cracked up to be. He relays the story of Coleridge’s opium dream from which, unbidden and unshaped by conscious thought, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ emerged.