Do you ever find it strange how something you read can persist in your consciousness like an echo or a burned-in image on a computer screen? For me, that recently happened while reading Jim Holt’s New Yorker profile of Stanislas Dehaene, a French neuroscientist who studies the ways in which our brains process mathematical concepts. What got caught in my mind’s web that day was a short paragraph near the end of the profile that described how Dehaene has been collaborating with philosophers in exploring the concept of a “global workspace” theory of consciousness, in which we become conscious of an idea or sensation when it is “broadcast to many areas of the brain at once, making it simultaneously available for, say, language, memory, perceptional categorization, action- planning, and so on.” Holt connects this theory to the work of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has described consciousness as “cerebral celebrity“ or fame in the brain.”
Now, I can’t claim to have any special insight into the subtleties of contemporary philosophy, having rejected the rigors of abstract thinking in favor of the more seductive pleasures of literature early in my college career, but I got interested in Dennett’s work some years ago when I came across his theory of the self as “a center of narrative gravity.” The self is simply a useful fiction, he argues, like the center of gravity of an object, an abstraction that we use to organize the object’s behavior in our minds:
[W]e are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography.
Imagining consciousness as “fame in the brain” takes that idea a step further. Long before we can narrate a coherent (and so fictional) self out of the inconsistencies of our behavior, our most basic forms of consciousness ??? perception, sensation, awareness — are produced by the built-in media buzz of the brain. Our neurons, like so many paparazzi, flash their bulbs at the brain’s latest Britney, but only those perceptions that can catch the attention of other centers of the brain gain the influence ??? Dennett calls it “clout” ??? to rise to the level of conscious thought. Dennett goes on to argue that we arrive at consciousness through ???multiple drafts” of perception as more information appears, and those drafts “compete in Pandemonium-like rivalry,” arriving at no final draft, only more revisions.
What I love about such metaphors is that they suggest an unconscious process that reflects the way the conscious mind creates its own fictions. Everyone’s a writer, according to Dennett’s theory. The self is a literary construct that precedes literature, and we might even speculate that it is through this act of assembling multiple drafts and narrating a unifying self for ourselves that we learn the impulse to literature.
But as with every writer, the challenge in Dennett’s theory of consciousness is arriving at a final draft. In fact, Dennett argues that it never really happens: “There is no definitive or archival draft” and “[r]einterpretation in memory may continue indefinitely” like Hofstadter’s “eternal golden braid.” We can only keep revising ??? our perceptions, the self, this blog post ??? partly because, as in any Hollywood tabloid, there are so many cerebral celebrities clamoring for our brain’s attention. We’re of two minds (at least) on every question, and the only way to resolve this conflict is by the fiction of coherence we call consciousness or self. For a writer, that idea has resonance, since any “final” draft is simply an arbitrary stopping point, beyond which madness lies. The author’s pride at seeing her book in print is quickly followed by the wince of realizing that its imperfections are now set in type. Books are written simultaneously from the ground up and from the heavens down: as writers, we’re always torn between the pride that we’ve made something from nothing and the dismay of knowing that it fell short of the ideal we once imagined. And like the self, any book only exists as a fiction of coherence which we hope others will share:
Pick up Moby Dick and open it up to page one. It says, “Call me Ishmael.” Call whom Ishmael? Call Melville Ishmael? No. Call Ishmael Ishmael. Melville has created a fictional character named Ishmael. As you read the book you learn about Ishmael, about his life, about his beliefs and desires, his acts and attitudes. You learn a lot more about Ishmael then Melville ever explicitly tells you. Some of it you can read in by implication. Some of it you can read in by extrapolation. But beyond the limits of such extrapolation fictional worlds are simply indeterminate. Thus, consider the following question (borrowed from David Lewis’s “Truth and Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1978, 15, pp.37-46). Did Sherlock Holmes have three nostrils? The answer of course is no, but not because Conan Doyle ever says that he doesn’t, or that he has two, but because we’re entitled to make that extrapolation. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Sherlock Holmes’ nose can be supposed to be normal. Another question: Did Sherlock Holmes have a mole on his left shoulder blade? The answer to this question is neither yes nor no. Nothing about the text or about the principles of extrapolation from the text permit an answer to that question. There is simply no fact of the matter. Why? Because Sherlock Holmes is a merely fictional character, created by, or constituted out of, the text and the culture in which that text resides.
Another way to think about this metaphor of consciousness as fame is to reverse it: instead of using the idea of fame to explain the brain, Dennett’s metaphor allows us to imagine our culture of celebrity as an act of collective consciousness. As many writers learn, the word publish can be defined as “the sound of the splash you hear when you toss your book down a well.” Culture as a whole only “thinks” in its celebrations of the known: literary fame, while more modest than other forms of celebrity, has become the culture’s measure of quality. Oprah pours her blessings on the living and the dead (and occasionally, as in the case of James Frey, on those who fit neither category, having sold their souls to the devil or Doubleday). Little else rises to the standard of consciousness set by Dennett’s metaphor.
But there’s hope: Dennett’s view of consciousness as multiple drafts in endless revision is also true of culture. Collective consciousness is only a momentary figment, as brief as a celebrity’s flashbulb smile. Like the mind, culture revises, and what takes shape as knowledge is almost always a revisionist history that elevates the obscure ??? Joyce, Woolf, Donne ??? through the intervention of later generations of readers and critics. We read the past the way that a psychoanalyst reads the unconscious mind, revising and reversing its initial conclusions in order to find what lies hidden beneath our conscious acts of commerce and desire. Every writer may wish to be famous, but it might be better to wish to be the unresolved trauma that haunts our culture’s dreams.