On Saturday Andro and I attended a seminar held here at Berkeley in honor of Gunther Stent. I didn’t stay for the whole thing as I mostly wanted to hear John Searle and Oliver Sacks. Searle gave an excellent lecture: he’s an accomplished speaker and he knows how to present obtuse German philosophers with a great deal of clarity and humor. In attempting to come up with a purely materialistic framework for consciousness and free will he made some very interesting observations on language – including something I’ve long suspected, that all language is essentially performative. However, I don’t believe he answered a question Stent asked him at the end: how anyone can make moral judgements about, say, Hitler, when we understand his actions only in the causal/random framework of materialism. Searle answered that, well, yes we can, essentially (as I understood him) because Hitlers are a menace to society, but his answer sets aside the meaning of the phrase “moral judgement” and conflates it with efficiency/necessity.

I very much enjoy Oliver Sacks’ writing, so I was more than a bit disappointed at his lecture, which was unorganized and seemed to be given without his full attention. He is right, perhaps, to avoid drawing far-reaching conclusions from anecdotes, but it’s still necessary to provide some illusion of a goal, that you as a speaker are going somewhere and everything is under control. One thing that did stick with me, though, was his desription of how the loss of sensory input (for instance, after spinal anesthesia) profoundly affects a patient’s notion of self, so that the insensate and immobile part becomes not-self, even not-flesh even though it is obviously still connected to the rest of the body.

Indeed, patients will forget that they ever had the limb, even though they have specific declarative memories of using it in the past. What’s interesting is that there’s a similar connection between sensory input and so-called “implicit” memory at all levels of the brain. Color blindness arising from damage late in the visual pathway is always accompanied by an inability to either imagine or remember color. This suggests that implicit, perceptual memory is contingent on continued sensory input: take the input from the arm away and there’s no need to remember you ever had an arm. Sacks suggests (but unfortunately not in the lecture) that the brain is continually constructing the arm (or more precisely, that my brain is constantly constructing my arm) – including the memory and “selfness” of it – in order to explain its presence, both as a source of sensory input and as something that can be used to interact with the environment. This ties in nicely with what Searle called “the worst philosophical problem in 400 years”, the empiricist notion that time, space, and causality are merely explanatory devices used by the mind to make sense of its sensory input.

Sunday I drove over to the city with Clark to hear a woodwind quintet read one of his pieces. There is, of course, a bassoon in every woodwind quintet, and since I play the bassoon I tend to listen for it. As I do, I “play along” with the bassoonist, moving mental images of my fingers over a mental image of the keys. This happens more or less involuntarily, though I may have done it consciously much earlier in my career. What’s strange is that even though I make a lot of mistakes (I don’t have anything close to perfect pitch) I can hear a bassoon line much better than a line in any other instrument. I’m nearly certain that this mental motor output is responsible. But here’s the really bizarre thing, which I noticed yesterday: if I watch the (real) bassoonist, I lose my mental image, and the advantage it gives me in hearing the music. Moreover, it’s extremely disconcerting to look at the physical process of playing. I know it’s a bassoon, I know that I play the bassoon, but I don’t do that when I play.

Could this be similar to what happens during spinal anesthesia? My consciousness has more or less invaded the bassoon; not, of course, the wood and metal, but The Bassoon, the mechanism for producing sound by blowing air and moving fingers. This Bassoon is as much a part of me as my arm. It’s a sensory organ (ears for listening, eyes for reading music, proprioceptive and somatosensory input from my hands) and a motor organ, and it’s mine. I use it to listen to bassoon music because I use it to listen to my own music. To see and hear it in another person’s hands is crossed nerves, as if I were receiving the input from someone else’s hand.

Needless to say this did not happen overnight. There’s a “ten year rule” that seems to be pretty universal across disciplines: ten years is the length of time that it takes to develop an intuition for something – to become fluent in a language, a musical instrument, an art form, to diagnose patients with neurological pathologies. Ten years to extend your consciousness in some unnatural direction, ten years of arduous trial and error, of making multimodal connections, of tuning feedback loops, of developing systems of meaning. Ten years to make some object part of your subject.

Tom and Andro and I were discussing the Sunday night movie last night, among many other things, and Tom observed, “That’s the problem with the pagan world. Subject and object were confused. It was terrible.”

To which I responded, “Tom, you make it sound like you were there.”

“I was,” he said, “and it’s a good thing my Volkswagen didn’t break down as I was leaving. How are you supposed to call a taxi when you can’t tell the difference between subject and object?”

Okay, I apologize for retelling that joke.

(cdm | SubjectsAndObjects)