levels of being

BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness, by Nicholas Humphrey, published by Harvard University Press.

Some years ago, I slipped in the shower and smacked my head against the sink. The glass doors had been left open. Severely concussed, I walked down the stairs, plucked a t-shirt from a pile of laundry, and walked outside. It was eight or so at night. I knocked on a door and stood there, dripping and without pants. I do not know what I said; I recall only the door being closed and then, twenty minutes later, becoming aware that I was in a car with a man I did not know. My panic was fierce. He drove me to hospital.

The doctors could not explain what had happened. Somehow I had walked and talked without awareness, engaging in the mechanics of being human but not the broad spectrum consciousness by which human beings are distinguished. Through this, I discovered that it was possible to act without the experience of action. The kind of zombie functionality familiar to shift workers (and U.S. presidents) is similarly independent of awareness; whilst the two generally work in tandem, it is possible to function without any “temporal depth” – that is, the layers of consciousness that brand a moment into memory.

Nicholas Humphrey, the philosopher, psychologist and the late Dian Fossey's fellow student of mountain gorillas in Rwanda , delivered his 2004 Distinguished Lecture Series at Harvard University on this very topic – not my amnesic epiphany, but the bifurcated nature of being human. “At the start of the first lecture,” he writes, “I put up a screen of plain red light and informed the audience I would spend the next three hours discussing what was going on in their minds as they looked at the red screen.”

These lectures evolved into Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness . Arguably the world authority on consciousness, Humphrey has written several graceful philosophical works on the subject – A History of the Mind : Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness, The Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in Evolution, The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution, et cetera – but none as intimately written or compelling as Seeing Red . His point of departure? Why consciousness matters.

The first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” after brain damage in monkeys, Humphrey relates the case of a woman blind since childhood whose sight was restored when her cataracts were removed. Unable to own the experience of vision, the woman saw without believing she could see and without investing that which she could see with any meaning. “Yet now, here she was, with part of her dream come true, and she simply could not feel it .” The “soundscapes” familiar to the sight-impaired informed her far more readily than the empty experience of vision. She reverted to a fuller blindness.

Why do we experience the world in this surprisingly complex way? Humphrey muses. What are the structural and functional reasons for it? What is their evolutionary history? And what, in particular, is the evolutionary history of consciousness?

Consciousness is, he elegantly posits, the privatization of sensation and experience. “What ever could be the payoff – the functional, biological payoff – of feedback that brings about a thickening of consciousness? Let me jump right in. I think the payoff is that it gives the subject a quite new sense of Self. It lifts the subject out of zombiedom .” The soul, we are then told, is sleight of mind and nothing more, a fairytale we tell ourselves to amplify our sense of self-importance. But if this is true, how is it that so many medical types and scientists – British science journal Nature found that only 7% of eminent scientists (averaged over all fields) believe in a god – still manifest the arrogance and intellectual righteousness otherwise known only to fundamentalists?

When asked if consciousness survives the death of the brain, Humphrey replies: “[M]y straight answer, as a scientist, is: not a chance . Consciousness is something we do with our brains.” As human beings, I wrote in The Eclipse, we are subject to spatio-temporal laws and thus assume consciousness to be similarly limited. The possibility of our being temporary receptacles for, or patterns in, consciousness itself is not discussed. But what if consciousness is multidimensional space itself? We may be nothing more than rich scoops of such infinity. Roger Sperry, the late Nobel laureate, said that no scientific account of the universe can be true unless it includes consciousness as a causal reality.

To philosopher Colin McGinn, the human brain is “just the wrong kind of thing” to give birth to consciousness. “You might as well assert that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb,” he memorably wrote. I think of Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart exuberantly gunning their names up on that wall of lights in Chicago 's last scene: consciousness may also be a wall of lights in which we exuberantly gun our names.

Nicholas Humphrey will undoubtedly disagree, but his sensitivity and intellectual probity make for magnificent debate. Seeing Red is a book to be savored – of the eighteenth century in spirit, ruminative and fluent and daring to the end.

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian