“Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
-Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities (1972)
As Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts begins, a man awakes without memory of his life or of his personal identity. He finds instructions to visit a therapist who will explain his situation. The therapist tells him he has a dissociative disorder- he’s blocked his memory because of a traumatic event. This is more or less a conventional explanation for global amnesia, a loss of the past and personal identity.
An alternative explanation soon presents itself. Mysterious letters and packages arrive at the apartment. These have somehow been sent by his previous self, the first Eric Sanderson. His past self warns him that he is pursued by a conceptual shark that seeks to consume whats left of his mind and sense of self. The novel is the story of his quest to understand his situation and somehow defeat or evade the abstract menace that threatens his tenuous existence.
What to make of this abstract threat to mental and possibly physical life? In the opening scenes of the novel, Eric is completely uncertain whether he is crazy or really threatened by the abstract world. Which is real, the outside world or the interior world of mind? The reader is just as confused.
The philosopher recognizes this conflict as having its roots going back to Rene Descartes. Descartes famously asserted that mind and the world “out there†are separate. As thinking beings, people live on the side of mind, entirely without access to physical reality. That is, if the real world can be said to exist at all if it is so far out of reach. The apparent entry of the abstract into the real world. The breach of mind into world breaks the Cartesian divide wide creating the central suspense of the novel.
How can a neuroscientist approach a book like this? I come to the book with a certainty that the central conflict doesn’t exist. There is no abstract world of mind, only physically based activity of the brain. It couldn’t be more clear that Eric’s conceptual shark and his the loss of personal identity are occurring in his brain. Electrical patterns of neuronal discharge can’t leave the brain and pursue the body though the world. So I can’t bring myself to a suspension of disbelief and accept the premise that a conceptual shark might be real and a physical threat.
And yet once I settled into the book I was swept up in the quest and invested in the outcome. It was a great and clever read, full of suspense and action even though I knew the events were occurring in Eric’s brain with no external referent even if he perceived it to be so.
Some neuroscientists take the rejection of Cartesian dualism too far, denying that mind matters at all. After all, it makes no sense to say that mind can control anything since only brain circuits can do anything. Mind is what brain does and so is not able to cause or create anything in a real sense, all metaphor aside. Subjective experience, in the most extreme version of this view, is of no importance. They would, I presume, find the entire book of no interest. Mental states are not something to be taken seriously. We know that scientists and philosophers who espouse this view don’t act this way. Typically when the subject turns to mental events they often act Cartesians, treating mind as existing in a separate world that somehow influences the brain. Like abstract sharks stalking vulnerable people.
A novel like The Raw Shark Texts actually helps demonstrate how important the content of thought really is. Mind matters because it is the only window we have onto reality. It is not reality itself. It is a simplified approximation of the world represented in brain maps that we experience with this marvelous subjective sense of sight, sound, smell and meaning everywhere.
The brain needs the sensory input to be anchored in reality. Without the input, the reproduction of the world continues on, just without as much relevance. Deprived of sensation to anchor it, the brain runs independently and disconnected. Sensory deprivation, for example, results in vivid hallucinations. Dreams are likely to be similar brain network activation patterns untethered to external input.
The fact is that I can close my eyes at will and bring sights and sounds to mind that exist only in memory. Imagination is a mechanism by which new reality can be constructed from bits and pieces of the known and remembered.
After all, the brain is an amazing realtime engine that uses a simplified model of the world to reconstruct a guessed at reality and predict outcomes based on imperfect knowledge. There is nothing more important than the battles that occur inside, the self-referential arguments to decide what is real and what is right.
The Raw Shark Texts puts this idea in a literary frame and dramatically portrays the struggle as a fantasy thriller. The genre we call magical realism gets much its power from projecting the interior imagination out into a story that seems to be about the real world. It’s more dramatic to read about the clash of swords than the clash of ideas. It’s a bigger problem to have your life threatened than to have your ideological underpinnings or emotional stability attacked.
The life of mind is important. It’s our most important experience in life because it’s our only experience in life. What you perceive becomes what is. Your perception of me, my motivations, my character is what I am to you. Who I really am or what I really think is entirely inaccessible to you. Even as you read this you are assembling a model of me that may be wildly different from the view I hold of myself. Who’s understanding of me is more accurate?
To awaken completely isolated from oneself, from one’s memories is a dangerous situation for Eric Sanderson. His journey to save himself is no less epic if it only happens in his mind. It makes my own daily interior struggle to be better seem more important, more noble.
It would be depressing to judge myself only based on my position in the world. Material success as measured by the bank account or the rank and esteem bestowed by others seem empty because they are external. Perceptions of the perceptions of others are mere shadows of shadows. It’s bad enough that we have to live in the illusion we’ve created for ourselves. What a greater pity to live that fragile illusion reflected from the shifting and conflicted illusions of others.
We know or at least imagine who we want to be. Success is best measured by the distance between who we are now and that goal of thinking, knowing and acting well.
Eric Sanderson awakes completely missing his memories, disconnected from what he has been and what he’s learned. He’s as far away from who he wants to be as possible. He doesn’t know who he was, who he is or who he wants to be. That conceptual shark has taken away most of his life and now threatens to wipe him out completely. I can’t think of anything more real than that.