3.1 THE MYTH OF “EASY” PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Before I examine the claim that the transition from what-is to that-it-is, or to that-it-is-the-case, is delivered by the brain – more broadly, the nervous system or, more narrowly, parts of the brain – I want to challenge the distinction, particularly associated with David Chalmers, between the “easy” and the “hard” problems of consciousness. It illustrates the ease with which many manifestations of explicitness are overlooked.

The (supposedly) easy problems are “those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms”, while the paradigmatic hard problem is “the problem of experience”. Another way of capturing the distinction is to contrast “functions and behaviour associated with consciousness” (easy problems) “with the experiential (phenomenal, subjective) dimensions of consciousness” (the hard problem). An organism possesses the latter dimensions of consciousness when we can say, as Thomas Nagel expressed it, that it is like something to be that organism. This is true most incontrovertibly of organisms like you and me. It may be true of some vertebrate animals, but probably not of any plants.

The basic elements of mind, and the source of Chalmers’ so-called “hard” problems, are qualia such as the experience of red, the smell of cheese, or the pain of toothache.

When David Cameron resigned as Conservative leader on 24 June 2016, logic, arithmetic and poetic justice all suggested that his replacement should be a leading Brexiteer. Logically, the process of withdrawal from the EU should be overseen by someone who genuinely believed that the majority had taken the right decision, for the right reasons. This was certainly the view of most Conservative members – the people who would exercise the final choice of leader – more than two thirds of whom had voted Leave. The promptings of poetic justice, however, suggested that the Conservatives who had campaigned most vigorously, and presented withdrawal as a risk-free opportunity rather than a gamble, would soon find themselves eating their three-word slogans. As such, when the Conservative Party ran out of employable Brexiteer options and alighted on the “reluctant Remainer”, Theresa May, it seemed to have made a sensible choice in spite of its somewhat irrational self.

THE BATTLE AND THE AFTERMATH

The referendum had taken place almost 201 years to the day since the Battle of Waterloo. Like a latter-day Eurocrat, the (Irish-born) British commander, the Duke of Wellington, had been wining, dining and jiving in Brussels, when the comparison was ended by a call for him to leave the Duchess of Richmond's ball and crush the forces of the Napoleonic transnational superstate.

When Rishi Sunak became prime minister on 25 October 2022, the most recent national opinion poll placed his party on just 21 per cent of voting intentions, 33 points behind Labour. As recently as 28 July, during the interregnum between Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, the deficit had been no more than one point. It seemed that, 12 years and five leaders after their return to office, the nation had finally grown tired of the Tories. The outlook was no more promising, at home or abroad, when Sunak decided to call a general election for 4 July 2024. Only some kind of divine intervention could spare the prime minister and his party. Sunak stepped out of No. 10 to make his announcement on a dismal 22 May, without protective rainwear; and the heavens duly opened, in “a downpour of biblical proportions” (Shipman 2024b: 812). It was as if the thorough soaking that Liz Truss had narrowly avoided on her first day in Downing Street had been held in reserve for her hapless and hatless successor as he gave notice to leave (see Chapter 7)

Weather forecasts, like opinion polls, are subject to margins of error. But Sunak's team had been forewarned of spectacular meteorological inclemency at the appointed hour, and it had been raining since lunchtime. It was too late to arrange a more sheltered venue, inside No. 10, if they wanted to top the evening news bulletins. Besides, Sunak was reluctant to forego the chance of using the Downing Street stage-prop to project the prestige of his office. All the big British announcements were made outside the famous black door.

On November 1, 2020, my grandmother died. I called her “Patti,” a Tamil word for “grandmother.” Patti, who taught me my letters and the names of the stars.

Patti was the third of my grandparents to leave this earth – or rather, in the spirit of Reid Gómez's citation, to return to it. But she was the first who had been my friend, and when she passed away, I felt a kind of grief with which I had never before been acquainted. It was a piece of the grief of extinction that poet Jorie Graham anticipates for all of us in her end-times poetry collection, To 2040. It was inflected with pandemic grief and internet grief and climate grief: the grief of not being able to travel to India for the funeral; the grief of having indulged in the convenience of distractedly texting Patti pictures over WhatsApp, instead of calling to talk to her; the grief of living in Arizona during the hottest year in the state's history; the grief of impossible distance, the grief of no return, and the grief of lost time.

I needed to mourn. I found myself obsessively rereading the email correspondence that Patti and I carried out between May 2007 and May 2015: all together, over 200 pages of daily news, recipes, stories about her dog, gossip about the neighbors, and complaints about the household help. It was intimate and mundane, urgent and extensive. And now it was over.

Some years ago, I wrote a work of dialogical literary criticism with the scholar R. Radhakrishnan. It began as a co-written review of a co-written book called Thinking Literature across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller. It ended up offering a metacritical analysis of the very premise of thinking and writing together.

Radha (as friends call him) described our writing as a “jugalbandi – a duet [in Indian classical Hindustani or Carnatic music in which each artist] alternately take[s] the lead, playfully, competitively, entwined in our improvisations.” He wrote:

EVIE's STORY, REIMAGINED

Fizzing sounds of sparklers and starbursts of gold danced out of Evie's phone. These special effects adorned a video of Evie jangling keys outside her new front door, to be sent to friends and family. Her mind wandered back to when she first got the call inviting her to come and view the freshly built social housing. That first visit, the friendly housing officer meeting her at the front door, showing her around her potential new home, asking her whether she was happy with the house. Evie and her three children had been living in temporary accommodation for several months by that point. The accommodation she’d been provided was comfortable enough, and she’d received help and support from her local authority throughout this period of homelessness, but living in uncertainty had been hard on them all.

She put the key into the lock, turned it and stepped into her new home. She smiled. It was as wonderful as she’d remembered. She took off her shoes, enjoying the feel of new carpet under her feet. She took a look around, noting the furniture and white goods that the local council had provided her with. Everything was second hand, a little tired, but it was a great starting point, giving her the breathing room to save for new furniture over time, once she was fully back on her feet. And Evie had been able to bring with her the small numbers of possessions she did have as the costs of moving these had been funded by the local council. The walls were all painted in a colour she loved, one she chose to calm the nervous system with the help of a free, trauma-informed designer for women and children who had experienced domestic abuse.

We find it very difficult institutionally [as housing professionals] to step back, and say, well actually, is there something more complex behind this [homelessness]. We have reporting systems that say tick box A or tick box B. It is the same with rent arrears, so as soon as someone is in significant rent arrears, they are on a little pathway that ends with one of those letters with red writing on (that people put in the bin), that actually says, you know, you are going to go to court.

You [as a housing professional] are already on a way of thinking, whereas we know from the report that the CIH Cymru did ten years ago, that said domestic abuse, is one of the leading drivers of rent arrears. So, it is standing back and using professional judgement, looking at relationships and households in the round, and STOP expecting victims to be as pure as the driven snow, because if I was experiencing things that people are experiencing on a day-to-day basis, I do not think it would bring the best out in me. So why do we assume that of everybody else? …

I think that one of the things that dawned on me gradually, was, not just the fact that housing is where most domestic abuse takes place, and it can be a solution [for a domestic abuse survivor to move], but also how it can be a cause. And I think the housing shortage has contributed to living arrangements … meeting someone and moving in with them three months later, you will both save something on the rent as you only have one rent to pay … and then suddenly it all goes a bit wrong, the relationship needs to finish at that point, but housing keeps you together … there aren't enough places for people to live.

For nearly 60 years, I have been haunted by a thought, an intuition, lying just beyond the edge of anything I am able to think. Notwithstanding the numerous published and yet more numerous unpublished pages where I have circled that thought from different distances, it has eluded me. It relates to something for which I have settled on the unsatisfactory name of “explicitness”. The present volume is my most sustained effort to make landfall.

Explicitness is one of the three fundamental mysteries in which our lives are wrapped, though most of the time they are hidden under what we take for granted. The first is that there is Something rather than Nothing. The second is that that Something has an order which, according to the standard story, ultimately gives rise to and sustains life. The third is that that Something (which I shall call “what-is”) is made explicit, courtesy of entities that also make themselves explicit. For conscious subjects, what-is presents itself as that-it-is or (more ponderously) “that-it-is-the-case”. The most arresting aspect of this mystery is the “I” itself, the blush of “who” awoken amidst the deserts of “what”.

Concerning the first mystery there is nothing to be said for those who, like myself, lack religious belief and who do not share the faith that the authority of science extends to metaphysics. The “creative accounting” of physicists who imagine they can explain the origin of Something out of Nothing by (for example) appealing to instability in the so-called quantum vacuum expressed in a bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence, allowing Nothing to wobble into Something1 is no more persuasive than the Creation stories offered by sacred texts.

Benjamin Disraeli, arguably, was Britain's wittiest prime minister. However, his parliamentary barbs tended to be much funnier than fair or far-sighted. For example, in 1872 he amused the House of Commons by comparing the Liberal government, which included his chief political rival, to “a range of exhausted volcanoes”. More than two decades later, unlike Disraeli himself Mount Gladstone was as active as ever, spewing lava to devastating effect (not least amongst fellow Liberals).

Back in December 1852 Disraeli had earned another entry in the Oxford Book of Political Quotations with an assertion that “England does not love coalitions”. Far from flaunting his mastery of the fledgling pseudo-science of Politics by advancing a testable hypothesis, Disraeli was aiming as usual for a cheap debating point. At the time, he was Chancellor in a minority government which was about to be supplanted by a union of convenience between Whigs and liberal Conservatives. He was hoping that the word “coalition” would be unpleasing to English (if not to Scottish, Welsh and Irish) ears through its association with the Fox–North government of 1783, whose downfall had been engineered by King George III before it had a chance to prove its qualities. Given the fluidity of political allegiances before the advent of relatively disciplined mass parties in the nineteenth century, it was difficult to identify a previous government that had not been a coalition of sorts; indeed, Disraeli's own party had itself originated in a junction, back in the early 1830s, between the old Tory Party and right-wing Whigs – the Cameroonian Conservatives and Cleggite Lib Dems of the day.

7.1 THE REALITY OF AGENCY

Selves – embodied subjects – are agents. They do things and the things they do, actions – notwithstanding that they are typically physical events – are fundamentally different from the mere happenings occurring throughout the physical world, including their own bodies. “Amming” opens up a territory within being, occupied by doing.

The relevance of actions to the present inquiry is that they are made possible by explicitness – by an explicit self, making the world around itself explicit. Before I develop this point, I shall briefly summarize the case for the distinctive nature of actions in a world of happenings, for their being genuinely free.

Free will seems impossible in theory. Nevertheless, it appears real in practice: there really is a fundamental difference between things that someone does and things that merely happen to or around that person. If there were no such difference, our lives would lose much of their meaning – though this concern should not be taken as evidence in favour of free will. Our lives, after all, may well be meaningless when they are considered sub specie aeternitatis. More to the point, seeing how free will is possible requires a radical rethink of our relationship to the natural world, a critical look at the concepts of causation and of the so-called laws of nature, and reflection on what prompts and guides actions and how those actions are put together.

1849–62 HBC established Nanaimo Coal Company and the new colony of Fort Rupert to provide coal for bunkering vessels used in the HBC fur trade. In 1862, HBC sold the Nanaimo mines to James Nichol, who then established the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company.

1869 Under the Deed of Surrender, the HBC received ￡300,000 ($1.5 million) in cash, and was granted one-twentieth of all the lands in the “Fertile Belt,” as well as 50,000 acres around the company's posts, for a total of approximately 7 million acres of land. 1872 HBC Land Department organized.

1875–76 HBC considered selling back its land to Canada for ￡550,000, but the Canadian cabinet was unwilling to accept the deal and the HBC was obliged to keep the land.

1880s HBC was granted 3,000 acres around Edmonton for a previous trade post, and in 1881 announced the creation of the City of Edmonton advertised as a centre of gold, coal, timber and minerals, richest wheat producing country, and projected Saskatchewan branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

8.1 INTRODUCING THE THINKING ANIMAL

That-it-is encompasses many modes of consciousness from the most passive sensory reception – things we can't help seeing or hearing – to facts that are discovered as a result of active scrutiny and investigation and, beyond this, to the products of the most intense, brow-furrowing thought. Thought may propose not only things that exist but also others that don’t. It may entertain the fact that something didn't happen, that such and such is not the case or does not exist, or reflect on the fact that it did happen or did exist. It is this that makes thought – pure that-it-is – seem a disembodied manifestation of the embodied subject. It is a mode of that-it-is that seems only loosely tied to what-is.

Homeless after her relationship broke down, Sam and her three young children were placed in a hostel room like this. Concerned about her safety, she moved out, sleeping in a car for seven weeks while her children stayed with a friend.

Finally, she was given new accommodation which was no better than the first. There was black mould everywhere and a lingering smell of cannabis. There was a hole in the door where the letterbox should have been, and on two occasions, she was assaulted while living there. Worst of all, Sam was separated from her three children yet again because her temporary accommodation was an hour and 40 minutes away from their school. The constant upheavals and separation tested the resilience of the family.

Thousands of families are stuck in places like this because they have nowhere else to go. IKEA have joined forces with Shelter to highlight this issue and call on the government to build 90,000 new social homes a year. By 2030, our aim is to ensure that half-a-million people have access to a better life at home.

5.1 MY BODY AND I: THE NECESSITY FOR EMBODIMENT

The more closely we inspect brains, or ionic currents in nervous tissue, the less we understand what role, if any, they play in the generation of consciousness. They fail to account for the distinctive nature of conscious subjects – entities to whom a subset of what-is is present to them as a world or as a situation that is their situation, a reality they must engage and cope with, exploit, enjoy, or suffer. In short, nothing in the brain explains how certain portions of matter come to matter to themselves and, as a consequence, other portions of matter come to matter to them.

The body beyond the brain seems even less likely to deliver this transition. While the extra-cerebral body is essential to ensure ongoing brain function, what happens in and under the skin, the function of organs such as the kidney, or of circulating fluids such as blood and lymph, acting either singly or in concert, does not seem to account for the transition from an “It” to an “I”, from the realm of what-is to that of that-it-is and thence to “that-I-am”. Indeed, those elements remain stubbornly “it”.

Granted that some of them, by means that remain utterly mysterious, may move closer towards the status of “I” when they are sore or give pleasure. Nevertheless, they still fall short of fully-fledged first-person being.