From the early 2001 of Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement,” we have taken into consideration how strange it is for a young girl to sit on the floor and have a body. She looks at her hands: Isn’t it strange that “this flesh spider” is part of her? She bends her fingers and straightens it. “The mystery was in a moment before moving. When her intentions became effective, there was a moment of division between not moving around,” she thinks. “It was like a wave breaking. I thought if she could find herself just by being on the top, she might find her secret.
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When I read “Atonement” in college, I loved this passage. My father was a neuroscientist and we often talked about the brain. Like the girl in a novel, I was captivated by the connection between our bodies and our minds. He also praised McEwan’s style. His language had an openly intelligent and almost technical sense. This suggested a pleasant convergence of art and science.
“Atonement” is not a novel about science. A moral story, it follows someone who makes a miserable choice and then tries to make up for it. However, in McEwan’s next novel, Saturday, the brain surgeon, who has the protagonist as its main character, focusing on what philosophers call physical problems. As a conscious being. “Can I explain, how can the substance become aware?” the surgeon asks the patient’s brain during surgery. No one knows exactly who thinks that “this well-protected kilogram-like cell” actually “holds experiences, memories, dreams, and intentions.” Even if the mystery is resolved one day, “the wonder remains. That mere wet thing will be linked to this bright inner thought, vision, sound, and touching vivid illusion of instantaneous existence, and The bright alchemy vivid illusion of illusion, which hoveres like a ghost at its center.” In the novel, a crazy man breaks into the surgeon’s house. Is the man responsible for his actions or is his brain negligent? If his brain is driving him, then perhaps our brains drive all of our actions – it somehow can’t make him human?
By the time I read “Saturday” in 2005, I was in graduate school and was studying with my PhD. In English. For my paper, I decided to see how novels thought about the mind in the age of neuroscience. “Saturday” was part of a long tradition. Kamilogorji invented a technique to view neuronal details in 1873. Brain, the novelist has become increasingly determined to portray the function of mental life. Many novels also asked questions raised by philosophers: We had free will? How connected was language and thought? Were we just our brains or something more? A philosophical hero of my paper, Professor David Chalmers, was famous for clarifying what he called a difficult problem. “How does the brain water turn into wine of consciousness?” (Maybe McEwan’s brain surgeon read him.) In Chalmers’ mind, science is how objects develop first-person perspectives. They didn’t provide a good explanation as to whether they could. Meanwhile, the villain in the paper was Chalmers’ nemesis, Daniel Dennett. Dennett, who was also a philosopher, argued that there were no difficult problems. He compared the mind to a computer program running on brain hardware – what’s mystical about it? – And in the influential book, “Consciousness Explained,” characterised people like Chalmers as suffering as “philosopher syndrome: wrong failure” Imagination for insight into the need . ”
I read “Consciousness Explained” and several other books by Dennett, immersing myself in a field known more commonly as philosophy. I was not entirely persuaded by his materialist position. He believed there was no fundamental contradiction between subjective and objective perspectives. Whether we perceived something as an object or as a subject simply depended on the “stance” we were directed towards it. I didn’t know how this made sense. In fact, this book made me a bit mad. I was with Vladimir Nabokov. He was called the “Wonder of Consciousness” when asked what surprised him most about life. Those who thought along similar lines to Dennett felt that they had rejected the uniqueness and sanctity of human existence.
My academic advisor dul me by pursuing my project My academic advisor dul me even more as I added more philosophers and added bigger and more novels to the mix did. Years have passed. I read, reread, drafted, deleted. Eventually, I realized I didn’t want to be a professor in the end and left the graduate program. I have never finished a paper. But I benefited from the experience of working on it. I’ve read a lot of great books. And I came across a certain opinion on the big questions that fascinated me. I was reading so much that I thought I knew what I was talking about.
In 2017, Dennett published a book called “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” I learned about it beforehand from the publisher’s advertising department. By then, I was a journalist. My studies have been in the past 10 years. In an email to my editor suggesting I’m writing about the book, I noted that I disagree with Dennett “in many ways” and said, “But what do I know? ” he added. At one point, my beliefs were cold. I also realized how good journalism is from the convergence of disagreement and confusion.
Ultimately, my editor and I decided that instead of reviewing the book, I should write Dennett’s profile. This is a long piece that describes him as a human and tells the course of his life. Dennett was a game and he and I arranged for the first time we met in Seattle. There he attends the meeting. I spent a few days with him watching him discuss the mind with philosophers and scientists. Then later that month, I met him again in Boston (he was a professor at Tufts), attended his annual Black Tie Christmas party (punch, piano, carol), and he and he Driving with his wife, Susan, Maine, they lived for many years. After a few days there, I returned to New York and interviewed Chalmers, who I was currently teaching at NYU, and then drafted my story.
I wrote all sorts of works, including reviews, criticisms, essays, and more, but it was by no means a profile. I was nervous, interpersonally and intellectually, spending a lot of time with the renowned philosophers who had bothered me. I reread Dennett’s books as if I was preparing for the exam. I had an academic approach. In academia, you go systematically, identify questions and study them. You read what’s written and discuss it with your colleagues and students. Design experiments, teach seminars, and write papers with the aim of becoming an expert and developing original views. If you fail, you will at least try to explore your question rigorously and systematically. Don’t go on to someone else’s Christmas party and then drive to Maine.
That approach – report – always found me a bit strange. Were there any risk of introducing any element into an otherwise objective process? If you want to understand the complex questions of philosophy, have you been hanging out with the right ideas with a single philosopher? What was the key to knowing what such a person did, wore, ate, and ate on a particular day that a reporter visited? Part of me was drawn to more incompetent ways of working. I wanted to stay in the world of thought. I was still a graduate.
It was cloudy in Seattle and snow in Boston and Maine. Dennett liked snow. He walked on a wooden stick carved himself. He had a cheerful, rare, merciless energy. He could do anything at first glance – introducing the piano, calling a square dance, gl-pigmented windows, whittle, sails. When you spoke to him, he stared at you, raised you heavily, and denied you your misconceptions, but warmly denied the way the coach guided the players. During our time together I learned a lot about Dennett as a person.
I also learned a lot about the value of being there. For one thing, I underestimated the importance of time. The report meant hours of conversation in the car. There is room for asking the same question again and again. Gradually decreases the embarrassment of being ignorant or uncertain. Quiet listening and expanded attitude of viewing. The possibility of misunderstanding has been resolved. Patient, clever and imaginative, Dennett was able to explain concepts from all angles and invent new concepts when given time. Also, I didn’t take into consideration the communication of personality. What it suggested about personal bloating, and even a brief glimpse of it, what they might know. Materialist philosopher (what is the person who doesn’t believe we have a soul, but who has been absorbed in that way? I had a photo in my head: coldness, dullness , accompanied by harshness, it was completely wrong. It wasn’t that much that Dennett’s character made me rethink his ideas, but his idiosyncraticity made me consider them more specifically. The more people you know, the more interesting they become. This can apply not only to who they are, but how they think. And then you meet face to face. When you are there, your interests are high. It’s easy to close a book and difficult to finish a conversation.
Immediately after returning to Japan, I completed a draft of my profile and sent it to the editor. He called me just a few minutes later. Just scrolling through the document, he said, and registering the blocky regularity of that paragraph, he could see what the problem was: the work was like a big essay. “Scene,” I needed a section to read as if it were in the novel. A small, small paragraph suggesting an exchange of dialogue, a moment of action, a physical eruption. I was there directly. What happened? The readers wanted to be there too.
I knew this kind of scene. I’ve read them in other profiles, but I’ve also studied them in novels. In the play, the scenes were formal. The drama unit is an extended interaction between a clear beginning and end. Scenes in the novel can be equally structured or slippery and elusive. In other words, it is a concrete beat of reality, or a flash of light to see. The surgeon who opens his skull may be a scene. So the girl was able to get her to shake her fingers. The scene simply allows instants to take beads together. On “Saturday,” the surgeon “takes a scalpel and makes a small incision.” He asks another doctor, “How much blood did we lose?” Another surgeon, with a special tool, I’m grasping some Adson forceps. He “Uses Adson to lift clotted blood.” This combination of fine narration and clear, sometimes esoteric, or opaque details – what does Adson’s forceps look like? You can create what literary theorist Roland Barthes calls “real effect.”
