With Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in a hospital waiting room

I went today to the Gloucester Hospital to undergo colonoscopy. I expected a long waiting time. I took with me G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, which I have not read, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which I read once upon a time in Prague in preparation for Roger Scruton’s lecture on Wittgenstein (it took place in my philosophy seminar in Prague on 26 September 1979). In the waiting room, waiting for my colonoscopy, I took Wittgenstein in my hands, and I managed to open it on page 124, paragraph 412, which caught my eye, for it is marked on the margin by red pen with a squiggly line. I must have expressed my unease with it in the discussion.

I found myself as unhappy with it today, in the waiting room, as almost forty years ago in Prague. Wittgenstein says:

‘The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness – which occurs when we are performing a piece of logical sleight-of-hand. When does this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain! – as it were clutching my forehead. – But what can it mean to speak of “turning my attention on to my own consciousness”? This is surely the queerest thing there could be! It was a particular act of gazing that I called doing this. I stared fixedly in front of me – but not at any particular point or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they mostly are when I am interested in a particular object). No such interest preceded this gazing. My glance was vacant; or again like that of someone admiring the illumination of the sky and drinking in light.

Now bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox (THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical about it. I could have said it in the course of an experiment whose purpose was to shew that an effect of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part of the brain. – But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not such as would have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my look would have been intent, not vacant.)”

Wittgenstein solved the problem of consciousness: There is no gap between brain and consciousness. For everybody would agree ‘that an effect of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part of the brain’

I cannot agree with Wittgenstein on this. ‘Stimulation of a particular part of my brain’ mediates ‘an effect of light which I see’, it does not produce it. There is nothing in the brain that can produce light which I see. In the brain there are neural activities on the basis of which I can see light. So there must be something else – may I call it ‘mind’, or ‘soul’, or ‘spiritual nature’ – something radically different from the brain, which on the basis of the visual brain centre produces light which I see. For I see it, this is an undisputable fact, and the data of neurophysiology tell me, that there is nothing in the brain that can produce it. Yet without the mediaing activities of the visual brain centre I could not see light.

Light is obviously not a good example, for Wittgenstein and his followers did not see and do not see any problem with their claim that their visual brain centre produces light they see. So let me take a different example. I am typing all this on my computer. The computer screen has a rectangular shape, the keyboard has a rectangular shape, as all the keys do. In the visual brain centre all these rectangular forms must be coded and processed, but there is no place in the brain in which these rectangular forms can be produced, let alone perceived. In the brain there must be neural activities – the electrical currents and chemical transmitters by means of which the neurons convey the sensory stimuli to the brain centres where they are coded and processed, again by bio-chemico-electrical neural activities – which accompany every movement of my hands as I type, but these neural activities proceed completely differently in time and are completely differently structured in space  from that of which I am conscious as I move my fingers when typing, as I follow these movements with my eyes, as I check what I type on the screen ... Since what I am conscious of as I am typing is the primary data, and I accept what neurophysiology tells me about my sensory organs and about the brain, I cannot but conjecture that there must be a part of me of which I am not conscious, which transforms the brain activities, of which I am not conscious, into the activities (of my typing etc.) of which I am conscious.

Let me end my comments on Wittgenstein by attempting to answer his introductory question: ‘The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life?

In our ordinary life we take the computer in front of me, my typing, my sitting in front of it, simply as being there, just as I see and perceive it all. How could I live my ordinary life if I were to think all the time of the neurophysiological data that tell me that all this – in so far as I see it, experience it – is mediated by the brain, and as such happens ‘inside my head’? I say ‘inside my head’ for the X transforms the activities that proceed in the brain into what I see in front of me, and so it must be ‘reading’ all those neural activities that take place in my brain which is inside my head. It is therefore reasonable to think of this X as located in the same space as the brain. To do so, it must be different from the brain, yet it must be intimately linked to it, so as to be in constant contact with its activities.

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Let me end this blog by some ruminations I was having in the waiting room of the Gloucester Hospital while waiting for my colonoscopy. In 1978, almost forty years ago, I invited Oxford dons to my philosophy seminar. Barbara Day gives prominent space to Roger Scruton’s visit to my seminar in The Velvet Philosophers:

‘For his lecture to Tomin’s seminar, he spoke on Wittgenstein’s private language argument. He remembers that there were about 25 people present … After the seminar, from 6.00 till 9.00 p.m., Scruton and the Tomins went to a restaurant; the next day he met Tomáš and Lenka on the quiet, wooded Shooters’ Island in the Vltava. As he talked to them he … wondered how much opportunity they had to express their own ideas; the seminars were dominated by Tomin, and the young students were overshadowed by his powerful personality … he also thought how much more effective they could be if the teaching were freed from the influence of personality.’ (The Claridge Press, 1999, p. 45)

The students in Prague were freed from the influence of the personality. It was the Czech secret police that did the dirty work. But who or what is it nowadays that prevents the Oxford University and the Philosophy Institute of the Philosophy Faculty at Charles University in Prague from allowing me, let alone inviting me, to present to their students and academics a lecture on ‘Human spiritual nature and the X of neurophysiologists’ or on ‘Self-knowledge as an imperative’ (the texts are on my website), or a lecture on Plato?