Thinks ...

Sarah,

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Thanks for clearing up why the most vibrant young British novelists tend to be immigrants. I'd wondered about that, and I found your explanation--immigrants are on their way up, as opposed to the rest of Britain, which is on the way down--quite persuasive. Lodge's new engagement with Big Ideas, which seems similar to that of Michael Frayn (art history in Headlong, quantum mechanics in Copenhagen) may be the native Brit's chosen method of fighting back. (Tom Stoppard, who is both an immigrant and a longtime popularizer of esoteric knowledge, plays on both teams.)

Your summary of the debate in Thinks... between the mind as computer and the mind as seat of the soul is pitch-perfect. I would add only that the dichotomy between the two worldviews is expressed not only in the narrative, but also in the names of the two protagonists: Helen Reed (read: "read," as opposed to "perform mathematical proofs") and Ralph Messenger (which connotes the mechanism, as opposed to the content, of conveying information). There's also that wonderful physical detail about the University of Gloucester, built on farmland during the "utopian sixties," never having completed construction so that an unintended gap of greenery is left between the arts buildings and the sciences buildings. "We're an architectural allegory of the Two Cultures," the dean of humanities observes.

You're right that Lodge lets Helen, his fellow novelist, win the argument, with an assist from Andrew Marvell's "The Garden." But I don't think it's the slam-dunk you make it out to be. Granted, literature is winning the race right now, but that may only be because it's had a head start. Poetry has been with us for thousands of years, whereas computer science dates back less than a hundred. Even the theories about what artificial intelligence may be are relatively new. And while it's true that Ralph's belief in the mind as machine is shaken by his cancer scare, Helen's belief in the mind as spiritual vessel has already been shaken by her discovery that Martin, the late husband whose soul she'd presumed to have blended perfectly with her own, was a serial adulterer. A less skeptical approach to evolutionary psychology might have led her to suspect otherwise.

The central (and, to my mind, very best) episode in Thinks... is the scene in which Ralph gives Helen a tour of the second-floor gallery at his beloved Center for Cognitive Science. The walls of the circular building are painted with "[a] series of overlapping scenes, figures, vignettes, painted in a bold, expressionist style ... making a kind of cyclorama." The paintings, left by a visiting fellow from Princeton who was also an amateur painter, depict various prominent scientific theories and speculations about how the mind works. Ralph explains them to Helen, and they debate them. Here, for instance, is Ralph explaining "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?," an essay by Thomas Nagel that gives aid and comfort to Helen's contention that science lacks the means to probe consciousness:

His argument was that there is absolutely no way we can ever know what it is like to be a bat--the only way to know is to be a bat. Ergo qualia [that is, the more ephemeral kinds of thought, such emotions, memories, and feelings] are ineffable, ergo the scientific investigation of consciousness is impossible.

Helen later assigns her creative writing students the task of writing their own versions of "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" These turn out to be delightful parodies of Martin Amis ("You could say that crapping was one of our chief occupations in life"), Samuel Beckett ("When? Why? How? Squeak"), and various other litterateurs. So really all Helen proves is that it's possible for literature to imagine what it's like to be a famous writer imagining what it's like to be a bat.

I still haven't seen Steven Spielberg's A.I., which opens tomorrow in the United States, but I gather that it takes up Ralph's side of the argument--science can recreate consciousness--and then invites us, Helen-style, to imagine what it would feel like to be the android that would result. The answer, apparently, is "unloved." That, in any case, is what the film's publicity material suggests and what science fiction writer Brian Aldiss is up to in the short story on which A.I. is based, "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long." But perhaps, by using logic to simulate the experience of having seen a film that I really haven't seen, I am being presumptuous in the very way that Helen would deplore.

Anyway, thanks for allowing me to elbow into your "Book Club." In lieu of telling you how much fun I had, I'll conclude by reciting the recurring joke in Thinks... about the two behavioral psychologists who have sex. After it's over, one turns to the other and says, "It was good for you. How was it for me?"

Tim

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers (plus guest star Tim Noah) tackle Thinks..., David Lodge's latest academic comedy of manners. Click here for an explanation of our format and here to buy the book.

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