Iris Bayley and John Searle

IRIS AND OTHER MINDS

DENIS PAUL

BARRA HEAD

Internet version

for www.wittgenstein.co.uk

Denis Paul

Aberarth

Wales

SA46 0LL

In Memoriam Iris Bayley

A friend has asked me for a copy of something I wrote some while ago on personal identity, because he cannot find it, but alas, neither can I. So I am copying a notebook entry for him, hoping it will do, from 21.9.98.

Something philosophical on last night's Star Trek. Voyager --- the one with Kathryn Janeway as Captain. She appears to everyone else to have died but on camera she is still around talking to an alien who impersonates her father (who really is dead). In their conversation some phrase like "a higher state of consciousness" turns up. Now consciousness is just consciousness, and the only question is what it is conscious of --- that can be something 'high', no doubt. If I die my neurology stops functioning, just as my jaws stop being able to eat and my eyes to see. No neurology means no memory. The consciousness that survives is continuous, but it's no use calling it my consciousness, because the meaning of "my", to all the people who have survived to consider the matter, at least, is bound up with the chap I am, whether I mow my lawn or wash my windows or not, and so forth --- all of which, ex hypothesi, has ceased to apply.

Now, the inappropriateness of words like "my" makes people who think about this wonder whether the surviving consciousness can be continuous. If it is just consciousness, can it be said to be the same consciousness? Stalin, Hitler, Mozart, Princess Diana and I all die and our discontinuous consciousnesses go off and are conscious elsewhere, so that there is no meaning to saying which is which; and then, perhaps, they turn up as other people's consciousnesses, but there is still no meaning in saying which is which.

Well --- I do agree absolutely that there is no meaning in specifying which is which, in claiming that this person was once that person, but the anxiety that what I now call my consciousness might lose its continuity with whatever consciousness follows it is misplaced. And equally misplaced are euphemisms like "different" or "higher" states of consciousness. These terms do, of course, have reasonable, non-euphemistic uses. Did I have a higher state of consciousness when I was sixteen? Quite possibly, if you want to say that. Has Iris a lower state of consciousness than when I last saw her in a pub in Oxford? Very probably --- and whereas I have quite a lot of memory of my consciousness when I was sixteen, Iris almost certainly has very little memory of when she was sixteen; yet the continuity of her consciousness is quite unaffected by this. When she dies, this continuity of consciousness might experience all sorts of things, some of which may be ineffably 'higher' --- but it won't be a higher consciousness in the sense intended by the euphemisers, or consciousness in a higher state, it will simply be a consciousness of higher things.

I can't explain it any better than that, and I can't quote Janeway's phrase exactly, but it hit me immediately as a euphemism, which had come about because of the anxiety I've tried to express above: namely, how can I be sure that when my consciousness ceases, any consciousness that goes on is the same consciousness continued? Or: when what you call my consciousness ceases, that what goes on is what I call my consciousness?

With this anxiety gone, a philosophical red herring goes too: the status of the concept of consciousness of self. 200,000 years ago a rock falls on someone and someone else grunts gratefully, meaning "I'm glad that didn't fall on me". The dawn of the consciousness of self. What is so mysterious about that? And what is so important? 100,000 years later people begin to assemble their memories into some kind of order and to notice some kind of consistency in them. The dawn of an extended concept of the consciousness of self. More significant, but no more mysterious. Or consider the importance attached to discoveries of what we used to consider 'human' emotions displayed by animals --- and not only by chimpanzees, now thought of as 'nearly' human, but by many others. And if the person who grunted with relief had grunted instead with sympathy and regret, that would not be very surprising either, and nor would it be very revealing about the status of humanity. Indeed, one thing I find revealing about our anxieties about our status is the growing tendency to find the word "sympathy" inadequate: if animals can feel sympathy, we feel empathy. If we were more confident of what sets us apart we should not need to shift our vocabulary like that. Of course, the words are not identical, and the usefulness of "empathy" is clear if one thinks of the German: to feel Einfühlung one has to make an effort to feel one's way into another person, while Mitgefühl is something one just feels. In that sense, I would guess that empathy was very rare in animals --- but I'd never dream of claiming that only humans can feel it. [In my book I have made fun of anthropologists, Jane Goodall being one of them, who use the preposterous phrase "having theory of mind" for animal empathy in the sense outlined above. I am glad to find that I have allowed for this possibility in animals, and I welcome Goodall's evidence for it --- it is her phraseology that gets me.]

Then what does set us apart? Or does anything? Animals are indubitably conscious. Many of them have emotions. Some Chimpanzees can comunicate with signs. If it is meaningful for us to add to the standard five types of consciousness --- for example to subdivide feeling pain, feeling hot and cold, feeling the position of one's limbs --- it is meaningful to posit the same of animals. If we can have a 'sixth sense' that alerts us to something that is about to happen, animals can have it too.

I do believe that something sets us apart, and that it can be expressed by saying that we are conscious of the fact that we are conscious. I can't prove that animals aren't, but I certainly don't believe they are. This aspect of consciousness is not a further type of consciousness, and I can't offer any theory as to how it came about. It would be as clear as daylight to us if we hadn't obfuscated the issue with the red herring --- or wild goose chase or garden path or whatever metaphor for irrelevance you like --- of the consciousness of self. Yet we still have to be careful how we express it. "Consciousness of consciousness" is a phrase that particularly irritates me because of its pretentiousness. We appreciate our consciousness. We delight in it. If animals do too, good luck to them.

All I need to add is that the three paragraphs immediately above were not part of the notebook entry but were added at the keyboard on 6.10.98. [And the square prenthesis was added on 30.7.04.]

Soon after Iris died the BBC put on a beautiful obituary programme which, after very brief details of her early life, was given over to a complete screening of a programme made a few years earlier for Iceland Television, a splendid interview by an extremely intelligent woman who asked Iris all the right questions.

At one point Iris declared a profound difference between philosophy and novel-writing. Philosophy was an utterly unnatural activity, whereas novel writing was a development of story-telling, one of the oldest and most natural activities on earth. This awakened in me old dreams of uniting philosophy with story-telling and making a natural activity of it, as I had already, rather apologetically, tried to do in some diaries that I began in 1990. With In Memoriam exemplifying this attempt afresh, and laser-printed to start me off, perhaps I should try harder and deliberately let philosophy and story-telling interweave with each other.

Eventually this became too dificult to keep up in its original form, and I had to open a separate philosophical notebook. I became zweibändig, as Wittgenstein called it when he ran two notebooks at the same time. So what follows is really a plaiting together of three things (as a proper plait should be): diary entries in which small gobbets of philosophy turn up as the incidents of the day prompt them, and then more extended philosophical notes when I deal with particular projects --- mainly details arising out of my review of Paul Strathern's Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes, a letter from Antony Flew in reply to this, and notes made about a new book by John Searle, Mind, Language and Society.

Neither the diary entries nor those from the notebooks are given in full. They are selected, in fact, to link together to form a story --- that is the whole point of the operation, after all. And the mixture of serious and frivolous is also part of the point. Philosophy can exist side by side with the frivolous, and is all the better for doing so. Whether I've succeded in mixing them together in the best way is another matter. I can only hope.

Perhaps I should add, in case anybody wants to read it, that my Strathern review is on the Internet at www.wittgenstein.co..uk. [That remark was for recipients of my printed version, and on 30.7.04 I must add a new discovery: you have only to put "Wittgenstein" into a search engine and you will get my website on screen. This has led me to update and correct my website as thoroughly as possible, before I turn to making final changes to my book.]

7.1.99 A new genteelism that I'd never thought of: charabank for charabang.

9.1.99 It's bad enough having everyone (except for elderly locals) calling Greenwich grennitsch, but Kirsty Wark, presenting the Dome on Newsnight, has to put it in the East End.

However, a thought came to me while listening to a discussion which included a bishop: the problem of evil came up, and I quite forget what they said about it because this idea of my own had taken over, and I must set it down. There are three levels. One is my neo-Platonist insistence that evil is non-existent, it is like darkness, it simply vanishes when the light is turned on. It is very difficult to explain why this view is is not uncashable metaphysics, and so I shall not try to defend it --- people who like it can take it up, people who don't are welcome to ignore it. That leaves two other levels. One is that however non-existent it is, there is a kind of evil which indubitaby deserves the name. Absolutely frightful things continue to happen. They are utterly different from the good things that, thank God, also continue to happen. No sane person can be in any doubt as to which is which. My faith that one day the light will switch on so brightly that evil will vanish leaving no trace, demonstrating its utter lack of substance, does not diminish by one jot the reality of the difference between the two as they are now, in our still deepening twilight. Nor would any argument that it is my philosophy that lacks substance diminish the difference. Any healthy mind has to admit this fact.

Then there is what I call the third level to consider, something that makes less stable minds doubt, and feel impelled to mumble about everything being, in the last analysis, relative. This level of the argument is something I owe to one P Rawat Esq, as Brian calls him, thinking this name to be a choice irony. Mr Rawat is certainly no relativist, but some of the things he says can be misinterpreted in that way, which is no doubt why he is so careful not to let his views be broadcast to people who could misunderstand them. A great deal of our intellectual energy is dissipated by our obsessively judging things to be good or bad. A caricature of this is my own obsession with details of fashion. Made-up bow ties bad, bows tied by the wearer good. Cuff-links bad, cuff-studs good. A shirt worn with no tie but nevertheless buttoned up bad (my first sight of this frightfully unsmart habit was a photograph of PG Wodehouse taken in Berlin during the war), a shirt worn open at the neck good. I could go on for ever with details like this, and my obsessive judgements about pronunciation are much the same. This is all utter illusion. When one is in the grip of such an obsession one is completely convinced by its reality. The thought that Aaron might do up the bottom button of a weskit fills me with horror, the memory that Nick did himself in before I could teach him to tie a bow tie evokes remorse and shame. The sight of a dot over a capital I makes me shudder. Mr Rawat knows nothing of these prejudices of mine, and directs his scorn to judgements that, while equally illusory, are of wider significance in their social effect. I leave readers to think of examples for themselves.

The important point that I need to make is: the task is to clarify, to clear away otiose concepts; and then to see clearly. The illusory distinctions of 'good' and 'bad' disappear and we find the real difference between good and evil sharp and unmistakable. Finally, but I fear this will take a long time: the very clarity of our view of that reveals the unreality of evil, its ineffectiveness and its spuriousness as it flutters away, gibbering and traceless.

One evening this week there was a fascinating BBC 2 programme about relativity and quantum mechanics and whether they can be united or, until they are, whether they are mutually contradictory. I was startled to hear an argument that I had once found in Popper, and had immediately rejected as an absolute howler that he ought to be ashamed of himself for. Then, while writing to Aaron about something, I sketched my objections to this programme, saying I wished I could express them clearly and put them in print. The next day a letter came from Brian, anguished, as usual, because of swallowing it all so gullibly.This inspired me to elaborate on my objections a bit more fully. A scientific letter from Cyril is still waiting for me to answer, so I will take the opportunity to type a reply to him which enlarges on Popper as well as science fiction. That won't exactly be in print, but it will, in my kitchen table-top sense, be printed.

Briefly, this mysterious and much quoted incompatability of relativity with quantum mechanics turns out to be nothing but Popper's howler: namely, that the acceptance of four dimensional space-time 'all in one go' entails that the future already exists and is therefore immutable, from which follows the impossibility of quantum indeterminacy and likewise of free will, which Popper, like Isaiah, couldn't admit. The truth is that space-time is nothing but an assignment of four coordinates in one go --- which doesn't mean that they have to be assigned in advance, but that when things happen we assign quadruple coordinates to them, three for space and one for time. They are nothing but a convenience of description. Well --- if that's all that keeps quantum mechanics and relativity apart we can all knock off and relax, and wait for further experiment and theory to fill in any domains that will one day bridge them.

10.1.99 The fact that one doesn't pronounce the n in column doesn't mean that one shouldn't pronounce it in columnist either. There is a BBC 2 chap who says "col'mist" (I put an apostrophe for a neutral vowel), which sounds quite odd to me. This chap doesn't button his shirt up with no tie, but comes very close to it in a fashion that has been growing depressingly --- and has an interesting history. In the old days the working classes used to wear an unbuttoned shirt collar over the collar of their jacket. There is a picture of me doing this taken when I was ten. There are shots of the Duke of York (our good Queen's father) wearing his shirt collar over a tweed jacket on one of his camps in the twenties, when he ran them for public schoolboys and state schoolboys (very worthy, but I'm afraid it accomplished nothing but teaching buggery to the lower orders). The essence of the fashion was that it helped keep one's jacket from being soiled by one's greasy hair. It was an expression of nervousness, of a desire to look one's best. Well --- in my progress through grammar school I forgot all about it. It simply never occured to me that I needed to worry about soiling my jacket collar. The strange appearance (as it had become for me by then) of a shirt collar outside a jacket presented itself to me in 1944 when I joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and went to their training camp outside Birmingham, when I saw a working class pacifist with his shirt collar neatly arranged like that.

After the war one hardly ever saw it, but somehow news must have leaked out that it wasn't the thing to do, because in the course of the eighties and nineties one saw a new phenomenon: men wearing their open, unbuttoned shirt collars very carefully tucked low so that no-one could suspect that one was a member of the working classes who needed to take care of his jacket. So no longer does this natural way of wearing a shirt collar express devil-may-care insouciance but the contrary, a fear of giving the wrong impression. And it is accentuated by another awful fashion, wearing one's shirt collar buttoned down at the wings, which makes sure that it never strays above the jacket collar and risks misidentifying one's origins.

31.1.99 There have been reports lately of cosmological discoveries that make the universe perpetually and acceleratingly expanding. In the early seventies my Ph D supervisor, Dieter Peetz (before I discovered the Cornell microfilms and did it on my own), told me that the latest theory was that the universe would collapse into a Big Crunch, after which a Big Bang would follow, and so ad infinitum. Each renewal, however, would bring with it a new set of physical laws, meaning that this universe was simply the only one, out of that infinitude, whose physical laws had enabled life to evolve. This is very easy to understand, and its corollary, you would think, would be that once a Big Crunch is definitively ruled out we know that there is only one universe, namely ours, giving advocates of divine design an opportunity to argue their case. I never did put any trust in this case, or see any need for it, because I saw the Big Bang as so superlatively superlative in itself as not to need the complication of design.

Yet the new theory has a twist in it, which brings back the statistical elegance of the Peetz programme. No need for a Big Crunch: the Bang itself was "a runaway quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing universe", whatever a runaway quantum fluctuation might be --- and in that case our own universe could bud with another runaway fluctuation, which would provide a further universe (with a new set of physical laws) which co-existed with ours without any possibility of communication, making it meaningless to assign any temporal sequence to these universes --- and making otiose the term "pre-existing" in the quotation above. So there is no need to posit a sequence of universes, there is simply an infinity of them, with no possible temporal or spatial relationship between them. This makes the hypothesis of divine design completely unnecessary. But I insist it always was, even on the single universe assumption. It really is awfully sad that sceptics find themselves obliged to embrace an attitude of dull gloom, when the truth of the matter is that if they look for the actual reality of the universe's origin, whether single or multiple, and waste no time on either avowing or rebutting divine design, they will find what they see so rewarding that they simply have no time for anxieties about design, pro or contra. Everything that religious people could ask for is there for the taking, and all the elegance of statistical atheism is there, equally. [And on 30.7.04 I must add what a pleasure it is to find that recent work by Hawking promises to put an end to multiple universes of every kind.]

1.2.99 How can I be so ignorant? Fancy needing the FT to discover that the rhyming slang for fork and spoon is the Duke of York and Lorna Doone! So knife and fork can be the Earl of Fife and the Duke of York.

A couple of evenings ago there was a programme on human and animal consciousness, and you cannot imagine what a mist of muddled thought it was. In particular, the use of "consciousness" to mean self-consciousness, and related concepts like being able to consider and compare. One thing was new information, however. I have always wondered why on earth people should want to posit the possibility of animals receiving visual stimuli and reacting to them satisfactorily without experiencing visual . . . experiences. This is on the face of it a perverse and pointless supposition. Yet in fact there are people who are blind in one eye who yet, when they close their good one, can move their hands to mimic a laser beam shone into their defective one while they declare steadfastly that they can see nothing whatever. Are there people who are 'blind' in this manner in both eyes? The programme might have told us. At all events, the discovery gives a meaning to the very supposition that I had dismissed as perverse and pointless. I still think it is a bit gratuitous to argue from this kind of evidence that, for example, fish feel no pain when caught, only a little regret, and mutatis mutandis for the other senses. On the other hand I mustn't chuck cold water on this programme, because it showed hormone-evidence that fish do feel pain, so good luck to them, but I do wish they'd sort out their use of the English language.

2.2.99 There is what looks like an anomaly in 31.1.99. If, in our universe, a 'runaway quantum fluctuation' takes place, giving rise to a new universe as a 'bud' of our own, and we observe this and conclude from our current theories of cosmology that a new universe will indeed be the upshot, then in ours we can pinpoint the moment at which the 'bud' formed and vanished, giving the departure of this new universe a temporal correlation with our own. No-one in the new universe, however, will ever be able to identify the universe it came from, or when, in the life of that universe, it came; and similarly we, in our universe, can give no spatial or temporal reference to the universe that has gone, only to its having gone. No doubt some cosmologist propounding such a theory will find it mathematically useful to posit an inter-universal observer who can establish such correlations, but mathematical usefulness cannot guarantee his existence, and moreover, even if he did, fortuitously, exist and was capable of observing us, along with the inhabitants of all other universes, we should never be able to observe him. And if he were kind enough to enter our universe he would thereby be incapable of giving us information about, or even himself knowing anything about, other universes, and the best advice he could give us would be to take no account whatever of their possible existence. [On 5.8.04 for final revision I can only reiterate my gratitude to Hawking for, if all goes well with his new theory, putting an end to all that stuff.]

3.2.99 I think it would be a nice variation if we had Kirsty Wark and Lorna Doone for fork and spoon, and the Earl of Fife and the Duke of York for knife and fork. There is something else I wanted to say but I've forgotten it.

6.2.99 Walking to the post with a letter for Aaron I thought of a simple example of a mathematically useful assumption about multiple universes. Someone asks if this infinity of universes could be a super-infinity. Could it have the cardinality of the continuum ("for example", I am tempted to say, but that would give the impression that I know about other super-infinities)? Quite simple. We assume an observer in a suitable multi-dimensional space who is able to tick off universes as they bud. However complex their budding (they can be quite higgledy piggledy and often coming simultaneously) he will be able to order them in such a way that they can be correlated one-one with the positive integers. Set theory buffs will know all sorts of tricks for doing this. These universes do not need to have a first member. They can stretch to infinity in both directions, like the positive and negative integers, which can be re-ordered: 0, +1, -1, +2, -2, . . . and thereby be put into an infinity that stretches in only one direction. Whatever the complexities, our observer will always be able to find some such trick up his sleeve.

Clearly, the elegance of that thought experiment does not require this observer's actual existence. And more than that: consider the supposition that the universes in question exist within a super-universe of many --- if you like an infinity of dimensions, if I remember the tricks of set theory correctly --- enabling the supposer to say that while the natural four dimensions of each cannot be correlated with the four dimensions of any other, they can still be correlated 'from outside' in the multi-dimensional super-universe that he is positing. Again, I insist that this doesn't require the actual existence of these multiple dimensions any more than it requires the actual existence of the observer. It is all a game. Nothing more needs to be said. We in our universe cannot correlate it with other universes and that is all there is to it.

And coming back with my FT I found it had one of those quarterly how-to-spend-it supplements that keep coming round so bloody quickly, with an article on the British film industry which mentioned Aaron's set-up, Mill Film. I will post it to him as a substitute for a birthday card.

Thursday's Star Trek was a double-length, the very first of the deep space nine series, and it was full of philosophical overtones about linear time and . . . simultaneous time, I suppose. I may be able to enlarge on this tomorrow, but today (getting Frege typed completely and only a book reference to find before I print it) I am too blotto and will just make an observation about American and English idiom: saying "this" where we say "that". I first heard this talking to Iris and assumed it was just posh-educated, though I never took to it. To appreciate that it is American you have only to think of an American opening a telephone conversation by saying "who is this?" However, it spreads much wider than that. Our Star Trek hero, meeting images from his past, would use words like "past" and "time" and they would respond: "'past' --- what is this?" or "'time' --- what is this?"

This encounter with Iris must have happened a long time ago, because it took place in my parents' flat in the City, where I am sure she only visited me when I was still at Oxford.

There is a quite different use of "this" which is English colloquial, and would sound like irony to people trained in philosophy. You have to know Russell's theory of definite descriptions and Strawson's revision of it. I can explain it best with a story. I was leaving the Milan youth hostel in Delia's Lea Francis and my pupil, young Nawaz, was in the driveway ahead of me looking out for traffic. Suddenly he said "Stop, Mr Paul, the car is coming". I stopped, got out, and held everyone up while I gave him a lesson on Russell and Strawson. You only say "the car is coming", I said (following Strawson's line), when speaking to someone who already knows about the existence of this car. What you say to someone who doesn't is "there is a car coming". There is something linguistically odd about people who do not distinguish between an introductory mention of a person or thing and a mention that assumes prior acquaintance. My "this" just above is one that assumes prior acquaintance. This colloquial usage, to get back to it, is ironical because it makes a joke of taking a phrase that normally assumes acquaintance and using it for introduction, as when people say "I was in a pub the other evening and this chap came up and said . . ." or "I was walking along as quiet as could be and this copper . . ." That aspect of "this" has nothing whatever to do with saying "who is this?" to someone whose voice one does not recognise on the telephone.

7.2.99 To return to the philosophical overtones of Deep Space Nine. The first thing to say is that if one lived in a simultaneous world everything would just be simultaneous. One would not experience anything that gave one even an analogy of time. In order to make dramatic grist out of the idea, script writers have to let these simultaneous people have experiences that are like ours in order to be puzzled by how our experiences differ from theirs, but truly simultaneous people would not experience experiences. They would not even be able to ask "'time' --- what is this?" because that would take time to say. The script writer has to invent an 'analogy of time' which simply isn't a theoretical possibility. Something like: one lives in a magic bubble in which everything is there in one go to be explored, and then one explores it in a completely arbitrary order, moving into one set of experiences and then into another--- in other words, doing something which requires time in which to do it. If script writers can handle that, good luck to them, but it doesn't constitute a timeless universe.

Then there are two quite different sci fi series which I won't identify in case my readers think I am going soft --- in any case, both are so awful that I'm not going to try them again. And a charming American schoolgirl who tracks down vampire-like phenomena --- I shan't give her up, but her scripts are part of the same syndrome. This is what my diary excerpt of 1990 began with: the compulsion to personify evil, or failing that to reify it. People just cannot digest the horrors of the world without mythologising them.

The question is, what hope is there for drama if we seriously try to eschew all that? I take it for granted that I don't have to argue all over again that evil is not an object, removable by the right kind of magician and requiring grim acceptance by the rest of us. What I am interested in is what kind of drama people who agree with me can hope to write.

And there, I'm afraid, I must wind this up and leave it. There isn't any answer I can give except by actually writing something that grabs people without resorting to superstition. That ought to be possible for someone with the talent, but I don't see how I can hope to do it. It's just got to be back to the only thing I'm any good at, nit-picking textual criticism of Frege and Wittgenstein. It won't get them hammering at the box office, but at least it gets me into print.

18.2.99 Told Brian that Iris had described philosophy as entirely contrary to nature, whereas novel writing was like story telling, the most natural activity on earth. Hearing this had filled me with the conviction that I had cracked this problem by telling philosophy like a story --- not that anyone else would be advised to try it on. If the genre is ever admitted, it must go with the proviso that a fifty year apprenticeship is required for it, preferably with Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, reading practically all of Frege in print and then practically all of Wittgenstein in manuscript, curing oneself of Oxford by doing logic under Casimir Lewy and Timothy Smiley in Cambridge, making a mathematician of oneself (by picking it up in Nottingham like German in Oberhausen), befriending Imre Lakatos and knowing his mind inside out . . . I could go on but it would sound big-headed. It is a serious thing that I am trying to say. I have achieved something. If only I could get it recognised!

19.2.99 Too tired to note anything but a couple of sad mispronunciations yesterday: the Duke of Clarence who died in a butt of Malmsey pronounced as spelt, and a seafood programme in which only two people out of about eight could pronounce scallops as they deserve. And something charming in the Spectator of the 30th of January, written by one Alan Duncan about the Duke of Rutland and what a nice chap he was. Alan Raddon likes people to call him "Al", but Alan Duncan doesn't. However, he was shooting with the Duke and thought he heard the Duke's land agent call him that as a low bird flew up. Thinking he was being told to shoot it he shot, and fortunately missed, because it was an owl. From this I infer that the land agent was a posh one, not someone who had worked his way up from gamekeeping, because quite apart from how an ex-gamekeeper might address one of the Duke's guests, only a very posh voice can pronounce "owl" to resemble "Al" ("arl", I presume).

20.2.99 Much cheered yesterday to hear a girl on telly pronounce a London lido as "lyedo". I remember the Walthams long ago when they were rising through Islington asking how it ought to be pronounced, and funking saying it was "lyedo" in London and "leedo" in Venice. This gorgeous girl has vindicated me.

21.2.99 Vague reports elsewhere have spurred me to look at a precise one in the FT: the Euro is weakening because of poor industrial figures in France and Germany. How different from the D Mark's magnificent performance when it started up, with an exchange rate that made it such an attractive buy! Admittedly, there are murmurs in Frankfurt that they don't mind its rate slipping, and very reasonable that could be, because we all know now that a drop in exchange rate can help trade, but that isn't the line that was taken when the Euro was planned --- it was supposed to be hard, with just that little bit of softness that would help employment, but it has softened seriously and unemployment hasn't dropped at all.

9.3.99 On Thursday President Khatami of Iran is going to meet the Pope and Monica Lewinsky is going to dinner at All Souls.

14.3.99 And another FT thing I wanted to quote. Essays by a chap called Manguel. One of these says that publishers' editing (I am quoting the reviewer) "is an American-originated practice spreading itself through the empire of English writing, so that almost every text becomes [in effect] co-authored". The job of the publisher's editor is to make sure that the author hasn't made any spelling mistakes or the printer any printer's errors; and on top of that, in non-fiction works, to check facts, which authors do sometimes get wrong. Of course, there are texts that are so bad that they wouldn't sell at all if they weren't rewritten in a pubisher's office. I discovered this when Delia's friend Sally showed me a typescript which her boss had written in his spare time and she had typed for him. It was about sex, and it was preposterously bad --- but, to our astonishment, a publisher had accepted it. A few months later it came out to rave reviews. The explanation was that it had been completely rewritten. I'm not at all sure that publishers who do that with impossible texts are being kind to the public, but definitely, authors of good texts ought to stand out against the system. I shall found The Iris Murdoch Society For The Prevention Of Publishers' Editing.

Up early, I've celebrated the first fine day for months by standing on my doorstep drinking tea from my saucer and singing to myself

Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes,

Bow, bow, ye merchants and ye masses.

My neighbours in Water Street never notice. Once the postman did.

Now, a last check before halfWitt is ready to edit at the keyboard, to find where exactly he talked about the swamp and see if I can work in a puff for my book, which through thick and thin has been and will be called Climbing out of the Swamp. (Discovered, earlier in the notebooks than I'd remembered.)

20.3.99 Just started reading Wells's New Machiavelli (but I'm putting it aside for more exciting things) and find in its §1: "It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do". I wonder if this is the source of Isaiah's positive / negative? If it isn't, it is a useful mnemonic for it. And incidentally, it is clear that there are a lot of interesting things to know about Machiavelli. All I've read are Isaiah on him and the text of the Prince itself. Isaiah's Romanticism is one of the exciting things but it's still to arrive. A new translation of Gilgamesh, with fascinating extras, is the only one here yet, and the third will be Frieda's poems. Also, a book on the Navy from the London Library has come. Disappointing on the Benbow but lots of background.

I am suffering from a block that you'll have to look up in the Waltham archives. Otherwise work going well.

21.3.99 Rang Aaron today and explained my block to him, hoping he could psycho-analyse me, and he said "it's not very important in the scheme of things". It is that Kings have got my entry wrong in their new Register, and New College are bringing out their own new one and I must write and correct their proof suggestions. I can't type halfWitt until I've typed that, and I can't type New College until I've typed Kings, and I can't type Kings because I can't bear having to be beastly to anyone. I promised Aaron I would send them a nice letter, and if I couldn't manage that I would just let it lie.

Maharaji has a website. I discovered this a fortnight ago, and gave Alan the code for it. On Thursday I saw him looking very pessimistic and muttering about "the website". I assumed he meant Roy's Aberarth website, but he meant Maharaji's. My impression was that he thought it too low key, not exciting enough, and I thought this very unfair because he'd have grumbled if it had been high-key. No: what had upset him was a palaver one had to go through in agreeing to accept copyright restrictions before one was connected --- an excellent system which I quite fancy making use of myself. But when Alan called this site up what intrigued me was something quite different. Alan must also have said something about previous Perfect Masters because I arrived with thoughts on the subject. My guess had long been that the recent line of Masters began with a naked monk called Tota Puri who turned up by swimming across a river towards a holy man in Calcutta, Ramakrishna. There is a book about him (or was) at Gwarllyn. Tota Puri said "what you need is a bit of Advaita Vedanta", which means the knowledge of non-duality. (The initial "A" means "non" and "dva" means "two".) Ramakrishna had two young disciples, whose names were Brahmananda and Vivekananda. The former stayed in India to run the mission when its holy founder died, and Vivekananda went to the States and made quite a splash there at the end of the last century. When people like Isherwood settled in California they received the Advaita Vedanta that this mission (whose name I forget) passed to its followers, having derived it via Vivekananda from Ramakrishna and thus from Tota Puri, who said he had been trained in some monastery, but no-one has ever been able to identify it.

Since reading this book I had always assumed that Maharaji's father had received the same Knowledge from his Master, whose name I am dubious about, who must in turn have been given it by Brahmananda (a name I have heard Maharaji refer to with great respect).

The surprise, on seeing the names on the Maharaji website, was that while the first of them was Totapuri (in one word), I did not recognise his three successors. No name resembled Ramakrishna's, and Brahmananda wasn't there either. But Totapuri's name was unmistakable, and he had no antecedents. I have heard it said that the California mission which took Isherwood under its wing has spent a great deal of money trying to find out where Totapuri came from and where his monastery was, to no effect. (But our website does give his dates of birth and death, 1780 and 1866.)

The way he came out of the blue and gave 'Advaita Vedanta' to Ramakrishna (and it now appears to another holy man as well) reminds me of the way Melchizedek turned up out of the blue and gave some kind of Knowledge to Abraham, an incident that is commemorated in the Catholic liturgy, in which Christ is said to have been a priest secundum ordinem Melchizedek. (For the Catholic Church his interest is that he gave Abraham bread and wine in his status as a 'priest of the most high God', and as a king as well, but for the rest of us it is surely that the Old Testament is supposed to be the story of the revelation of monotheism to a special series of people, of whom Abraham is one --- whereas Melchizadek appears as a fully paid-up monotheist who does not belong to that series at all.)

Another surprise, which Alan couldn't explain and I haven't told him my view on yet, was that Maharaji's father, Shri Hans, was prefaced by the initials HRH. Now I discovered recently in the FT that the name "Rawat", Maharaji's surname, was actually an Indian title --- there was once a Rawat of Irgendwo. So presumably Shri Hans was the last Rawat of Wo-immer, and the title has now become a surname, rather as my pupil's father was originally Shah Nawaz but when he employed me was simply Mr Shahnawaz of Karachi. (Which the ever-helpful FT has capped by telling us that "rawat" means "ruler".)

All of which I can wind up by saying that our friend Prem Rawat, known to us as Maharaji, is the Perfect Master secundum ordinem Totapuri.

26.3.99 Very little news today because my second typing stint was just finishing (missing BBC's six o'clock) in time for ITN's six thirty when I made a mistake in saving my stint and damn near lost it. After agonies it all came right, and I still don't know what I did to cure it. I do know what I did wrong, and certainly shan't ever do it again, however fatigued I get.

It is doing well, though liable to run over my limit of forty five minutes of reading time. Something that intrigues me has come up. I've nailed a passage in which he says that idealism and realism are equally false because they are metaphysical claims about the essence of the world and incapable of being said in language. I had quite forgotten this latter point. But somewhere else I have a note on a passage which says that the truth-functional nature of sentences cannot be expressed in language. Of course it can --- by a lecturer standing at a blackboard with a piece of chalk explaining how Wittgenstein's truth-function diagrams work. It seems to me that these are two entirely different orders of what language can't do. The first really is metaphysical and one has got to give up trying to do it; the second is not an impossibility at all. Or can there be some simple, unmetaphysical way of explaining that there really are things in the world just like explaining truth-functional algebra at a blackboard? Surely --- except of course that the two won't be 'just like' each other. The lesson is that Wittgenstein was obsessed with what language can do, a preoccupation that elevates what ought to be common sense arguments into metaphysical ones, instead of (as the aim ought to be) bringing metaphysical arguments down to common sense. [See 3.5.99 ahead on Searle, who achieves exactly that in his new book.]

30.3.99 A little febrile, because after typing and printing seven pages of halfWitt, leaving nothing but some extra illustrative quotations to come, I just can't get down to useful things I ought to be doing and am floating on a cloud instead. I read my print-out in thirty minutes, which included some corrections, so there's no doubt that I'm in my limit, and I really am rather pleased with it.

One thing I really must note is seeing Dr Strangelove on telly on Saturday evening, which included interior views of a B52 bomber --- and then, less than 48 hours later, seeing views shot by ITV of the cockpit of a current B52, on its way to drop Trident missiles. Absolutely identical! Jolly enterprising of Kubrik to get hold of the real thing, of course, but the symbolism! Made worse by the fact that (never having seen it before) I'd been under a misapprehension that it ended with disaster averted. Not at all. The doomsday machine goes into action, with hydrogen after hydrogen bomb going off, laced with whatever was going to put an end to us all.

And it was very prescient: the reason why the Russians go for this doomsday machine is that they can't afford the standard nuclear arms race --- the machine is so much cheaper that it gives them a chance to give their people a few more refrigerators and washing machines. Actually, it occurs to me that the doomsday thing would have made so many bombs unnecessary --- one, sufficiently laced, should have been enough, hence the economy of it. No matter. The sight of them drove the point home.

I've told Aaron that while he is in Prague (not so very many miles north of Belgrade) he must keep his antennae out and come back and tell us what Central Europe thinks about us. I ought to be able to add here what I think, but it is too complicated and bound to give the wrong impression . . .

2.4.99 I knocked off at half past one and a peaceful Good Friday followed: the St John Passion, reading Frieda's deeply personal poems, and then reading more of the Berlin book. Now it's Parsifal, barely audible on my little tranny.

So I wonder what I could tell Aaron about the Kosovo business. I don't want to justify anything. As someone said in the FT, far the best thing would have been to sink a Yugoslav gunboat shelling Dubrovnik in 1991, which might have cured Milosevic of his romantic enterprise and saved an awful lot of lives. It also needs to be said that when Tito gave Kosovo autonomy and then removed his discipline by dying, the Kosovan Albanians did not treat the Kosovan Serbs with generosity. Not to put too fine a point on it, they terrified them and drove them to back Milosevic. The fact remains that the man can't be tolerated. It doesn't follow from this that we are justified in doing anything it takes to get rid of him. I want to move the viewpoint. In the course of three thousand years we have learned to get rid of despots. They don't belong in our vision of the future. They have got to go. But how do we get rid of them? The last thing I should be propounding is that anything we do to boot them out is OK. After all, I've got a good record of not thinking anything we did to get rid of Hitler was OK. From the viewpoint of human history, we are learning, rather incompetently, how to stop people setting themselves up as despots. It takes time. One can't say "while people are learning, the rules of moral conduct don't apply" --- or "this need of social evolution is bigger than we are and excuses the mistakes we make". All one can do is stand back and wait for the dust to settle. And perhaps plan post-war relief, a quite different thing from immediate relief, long-term efforts sent from Ljubljana to follow the day-to-day clean-up coming from Skopje.

3.4.99 As I was working at the computer towards lunch time, Cyril came round with his thirteen year old son, Josef, aus Tyrol, and I did my best to tell him about Wittgenstein, though I told him he ought to read Tolstoy's War and Peace first. I said I was sorry my thing on Wittgenstein wouldn't be ready before he went home on Monday, but blow me down, after they'd gone I buckled down and finished it, and actually printed a proof copy, but I daren't look at it till tomorrow, when I'm fresh with strong Assam tea. So I'll be able to do a copy for Josef and Cyril after all, and I must give Roy one with his copy of Strathern, and take one to Alan. As soon as I'd finished printing I turned printer and computer off and put a sheet over them, like Rabbi Sassoon putting a cloth over his in-tray in readiness for the Sabbath. Without stopping for anything else I went upstairs for my hour off. Then I did my roast and watched an hour of Maharaji while I was eating it, Kyoto last October, in which he obligingly told people that one didn't have to give up eating meat and even atheists were entirely acceptable. It was full of beautiful things.

11.4.99 Aaron well, and I told him I had been reading the Navy 1914-1939 book, in which I had found staggering things from 1919-20, the Navy against the Bolsheviks, both in the Baltic and the Caspian, if you please. In Latvia they discovered that the German army had been ritually raping Latvian women, and sending their resulting babies to Germany. After the armistice, this particular German unit went on the rampage and pillaged Latvia further, and the Navy and Marines, when they discovered what had happened, took great pleasure in blowing them to pieces. Quite right too.

What I infer from this, but couldn't explain properly to Aaron, is that this is a syndrome, a family of signs and symptoms, which goes back altogether --- and to the Vikings, as Aaron added. When the Serbians collapse and Nato takes over we shall need a therapist who can tell us how to sort ourselves out. It really does go way back. It isn't local, it's global, and it needs global therapy.

A pleasure, I must add, to see the British Army taking over the role of the FAU.

12.4.99 As if the first world war in Latvia wasn't enough, there was a thing last night on the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and as if that wasn't enough we had the Sikhs tonight and Indira Ghandi sending the army into the Golden Temple and the consequences of that. You might think this simply depressing --- if human nature is like that, how can we expect it to change? --- but to me it implies hope. If this frightful pattern is a pathological condition of human kind, it can be cured, provided we find the cure for it, and provided people submit to being cured.

14.4.99 Don't seem to have noted that on Sunday (thanks to a lift by Alan) I bought plants at the local car boot sale (never been to one before --- awful culture shock) and planted them. Four herbs and a rhubarb plant, a way of telling my neighbours that it's vegetables I'm going for, not flowers.

An Ahuja article on a new book by Susan Blackmore (a most impressive person except that I have confused her with Greenfield), which includes a comment by a philosopher: " . . . we are forced to drop the idea of 'the self', and people don't like this idea that there is no soul and no spirit". But I don't put up ideas of the self, the soul and the spirit, and so it doesn't worry me when people think they are knocking them down. And of course, it's another case of was ebenso falsch ist, and when Blackmore declares that the lack of "a self" is also a tenet of Buddhism, I rejoice that I read about Buddhism when I was fifteen and had never met any of that airy fairy stuff. She goes on: "When I practise Zen I have to ponder ridiculous questions such as 'What is this moment?'." If they are ridiculous, why does she ponder them? And what the Hell do they mean anyway? I'm terribly disappointed in her.

16.4.99 Yesterday a review by Greenfield of a book by someone else, and I thought it had something I could quote, like the above, but it hadn't. More important: yesterday Nedo rang (he calls himself Michaël, like the O Michael we used to hear on the Third Programme, I forget who by) and had some very interesting things to say. So I must add his points to my '45 minutes'; and I've found a mistake, and decided that a passage needed rewriting, so I shall have to enter all that tomorrow and print yet one more proof, and on Monday I must send it apologetically to the Wren. Most gratifying to find how much Nedo put his trust in me, and I've got to pull my memory together about kleines Format. What he said made it quite clear that I was right about it and couldn't have dreamt it. That must go to the Wren too.

18.4.99 There may be above a confusion between two distinguished neurologists. It really doesn't matter. I want to make a declaration. I've already declared my principles as a generalist, but I can't remember where so I'll do it again. First, anyone who sets himself up as one must, to qualify, establish himself as a specialist in some field. Second, he (or she) must accept tuition from specialists and criticism by them in any field he hopes to dabble in. My two dabbling fields are colour science (in which Rushton tutored me) and musical scales, in which I listen to or read any specialist I come across. Then there is economics, in which I have the excuse that I did get a third of a third-class degree and in which I do my best to read in print or listen on telly to as many authorities as I can. My speciality, of course, is Wittgenstein texts, and I think my squib (last corrections made on it this morning) really does show what I'm made of, even if my book is never finished. In the field of neurology I would not dream of trying to make myself a generalist dabbler, even with those restrictions. So what I have to say about the one or possibly two distinguished neurologists mentioned above does not in any way whatever constitute a dabbling in neurology. My point is simply a common-sense one, though it is the sort of common-sense point that well over fifty years of serious philosophy can help one put better. It is that we all know what consciousness is because we've all got it. Consciousness is things like: my seeing the clutter in my rather untidy room and my remembering other things I have seen in the course of an adventurous life; my smelling (and remembering) smells, though if my neighbours are to be believed my sensitivity to smells is waning; my hearing noises (and realising that my sensitivity there is waning too); my tasting food --- though the waning there does not seem to have come from old age but to have come years ago in adolescence (difficult to pin-point but what stands out in my memory is being horrified by the urine-taste of kidneys before the war and finding, to my surprise, when they became available again, that they tasted quite pleasant); and finally sensations of touch and pain, which don't seem to have waned at all --- and incidentally I can never understand why they are lumped together as one fifth sense. That is what consciousness is. Our feeling that we who have such experiences are individuals is a separate matter and should not cloud the essential simplicity of what consciousness is. It is reasonable to believe that we share consciousness with all or most animals, though just what they are conscious of is a matter of speculation, and reasonable to doubt whether we share a sense of individuality with any but a very few kinds of animals.

What we need neurologists and biologists to tell us is how this extraordinary phenomenon works and how it has developed in the course of evolution. And possibly (but for the present this is metaphysical speculation) cosmologists to tell us whether it only came about in the course of evolution or was in some sense always there, for evolution to 'tap into'. I am not at all sure what that last point might mean, but I feel obliged to mention it because I have said something about it in a set of diaries that I propose to publish fairly soon called Born under the Pleiades.

25.4.99 An awful lot to write up but I'm quite shattered. I think the war in Serbia has been getting me down. To say nothing about Milosevic and his wife, and seeing on telly the extremely amiable newspaper owner they had shot.

2.5.99 To record quickly: Aaron didn't get the Soho nail bomb, but his flat-mate, Dylan, was drinking in a pub at the Wardour Street end of Old Compton Street and was quite shaken up. Maggie was shaken up too: I felt like telling her that after all it wasn't like the Blitz, but thought this might be tactless. And a second thing: I'm on the Internet at last, on a website primarily devoted to Welsh love-spoons. Anybody who thinks of associating Wittgenstein with Welsh love-spoons will get me. And a third: Roy has leant me a paperback on philosophy by Searle, which I've quite taken to and will write to him about.

3.5.99 Searle's book turns out to be an answer to the point made above on 26.3.99. While I'm extremely impressed, I'm not happy that I've understood all his arguments and I must make another attempt to get the hang of (as he puts it himself) how it all hangs together. I feel it is only a sketch of what he might have said. However impressive and effective, it is essentially a prep-school science-master effort: "when you get to your next school (or university or post-graduate place) you'll be able to fill in the details --- this is just to get you started".

Waiting to hear Anne-Sophie Mutter playing the Kreutzer, I note quickly that I have finished Wells's New Machiavelli, really not a very good book, and that what made me want to read it was something it had in common with The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, published in 1914 but clearly written before the Great War started. Machiavelli was published in 1911. Both of them take you beyond 1914 in their chronology. Yet this wasn't naivety about the possibility of war --- in Machievelli Wells expressly anticipates a war with Germany. He must deliberately have ignored it and decided to extend his plots for both into a period when catastrophe would have been and gone, but everything else remained the same. So much the same that there is a comic item. In 1910 my father was invalided out of the Navy and had to take a series of jobs doing whatever he could. One of these was in a house in Bayswater, and his first job of each day was to brush the mud off the skirts of the women of the house. In Machiavelli, at a point which is certainly intended to be later than 1914, there is a mention of women's muddy skirts --- but from 1914 onwards skirts rapidly rose . . .

6.5.99 This gives me a chance to tell a story about my schoolboy observation of skirts. I was too young to have noticed the way in which, in the late twenties and early thirties, skirts had come down again a little, so when, in 1937 I think it was, they went up again, I jumped to the conclusion that skirts had been rising monotonously ever since 1914, and would go on doing so until they asymptotically approached girls' knickers. I was quite looking forward to this. My hypothesis was disproved by the New Look in 1947, though I didn't notice it until 1948. Then, a new hypothesis took over, namely that whatever the fashionable length for skirts was in any particular year, that length would always look right for that year, and anybody who wore the length of the year before would look unsmart. This did actually hold for a remarkably long time, until, when the miniskirt had been fashionable for a couple of years or so, women rebelled, and decided collectively that they were going to wear whatever length of skirt they damn well wanted to. This freedom too has held remarkably, and my new aesthetic with it --- I quite abandoned seeing an unusual skirt length as unsmart. Until recently, that is, when I have come to see as unsmart (and bewildering) skirts worn well below the calf in daytime --- I just cannot see how women and girls can see themselves as smart in such rigs, whereas a few years ago I'd have been happy to accept it as freedom of choice.

A moan that goes back a few days. On Monday the Times got him right --- Padre Pio was a friar, not a monk, but on Sunday, in bulletin after bulletin, the BBC had him as a monk. And today the Times has Christopher Columbus entering a Franciscan monastery for a few years. I really don't think one needs to be a member of a religious order to mind whether people know the difference between a friar and a monk, any more than one needs to be a shootin' type to mind when people call a gun a rifle. Or than one needs to be obsessed with Scottish genealogies to mind when people say "of that ilk" when they mean "of that kind".

On Tuesday I took a copy of my squib to Cyril, next door but one [already mentioned, but not the London Cyril mentioned earlier], who had a friend with him who read it all through and asked serious questions about it, and pointed out that one of my quotations lacked a page reference (it had a date, which I thought would be sufficient for real Witt-buffs). So on coming home, plied with beautiful vintage Cockburn, I decided to put this reference in, and while I was about it I put one or two extras in too. So the Wren, and Searle in California, will get the revision and the Internet thing can stay as it is. I've sent an unamended copy to a friend who won't mind, one will go tomorrow to Cornelia in Berlin, and a last copy can go to someone else.

Cockburn is marvellous stuff. My first (decanted by someone I was visiting) was a 1925, and later I actually had some 1908s of my own, and the taste reverberates down the century. This was 1993.

7.5.99 Even the London Review of Books has Padre Pio as a monk --- in an otherwise very informative article.

Walden, very good on Stalin, had some disturbing things to say. Chaplin! And of course the Webbs, old Aunt Sallies for this sort of thing, Beatrice saying something outrageously uncritical in 1936 and something else undated. Yet it was from her that I owe what I knew about the show trials and the treatment of the Kulaks as a schoolboy. For I read the second edition of her Soviet Communism, a new civilisation in 1941, which had a question mark after the title and an appendix about those two very points. I'm sure I picked up extra information later but Beatrix's appendix was what got my eyes opened. To be sure, by the time he died in 1953 I must have realised that many people had been killed or sent to labour camps without the benefit of show trials. I was astounded, when I arrived at work the day after his death, to see my employer, Revans, wearing a black tie and telling me that one ought to honour the death of a great man.

One of the people famed for opening our eyes is Arthur Koestler, yet his Yogi and the Commissar actually gives quite a kid-glove picture of the KGB and hindered my appreciation of how bad things had been. The topsy-turviness of reputations . . .

11.5.99 Lovely letter from Frieda yesterday. Last night, George VI --- said first to have met young Bowes Lyon in 1920 but my Navy book has her turning up at Cranwell, which Albert went to (and ran, contrary to what some people thought of him) after Jutland. Want to note an FT article by Raj Persaud of the Maudsley about neurological stimulation of 'mystical' experiences. Some quotations from this would be useful in my note on what Witt might have meant by 'das Mystische'. Eg "the strong emotional experience of awe"; "a state of ultimate unity"; "A decreased sense of awareness of the boundaries between the self and the external world could lead to a sense of oneness with others"; "Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance".

12.5.99 The above notes [omitted here] continued in the notebook for Searle, most satisfactory. Wrote a letter to Frieda yesterday which didn't catch the post and finished it at leisure, and today I wrote (very quickly) a good letter to Flew, copying in it the pome I wrote for Frieda.

After posting, I took the FT to Evan's, where he was outside and told me awful news about the Topleys. Their sale of their house has not gone through. And Kate has cancer of the breast and is being operated on next week. A boost for Kate is that Eric is taking instruction for the Church. On my way back I called on Roy to tell him of my Flew adventures and he said sure, put it on the internet site, but when I asked about Maureen (who was reported as looking well a few days ago), she has angina again and is very poorly, and going in for treatment. I said "it never rains but it pours", but I didn't explain what I meant by it.

13.5.99 [notebook entry] Page 68 [of the Searle book], the only candidate for observation is the act of observing itself. I believe this has important implications, in that people who go in for turning consciousness inwards, a la Totapuri, often talk as if they are observing consciousness, and this is very misleading. They are exercising consciousness, admittedly exercising it inwards and not outwards, and admittedly they are learning from doing so, but they are not learning that this or that is the case. Indeed, they are learning a contentment that weans them from expressing themselves propositionally, and especially in propositions about their 'real selves' or their 'essential being' or 'who they are' or anything of that kind.

Searle says simultaneously that consciousness is an irreducible phenomenon and an ordinary biological phenomenon. Ie, it is as ordinary as digestion or photosynthesis but (he fails to say) it does not resemble them in the least.

14.5.99 [notebook entry] Page 70, the idea (obsessing Witt in 1930) of "certainty about our conscious states". Cf me, "at least I had that image" (of a car that seemed to disappear into nowhere).

Page 72, he makes a meal of the term "introspection". The proper thing is to recognise that we have all sorts of different experiences, visual sensations being one of them. If we recognise these differences and then, for convenience, use the term "introspection" we needn't be misled by it.

14.5.99

Were Witt and Ryle

Like Tate and Lyle,

An unctuous amalgam,

Or did one pick the other's mind

--- And which one steered the tandem?

I was inspired to write that while answering a letter from Frieda, who is in the Times today for a memorial service at the Abbey yesterday. Queen Mum and Prince of Wales there --- the other royals sent 'representatives'. And to think that when I took her to the London Library 150 years do, I did my best to get her close to the Queen Mum as she came past . . . surely they weren't already buddies then?

I sent the poem to Flew in a long letter setting out what I'd discovered and saying if he was interested I'd send him more, typed. I hope the poem doesn't persuade him of my frivolity. There were many things in his letter and paper (on Ryle for the Linacre Society) that I didn't touch on, and some of them relate to Searle's book, so perhaps (as I put it to Aaron) I could get two profs with one stone.

Last night Mary Robinson was interviewed on Newsnight. A superb performance! In my novel, Nial's first Queen (Bel, soon to be replaced by a posh girl from a useful family) declares her philosophy of caring for the lands given her to look after: at first a little patch with a cow on it, where Nial finds her, now all five provinces of Ireland, and then in spirit the whole of Europe, or wherever else she is needed. I had Mary Robinson in mind when I wrote that. I hoped she'd become UN President --- but she's done well enough.

On the same programme, a well-educated chap talking about the Japanese addiction to killing porpoises (and the Norwegian for Minke whales) and pronouncing it as spelt. Don't people read Lewis Carroll any longer? I find it appalling.

15.5.99 [notebook entry] A side issue here is that Searle considers the theatre of consciousness model and rejects it because it leads to the homunculus model. The actors in this theatre are the various types of experience --- one actor represents sight, another sound, and there turn out to be many more than five on stage because of the tiny subdivisions of interior experience. This is quite different from my old (early Premie) assumption of a theatre of visual consciousness. Or the viewer in the monitor studio (and I deny vehemently that this viewer was an homunculus). Visual consciousness does lend itself to this theatre or monitor model, consciousness as a whole doesn't, and Searle's model is the prairie (or really plains) model. He must have crossed the plains by rail --- perhaps car would do --- as Delia and I did in '65 approaching the Rockies. It is a remarkable and memorable experience to see these plains, which in anticipation one had visualised as flat, plane, in fact convoluted everywhere into mounds. Those are his aspects of consciousness. Using his waking-up-in-a-dark-room analogy he argues that there is no need to posit some process of binding these aspects together. We draw out of Calgary, see the flat plain, and then notice these extraordinary hummocks --- there is no need to bind them because the plain was there first and the hummocks rose out of it.

What impresses me about this is that it is grist to my mill of wanting to argue that consciousness got there first in general --- that consciousness was there from the Big Bang onwards and animal consciousness somehow took it on as it evolved. I have no idea what this means. I cannot propound it, because as it stands it is plain metaphysical nonsense. I merely hope that some meaning will come to me.

As to his last paragraph in Chapter 3, I think he makes his argument harder than it needs to be. If I were asked in a lecture why I think consciousness important I should say "Suppose I had a switchboard here and told you that if I threw this switch all consciousness in this lecture hall would cease. For ever. That is as much as to say that when the janitors and charwomen arrived to close it down they would find us all dead. Would you think it a matter of no importance if I offered to throw the switch?"

This is such a knock-down argument that saying everything has value in relation to consciousness is in comparison trivial, and I can't help suspecting that it is equally trivial to say that in 'coping with the world' the important feature of consciousness is that it is essentially connected to intentionality --- whatever intentionality needs to mean and whatever being essentially connected to it means too.

One thing for me to get out of the way is that whatever intentionality means, it is a wider concept than Witt's 1930 work on intending etc. These were essentially propositional problems. What connects my present intention with what satisfies it in the future? Answer, my propositional account of what I intend to do (or hope to find, or what have you) at the stroke of midnight. Midnight comes, and I do what I promised myself, and then compare the upshot with what I had actually said, or written on the back of an envelope. Either (a), the two tally or (b), they don't or (c) there is some degree of mismatch and I say "OK, it's not quite what I intended but it'll do". (In recent Flew-directed reading of Witt I found some acknowledgement of this third possibility.) But Searle seems to regard even an 'amorph' element of consciousness as capable of bearing intentionality. It is not just that we could express ourselves propositionally but might not bother to do so, say if I see a dangerous dog and don't waste time muttering "that dog looks dangerous", but that an animal without propositionality is capable of intentionality if it simply catches sight or sound of a predator and runs away. That is surely intensionality in Searle's sense.

Next, he makes a point which I don't think matters very much. Chomsky. There are non-conscious states, like what happens when one part of the brain triggers, say, a hormone excitement in another part of the brain; there are unconscious states which can become conscious states when we wake up, like my disposition to believe that Clinton is President of the USA (which we call believing even though for long lengths of time I am thinking of something quite different); and there are other non-conscious states which tempt people like Chomsky to call them unconscious states, such as a tendency to handle language in certain ways long before we have any grammatical vocabulary. Why does this matter so much? Searle says (correctly, I assume) that these rules are not like computer data that come up on the screen when we want them to but go back into the hard disc when we switch the computer off --- they are like (I assume) the basic bits of machine language that are there in the works but never come on screen unless some computing genius wizards them up. "An unconscious mental state has to be consciously thinkable if it is to be a mental state at all as opposed to being a non-conscious brain process." Why should there not be non-conscious states that (we agree with Searle) do not merit being called mental and yet have effects which so reverberate with the mental that Chomsky is tempted to call them mental and hence unconscious rather than non-conscious? What is problematical about that?

Page 89, where "the urge to show that intentionality is really 'something else' is part of the eliminative, reductionist urge that infects our intellectual life". Sure. Like red being 'nothing but' a photon emission near 600 nanometers. Red is what we are conscious of when 600-700 nanometers shine into our eyes. Is that all he means when he uses the word "intentionality"? Then why not just say "consciousness"? Yet he began by saying that intentionality was the most important aspect of consciousness. I maintain (moving to p 90) that in thinking we can drop the term "intentionality" I am not being reductionist but simply parsimonious with words. Page 91, "It is just a plain fact about us that we have intrinsic intentional states". This means that we have conscious states and quasi-conscious states, many of which are 'about' our surroundings. Again: indubitably.

16.5.99 [notebook entry] I'm too tired to sort my ideas out but a memory comes back to me, of meeting Austin at the Moral Science Club (Cambridge) a few years after I'd gone down. He was saying in effect "it's all much more complicated than most philosophers admit" and at the end I asked him "what if someone came along and said 'it's all much more complicated than you admit'?" and he said fine, he'd welcome that, that was his idea of progress. This is what I feel about Searle. In particular, his umbrella concept of intentionality ought to be taken to pieces and shown up as the complicated business it really is.

17.5.99 "Who seriously can argue?" Who can seriously place an adverb so absurdly? I always assumed this came from fear of split infinitives combined with ignorance of what a split infinitive actually was, but we've been told that split infinitives are alright for quite a while now and this nonsense still hasn't gone away. The author, however, is one Dr Garth Wood writing on evil in a Spectator put through the letter box by the local gentry today. I absolutely agree with him. Read him for yourself. So I take this opportunity to say (once more) that my arguments about the non-reality of evil don't contradict what he says about its reality in the least. I am opposing two views which he mentions: Manichaeism, which posits a force of evil that exists independently, ab initio, and the Augustinus-Aquinas line of its being a non-substantial consequence of disobedience to the Divine will, which Wood seems to class with the psychoanalytical and relativist excusers --- but he forgets that in order to align their idea with our perception of evil as real and horrible, Augustinus-Aquinas have a thoroughly real devil, as substantial as you could want, who was created good but rebelled, and now stalks the world manipulating evil people. One has to confront the evil behaviour of evil people without concocting mythologies to explain it. Abandoning the myths helps us breath clear air and be grateful for the consequences of (if they will excuse me) the Augustinus-Aquinas line as amended by Denis Paul to do without their scheming rebellious devil, which are that when the battle with evil is finally won (however it might be going to be conducted) there won't be any reverberations of past evil left over to haunt us. An ineffable sadness, no doubt, but otherwise it will simply all have gone. And one quibble with Wood. " . . . because of the evil that you and I know lived in their hideous souls." Souls aren't supposed to be hideous --- good people tell us that everybody's soul is good at bottom. My line is to deny that there is there is such an entity as what people have traditionally meant by the soul. There is no need for it. There is only our consciousness --- and nobody's consciousness can be meaningfully said to be evil in itself. Now I've got to admit that there do sometimes come to us extremely good people who tell us that at the bottom of everybody there is good, and who seem to mean by it something far more significant than my thin, ascetic, bloodless "there is nothing at bottom but consciousness" --- and something far more hopeful and powerful. One just has to be someone like that to say something like that. I'm not. All I can offer is my thin metaphysic. I can't pretend it is anything else. And a quibble with the sub-editor too, who has "repulsion" for what I am sure is Wood's "revulsion".

18.5.99 I've just finished reading Searle's book, and earlier this morning I noticed Roy outside his house and went down to ask how Maureen was (still waiting for a non-urgent operation to be scheduled). Told him I was close to finishing Searle, and said I found the book's second half more difficult and problematic than the first, whereupon he told me that Amazon, to which he is hooked up, put out on their Internet site any reviews that are offered them. Splendid: this means that I can write inoffensively to Searle and more critically in a review for Amazon. I expect their deal is that copyright has to be surrendered, or otherwise I could offer them my review of Strathern as well.

I propose to name-drop in my review. First Austin --- see 16.5.99 in the other notebook where I am too tired to sort my ideas out. Second Isaiah, who said that just as my essays got interesting they stopped. Searle's book gets interesting and stops with three asteristisks on page 156, under which he says "I have now completed that attempt". But since he goes on to say, top of page 157, that he has only scratched the surface, I assume he won't mind.

In my letter I must quote that phrase from the FT review, "mind is a biological secretion of the brain". It is a caricature, and he will certainly think it unfair. On the other hand, he keeps saying that the universe consists of nothing but particles in fields of force yet denies that he is a materialist. Explanation: materialists reduce consciousness to configurations of particles in fields of force, whereas it is irreducible. Fine, I think so too. My consciousness of the appearance of this paper as my biro makes marks on it may be caused by the neurology of my brain but it cannot possibly be said to be my brain neurology. It is palpably something else. Then why does the universe not consist of particles in fields of force and this extra, irreducible phenomenon which we call consciousness? He certainly has arguments why this isn't so, but, until I read the book yet again to find out, my feeling is that instead of saying that he is neither a dualist nor a materialist he could say more honestly that he is both. Over and above the material universe we have to acknowledge the reality of consciousness. This, however, doesn't make consciousness a further type of substance; it isn't a constituent of the universe; so we have to declare ourselves materialists as well. What I won't have any more than Searle will is drawing from all this the need to reduce consciousness to matter.

One often hears eego but one doesn't often hear eegoist, but I just have from a very well-spoken and authorative-sounding woman talking about Kant's ethics. And on the six o'clock news a girl whom I'd really taken to, with a Scottish name but speaking perfect English, saying "bona fyed fans". It really is depressing.

Roy says Amazon wouldn't use my 45 minutes anyway because it's too long.

20.5.99 Awful news about the Topleys. Kate is having her operation tomorrow, and Eric, who had moved with her to be near her hospital, has come down with pneumonia. He is a shadow and simply hasn't the substance to fight off pneumonia. We need --- there was one on Star Trek last night and perhaps Trekkies will recognise my description --- a Q-Boddisatva. Perhaps the hospital he's gone to has some Q-Penicillin.

23.5.99 And an awful shock to see that I've not noted the eventual news, later that afternoon, that Eric had already died on Wednesday evening, no doubt while I was drooling over my Q-Boddisatva. The funeral is on Wednesday at 11 in the Catholic Church at Aberaeron, followed by cremation at Aberystwyth, where they will play the Haydn cello concerto (alas, I had visions of an orchestra and cellist, but it will be on CD).

Last night I jumped for a biro to note the name "Edward Godwin". One of the books I had in prison [in the winter of 1943-4] was a Penguin of a life of Whistler. Godwin built a house in Chelsea for him but he got too deeply into debt and had to give it up. As he left he pinned a note to the door saying

Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Edward Godwin built this one.

This has always stuck in my memory as one of the wittiest things I have ever heard, except that I could never be sure of the Christian name. Once or twice I have heard it but failed to note it. Who says I'm not a textualist?

Kate has put her operation off for a fortnight (which at least shows it isn't urgent) and she is definitely taking the cottage opposite, as Eric had hoped to.

Last night there was a 'reporting' programme that I caught less than a minute of: a Serbian photographer who had been taking photographs of the bombing and had exhibited them in Belgrade. He spoke eloquently of how evil it was. He had a theory that the States wanted to destroy Europe, but setting that aside it must still seem to him, on the Belgrade rooftops, and be, palpably evil. Then we moved to reports from Macedonia and Bosnia of equally palpable evil. I was glad I'd caught the Belgrade chap's peroration, because the whole thing seems like a Searle clash of default positions. To him and to Brian it is clear that the bombing is evil. To Blair it is clear that Serb behaviour in Kosovo is evil. It is no use trying to explain to Brian what a Searle clash of default positions has to do with it. I think Aaron could see both sides. I do. The Belgrade photographs reminded me of my two most spectacular nights in the London Blitz, St Paul's and St Helen's Place.

Two American academics have just turned up in the village, or rather they've been here for quite a while but I've only just found them, quite by chance, and they are about to leave. No-one ever tells me anything . . . And yet when I called, shyly, to ask if I could ask them round when Ben and Tim Smiley let me know they're coming, it turned out they had already heard of me, thanks to one Babs Osbourne, an ex-hippy of the old school who lives down-hill from Penuwch and is reading philosophy at Lampeter, where these two teach. She teaches Chinese, and I don't know what his subject is but he's been offered a professorship in the States that he can't refuse. By the time I had got as far as explaining who Tim Smiley was and we had exchanged names, his wife came down the passage to see who he was talking to and he said "this is Denis the philosopher". So I shall pin together the only two philosophical print-outs I've done so far and pop them through their letter box, with a covering note about my new Iris-type genre of philosophical story telling.

24.5.99 Satisfactorily achieved. And some philosophy achieved in the other notebook. Quite encouraging.

21.5.99 [notebook entry] A point that has occurred to me apropos of the 14.5.99 note, "at least I had that image". Similarly my brother, who had an early piano to renovate, and saw the maker's name as being of one well known maker and came back a while later and found it to be of another. At least he had had that image. It was so vivid, he told me, as to count as an hallucination, not a bit of vague inattention. Or my seeing a vision of Pam Parris while on a Strangeways 'boundary party': only the fact that I knew perfectly well that Pam wasn't there downgraded it from being an hallucination, so vivid was it. What is philosophically interesting about these examples of "at least I had that image", in spite of the fact that they answer to Descartes's requirements for what is indubitable, is that the moment we realise that our interpretation of the image may have been an error we lose interest in it, except perhaps for philosophical interest. A whiff of dubiety about the actual facts and it loses its Cartesian significance of being indubitable --- even though we all agree that, qua image, it is. That is no longer what interests us. My 1994 typescript makes it clear that Wittgenstein edged towards thinking so too, in a mid 1930 passage that is noted safely and doesn't need to be looked up now.

I want to read very quickly through Searle again to try to nail the point at which he fails, while maintaining correctly that consciousness cannot be reduced to neurological configurations, and that, correctly, it is not a constituent of the universe, to point out that it nevertheless exists, it is real, it is there, but it is not out there.

Page 45, Searle agrees that consciousness exists as irreducibly subjective. Where does he disagree with me?

Page 47, he is about to explain (overleaf) but meanwhile says "How are we to think of any sort of interaction between consciousness and the physical world?" This is because we are thinking of consciousness as a kind of super-gaseous (super-sublimed) substance which can get no grip with the physical world. But consciousness is simply what we all have when we are conscious of anything. Once a causal explanation is discovered of how that familiar state of affairs comes about, the question "and what sort of substance is this thing we call consciousness?" becomes otiose.

Page 50, "The main false assumption is that if consciousness is really a subjective, qualitative phenomenon, then it cannot be part of the material, physical world". From the falsity of this (but is the opposite ebenso falsch?) he is going to argue that it is part of the physical world. What we know is that if consciousness is the simple, subjective phenomenon we are all familiar with it cannot be 'reduced' to any set of physical attributes. There is no need to translate this as "cannot be part of the physical world", any more than as "must be part". So instead of this doubly false assumption there must be a true assumption we can formulate. I have already formulated one. That is enough. We do not need another formulation. We merely have to notice that it does not follow from "cannot be reduced" that it is part of the physical world. I cannot see anything else to say.

Page 52. Do I have to agree to this? "Grant me that consciousness, with all its subjectivity, is caused by processes in the brain (yes, I do), and grant me that conscious states are themselves higher level features of the brain." No: conscious states are what we know them to be (described by Searle just as well as I've done myself). They are caused by 'higher level' brain activity, which in turn is caused by other brain processes --- I assume this to be a useful and sensible biological distinction --- and I am quite happy to say that these higher and lower brain activities combined cause consciousness. I do admit that I have an uneasy metaphysical anxiety that this can only come about if, in some sense, consciousness is 'already there to be tapped into', as I've expressed it elsewhere, but I am prepared to be talked out of this, and one thing I admit absolutely, which may be sufficient to show this anxiety to be metaphysical in the shucks yah boo sense, is that the very last thing I mean by it is that my consciousness of the oranges and other things on my table or of my yellow biro as I write must have been already there to be tapped into. If there was some Big Bang Ur-consciousness it certainly won't have wasted its time being conscious of the clutter on my table or my picture of my helpful friend.

23.5.99 [notebook entry] Page 51. "There is a mystery that many philosophers are impressed by --- how brain processes could cause consciousness --- and there is, I think, a more serious mystery, faced by neurobiologists --- how brain processes do in fact cause consciousness." The second, I am willing to guess, is just waiting for details to be filled in, just as evolution leaves gaps at the moment which, however embarrassing we find it when religious fundamentalists clutch at them, are still there and have to be admitted and worked at by self-respecting biologists. The first, however, needs to be subdivided into two. One is a matter of shucks yah boo metaphysics: if consciousness is the super-sublimed super-substance we have dreamed up, how can the material world cause it (and how can it act causally on the physical world)? All we need to say to that is "shucks yah boo". The other subdivision is that if consciousness is what we all know it to be, how can the physical world cause it (or be acted on by it)? I am prepared to call that a problem of serious metaphysics. Searle is as eloquent as I try to be in giving examples of consciousness as we all know it. I am entirely in agreement with his general programme of unpacking our default positions and fitting them together again in line with what we actually know. I merely think he has over-simplified his formulations.

To give myself a rest from putting those under a magnifying glass, I shall attempt some re-packing of my own.

First, think of a science fiction world in which people in general can do the sort of spoon-bending tricks that Yuri Geller is supposed to be able to do. In this world, someone coming into a dark room would be able to will a light to be turned on. What we do in ours depends on whether we are familiar with the room. In a strange one we fumble for a light switch; in a familiar one we stretch out our hand to where we know it is. We do this without any puzzles about the relationship between mind and matter. The problem we are faced with is such a natural one that the only thinking it occurs to us to do is thinking where the light switch is.

This, I submit, is how people in a world of Yuri Gellers would view matters. Just as we, when we get old, have to exercise our short-term memory to keep it from atrophy, so perhaps they, in old age, have to keep their matter-influencing abilities up to the mark. No mind-matter problems need occur to them, either in youth or in old age. Quite possibly they will find it helpful to read up explanations of their inherited abilities, just as I take a serious amateur interest in neurology when I find I am becoming absent minded. Or, perhaps, in this world they have discovered facts which show their abilities to vary according to circumstance. Rich people have light switches made of amber because they respond to will power more easily than plastic ones. Whatever the practical details, and whatever their theoretical explanations, and whatever the practical improvements that those suggest in turn, no ultimate problem of a relationship between mind and matter will occur to them unless philosophers come on the scene to complicate their lives.

So, I insist, it can be with us if we keep our heads. I am sure Searle agrees with this, and the only question is whether I can usefully (in the cause of postponing neurological deterioration, perhaps) apply my nit-picking techniques to the detail of the way he expresses himself.

Page 52. "The way to reply to materialism is to point out that it ignores the real existence of consciousness." I agree with that entirely, as will be evident from the above. "The way to defeat dualism is simply to refuse to accept the system of categories that makes consciousness out as something nonbiological, not part of the natural world." Yes, of course consciousness is biological and of course it is part of the natural world, but it is a different sort of part from sticks and stones. The very fact that we all of us (from the most religious to the most atheist) find the Irish legend of the soul-stone absurd shows this.

Page 53. Where I differ absolutely comes with "When I say that the brain is a biological organ and consciousness a biological process, I do not, of course, say or imply that it would be impossible to produce an artificial brain out of nonbiological materials that would also cause and sustain consciousness." Substitute "possible" for "impossible" and I am with him (you must remember the "I do not" that precedes this). Yet I do agree with him in this: there is no reason (in principle) why we should not produce an artificial brain that results in similar 'output behaviour'; but I insist that this would not be enough to make us call this brain conscious. My conviction that no such brain could produce "inner, qualitative subjective states of consciousness" is of course a belief (absolute but in no sense religious --- in other words I can't prove it, and you must just take it or leave it).

To detach myself from Searle's text and express a further belief I would like to comment on a remark made at Jill Dando's funeral, that a light had gone out. Nehru said almost exactly the same when Ghandi was killed. I cannot understand how any person of religious belief can assert such a thing. We have lost a light, but it hasn't gone out. This is related to Searle's text because on an early page he mentions our unwillingness to accept that our own or a friend's death can be an absolute end, and Flew, in his recent letter to me, expressed a surprising sympathy with this unwillingness.

The brutal and (to most people) unacceptable fact is that Jill Dando ceased to exist the moment she died. Catholics and certain other Christians are able to agree with this but to console themselves with the belief that she will exist once more when the general resurrection comes. Most individual Catholics and Christians would wish to modify the brutal fact by hoping that in between death and resurrection some spiritual substitute for a dead person exists, capable, in particular, of remembering what it had been like for that person to be alive. Many people believe something of that kind while not believing in the resurrection at all. People who believe in reincarnation also have a strong reluctance to believe that between incarnations there is no residual connection of memory, perhaps rapidly vanishing or perhaps capable of memory up to the point of a subsequent birth.

My personal view is that all these beliefs are unnecessary and can be discarded without abandoning what really matters. The light that does not go out is consciousness. Consciousness of what? I have no idea and do not care. What it is not consciousness of is memory, because it is overwhelmingly improbable that the data of memory can survive the cessation of neurological activity. Flew says he cannot imagine consciousness in anything but a person or animal. I forget his words, but he certainly wasn't thinking of a disembodied person, and I'm not going to try to make my idea sound more plausible by putting the surviving consciousness forward as a consciousness belonging to an 'immaterial person'. That is just what it isn't. Yet neither does it correspond to the concept people sometimes dream up of a depersonalised consciousness, which I take to be a kind of consciousness soup. Something we all dissolve in when we die and out of which we emerge into another life (if we ever have another life) with nothing to join us to previous lives.

If I get round to explaining that to Flew he certainly won't wear it. I tried to explain it in my Iris thing --- in which I only asserted it and made no attempt to argue it. Did I assert it meaningfully? If I didn't then, I certainly can't now. There are two things I am clear about.

24.5.99 [notebook entry] One is that absense of memory does not imply discontinuity of consciousness. I am entitled to say that if consciousness survives my death it will be my consciousness. Although the use of first person pronouns mainly corresponds to the use of any other pronouns, in that they refer to what is normally understood by a person (someone one can point to if one is in the same room with them, which includes the possibility of pointing to oneself when, for example, one says "that's my book"), nevertheless I can meaningfully imagine that after death consciousness (let us say of something familiar like a sunset) can continue and be mine, even though I shall not be able to remember anything whatever about the person I can point to now when I say that something is mine, or that I am enjoying a sunset. Jill Dando could have had the same insight the moment before she died. Iris Murdoch couldn't, because her mind had deteriorated too much to formulate such a thought, but her case is pertinent because it is meaningful for us to suppose that right up to the end her consciousness was continuous with her unimpaired consciousness of earlier years. This helps us to appreciate that being able to consider what the characteristics of one's personality are, who one is in the normal sense of the word, this person who has done these and these things in the past, is irrelevant to the concept of continuity of consciousness.

So is the question of what one might be conscious of --- I put a sunset in to give the mind something to grip on, but if one's consciousness lacks memory it also lacks the possibility of recognising a sensation as being of this rather than that. It sounds awfully like inhabiting the world of Wittgenstein's purely phenomenological language, except that we shan't have a language to express anything in.

This reference to continuity that I can meaningfully make myself doesn't seem to apply to third person pronouns and hardly to second person pronouns. What you call my consciousness does cease when I die, because it isn't (to you) mine any longer. What I would have called Jill Dando's consciousness ceased when she died because it isn't, to me, hers any longer, but I can meaningfully maintain that what she, before she died, would have called her consciousness does continue. And I can look you in the eye and tell you not to worry, what you call your consciousness will continue.

The other thing I am clear about is that there is nothing miserable about all this. Quite the contrary. It is opposite to what I heard called, in my youth, the pessimistic philosophies of the East. Is coming back, if we do come back, such a miserable business that our only hope is to extinguish our individual consciousness by a discipline of successive lives of ascetiscism? What a preposterous thing to suppose! And if we don't come back and our consciousness continues in some absolutely unimaginable form --- why should there be anything lamentable about that? And what of what people call the worst scenario --- that we neither come back nor continue in any manner whatever? Well --- I can imagine all sorts of horrible ways of dying, and as to the grief of people who survive the death of others, that is something I don't need to imagine --- but the fact of extinction (if it is a fact) is nothing to deplore.

There is something wrong with us if life is not worth living and enjoying. And if it is, then living it is what matters, and the enjoyment of it is so absorbing that worrying about its end is an absurd distraction. Indeed, thinking about this worry and trying to explain why it is unnecessary is a distraction too, so these notes, far from being a ladder that people should climb up and throw away, are best walked past without a thought --- but I offer them nonetheless, just in case anybody with my peculiar cast of mind should find them any use.

25.5.99 [notebook entry] All the above read through, and a reasonable idea of what could be typed and interleaved with typing from the main diary.

28.5.99 [notebook entry] I want to add a really final item to these notes. There seems to be a contradiction between my saying on 14.4.99 that I don't put up ideas of the self, the soul and the spirit, and, in the same entry, where Blackmore declares the lack of a self to be a tenet of Buddhism, rejoicing to remember that I met Buddhism at the age of fifteen without taking in "any of that airy-fairy stuff". I think I meant my Wittgenstein "was ebenso falsch ist" quotation to resolve this contradiction, but I ought to explain matters a little more fully, and if I do so successfully that will make a good rounding off for these diary entries of story-telling philosophy.

In the paper Flew sent me he said that Ryle came to appreciate that a proper analysis of the concepts of minds, souls, selves and personalities would be relevant to the question of a future life, with (Ryle and Flew agreeing on this, I assume) a strong hint that the possibility of any of these words being construed as "referring to members of a kind of logical substances which could be significantly said to survive" could never make it through the Ryle analysis, thus leaving the things referred to having no more substance than tempers or grins.

There is no doubt whatsoever that people have selves or personalities. What constitutes these is something much more complicated than a grin or a moment of bad temper or even a tendency to grin or a tendency to bad temper. Our selves are everything we and our acquaintance know about who we are. Each self is a complicated family of characteristics which can vary slowly over time and in exceptional circumstances can vary dramatically in an unnervingly short time. There is no reason why our use of names to refer to people should elevate these families of characteristics, associated with slowly changing bodies, into things that, because they are capable of being named, are thereby dignified with the status of 'logical substances' and thereby (again) capable of surviving death.

While the enormous complexity of what constitutes our selves seems to make the comparison with a grin an extremely bad joke, the fact remains that every single constituent of this complexity is as incapable of surviving death as a grin is. Except for --- what? Except, I hope, for our individual consciousness. While we are alive this consciousness is associated with this complexity in a unique manner. Nothing else has the same continuity and persistence. Every other constituent of the complexity can be replaced by some other constituent.

Now there can easily be other slowly changing complexities which lack consciousness and are nevertheless capable of being named, and so it follows that consciousness cannot be a sine qua non for bearing a name. Moreover, names can continue to be applied to complexities that no longer exist, for example to Julius Caesar and Henry VIII as well as islands that have disappeared into the sea, and so being able to be referred to by name is certainly no guarantee of survival.

29.5.99 [notebook entry] Indeed, one has only to consider that names can be given to purely invented entities, like Father Christmas. So the Flew-Ryle strategy of analysing selves as complexities of things like grins wouldn't, even if it failed, deliver selves as things that must survive, and neither, if it succeeded, would it settle the case that nothing can survive, since it would overlook the possibility of 'mere but individual consciousness' surviving.

This insistence of mine wouldn't disturb Flew at all, because he regards the possibility of consciousness alone surviving (with no animal or person to have it) as meaningless. Now just as I said above that the impossibility of an artificial brain having consciousness (however well it did its job of navigating star ships or what have you) is something I can't prove, so I can't prove that consciousness can exist without a person or animal to have it. The sixty four thousand dollar question is: can I prove that this belief of mine is at least meaningful?

I think I can, and the proof is quite simply that we can consider whether it is or isn't the case (and, I would add personally, not give a damn whether it is or it isn't). I can look at the clutter on my table and say "naturally, when I die there won't be any more of my consciousness of all that, and the only people who will be conscious of it are the people who come in to clear the mess up, but perhaps my consciousness will continue as consciousness of something else, and then, again, it may not, and I don't see any point in worrying whether it will or won't".

The meaning behind my 'contradiction' of 14.4.99 is a difference of what Isaiah used to call up-life and down-life. My appreciation that there is no need to call in aid entities called selves when we contemplate what we call selves as we look at our friends ("and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought 'what jolly fun!'") is an up-life one, as I'm quite sure the Buddha's appreciation of this simple fact was. Indeed, in a manner of speaking I can prove this from a story I read (like so many other useful tit bits) in the Financial Times. As the Buddha approached his end, his disciples asked what shape they should make their temples when he had gone. In reply he said nothing, but laid on the ground one of his disciples' walking staffs, on top of that a folded cloak, and on top of that an upturned begging bowl. The rest, as the FT said, is architectural history --- but that, I swear, isn't what the Buddha meant at all. "You are the temples" was his real meaning.

In the same way I hope that what Susan Blackmore meant by approving of the Buddhist belief in the non-existence of 'selves' is something up-life. Yet I fear that what most modern Buddhists mean by this --- at least, modern westerners who embrace Buddhism because of its attraction for them of embodying the 'pessimistic philosophies of the East' --- is something down-life. (And along with Blackmore I ought to mention the Dalai Lama as someone who is patently up-life.)

A similar gripe about the down-life attitudes of would-be enlightened people is expressed by me in a science-fiction note somewhere, about people who call themselves humanists. Isaiah did, but (like the Buddha) meant something different by it. This note of mine recalls meeting a humanist 'preacher' who turned up to bury atheist members of my family, and declared that nothing survives death and that all we can do is remember the dead, and he also exhorted us to do so because this would provide some substitute for the deads' survival. Yet it is as clear as possibly can be that if nothing survives death no quantity or quality of remembering can compensate for non-survival as far as the dead are concerned. It is also clear that if there is survival, then (again, as far as the dead are concerned) no failure to remember can detract from it. Remembering the dead is something that it is very gratifying for us to do. And so we should. Similarly, hoping for their survival is gratifying for us, and (I can add, having attended a Requiem Mass recently) it is the most natural thing on earth to offer prayers and such like for some better quality of survival. Nonetheless, we have to accept that the fact (or otherwise) of survival in itself is utterly unaffected by anything we can think, or believe, or feel, or do along these lines. The truth is absolute, and absolutely hidden from us. There is a grandeur in this fact which no theories about the nature of the after-life can possibly match --- and what can be more up-life than admitting that?

25.5.99 Today's achievement is making short pastry and baking mince tarts (nine of them) with Ben Smiley's mincemeat. Gave two of them to the friends opposite, for lending me their kitchen balance to weigh the flour, sugar and butter, and gave them the rest of Ben's mincemeat, too, honour now being satisfied. I must have seemed rather absent minded, and the reason is a bit embarrassing. I had telephoned an old friend whom I've known for sixteen years, to give her my telephone number. Had to leave it on her answerphone, but to my surprise a few minutes later Lynn rang me back. She had been collecting her son from school. Or sons, if the newest is already old enough. God help me. But it's her daughters I need help with. The middle one got married in February and is expecting a son in June. The youngest (whom I never actually managed to make friends with, my devotion to the other two being chronicled in detail in old diaries) also has a baby, her boyfriend being in the army and in barracks. It was all rather a shock to me. So I changed the subject and told her about my shelves, my central heating and my stair ropes, and confessed that Brian had bribed me by paying for all of them. Then I bragged about the ropes being from a ship's chandlers and being invoiced as companion ropes, so that instead of a staircase I have a companion-way and can feel I am at sea. "You always were at sea," she said.

26.5.99 Beautiful, simple Requiem Mass, celebrated by a Carmelite friar with a Ukranian accent. As we went in, the undertaker gave us slips of paper to put our names on, and I put my address on the back and told him he could come and collect me when I was due. The elderly Evan and Susie (the local gentry) had taken me in. Evan was wearing a beautiful suit he had already bragged to me about, made for him forty years ago by the best tailor in Santiago. So when it was over I bragged about my black jacket, made for me by my father's tailor fifty seven years ago. I can still get into it for funerals. His fitted him perfectly. Then he went to fetch his car from the car park and Susie said she would walk to the corner, so I went ahead, but when I got there and looked back she was lying on the pavement, looked after by two friends. A stroke, I assumed, but it was a fall --- she had slipped and was lying helpless. Displaced acetabulum I assumed next (but it wasn't that either). Two doctors who had been at the service said she mustn't be moved until the ambulance came, and then left us to get on with things. A neighbour gave us a pillow to put under her head. Later another neighbour gave her a blanket. After quite a wait the ambulance came and Evan followed it to Aberystwyth, and I came back to the village with the two friends who had helped, sisters, Dawn and Delwyn.

This left me very little time to eat and sit and recover before I needed to catch the bus at half past one so that I could go to the wake (at a posh hotel called the Feathers). Very tired, and very tempted to call it off but the thought of a pretty girl, one of the grandchildren, pulled me together and I changed into another jacket, only forty five years old, made by the same tailor's nephew. I don't think anybody appreciated it. I sat drinking tomato juice for half an hour before anybody came. Then a few arrived, and I spoke to a couple, but they went to the bar and I sat alone for perhaps another half an hour wondering what on earth I was doing coming to a wake where I knew no-one, but eventually I saw Kate and went and made small talk, and after that I got to know quite a lot of people, everyone, nearly, except the pretty girl, whom I never did manage to talk to. Eventually I got my glass of Sherry, blessedly dry, and then a buffet lunch started up and I had a wonderful time. The beef was so good I went back for more, and the carver told me it was Welsh Black. Finally I had to say goodbye to everyone I'd met, and thanked Kate and the carver and left, to come back on the school bus. Done nothing practical since. Don't need to eat till later. Too tired to do anything serious. A letter from Brian and a telephone bill to think about tomorrow. Ideas for polishing up the philosophy I've been writing (a propos of Searle). Otherwise blotto.

28.5.99 My butcher tells me it's extremely improbable that my beef was Welsh Black --- there are too few of them and hotels and restaurants have a bad habit of calling any Welsh beef Welsh Black. A very little philosophical work done today in short gaps, my main activity being to go into Aberystwyth with Paull to a nursery, where I spent over fifty quid on plants and gave Paull a fiver for petrol. I had promised Brian I'd spend forty five quid and give Paull a fiver, and billed him in advance for fifty, so honour is satisfied and I don't need to feel I'm a sponger. The main cost was £35 on a bay tree (or it will be a tree when it grows up) and the main activity, apart from the trip itself, was planting the stuff, which I finished at nine o'clock. So my philosophy, jotted in intervals, may not turn out to be very good.

29.5.99 On my way to fetch my paper this morning I bumped into Keith Brown, one of my local academics. He thanked me for the things I'd put through his letter box. I said I'd not discovered what his subject was. He said "anthropology". I bowed my head humbly and said I knew nothing about it. Neither did he, he said. His speciality was national identities in the Balkans. "God help you," I said. "You've got your work cut out."

31.5.99 Yesterday I managed, at last, to go to Roy's place and ask him to let me check and correct my Internet thing ("45 minutes"). As well I didn't do this a week ago because I'd found yet another humiliating mistake. As to improvements, only one was needed, and my Internet thing now matches what I shall be sending to the Wren.

Roy screened (and printed out) two Internet things for me, and a useful fact. This is that there is no Amazon review for Strathern, so I shall be able to concoct a short one and refer readers to our Aberarth website [www.aberarth.org.uk --- this was written before my real wittwebsite came into being] for my longer one. There is one Amazon review of the Searle book, quite decent, except that in summarising his arguments against dualists this reviewer says they "cannot describe consciousness without evoking some supernatural involvement", a notion I cannot remember Searle even hinting at. Typical reviewer's misdescription, like the FT's "mind is a biological secretion of the brain". Roy's most gratifying discovery, however, was a review of On Certainty by an American theologian (Terry A. Larm of Pasadena). My heart dropped at the thought of this, and I told Roy I couldn't read it straight away, but this morning, topped up with strong tea, I braved it and found it was very good. I can write to him without being diplomatic. One very minor quibble, which I'm sure he won't mind. He might even be interested in how I came to translate it.

Roy also lent me Freddie Ayer's Part of my Life, which has a couple of phrases in it I want to quote. On his way to Spain by boat he stretches out in a park in la Rochelle and has "an intense feeling of being in harmony with nature", and he recalls "a similar experience at Eton when I was walking back alone after playing football and was suddenly seized with an extraordinary elation". Adolescent mysticism. One needs a few quotations like that to counter the other use of the word "mysticism", which goes with irrationality and mumbo jumbo. He nails one thing which is grist to my mill. Ryle took him to meet Wittgenstein in Cambridge in the summer of 1932. By that time Witt was well into his 'Olympian years'.

4.6.99 And yet Ayer's impression of Witt on this visit was that he was still the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Indeed, it was precisely because of this that Ayer chose to use a couple of sabbatical terms to go to Vienna and join (if you please, not study under) the Vienna Circle. As my dates show, a few more days have gone by now and I'm further into the book, but I won't note anything except my impression of Ayer's intellectual and aesthetic laziness.

I've not done all that well myself, most of the gap, apparently, having gone on drafting and writing a letter to Larm, and today I've drafted one to Searle. On Sunday I've a date to call on Roy and type a mini-Amazon review of Strathern, and while down there I must tempt him up here to change my printing ink so that I can print a copy of 45 minutes for Searle and post it with my letter on Monday, the temptation in question being that I feel I really must open a bottle of something good this weekend to express my gratitude to him. It will be an Australian red that cost me a packet and was worth it, but it hasn't caught on in the wine auctions, not being a world-famous name, so there isn't any point in saving it for Aaron to inherit. I might as well enjoy it. And Roy might as well enjoy a bit too.

7.6.99 Two cheques off this morning to a total of £690, to Aaron and Corney and Barrow. Yesterday I found Aaron's land-line not even to be 'incoming only' but disconnected, which means he'll be clobbered for a reconnection fee, but instead of confessing the true state of his finances to me when I'd told him to come clean, he has been floundering at the bottom of a £1500 overdraft, on which he has to pay back £500 quite soon. It would have been insane to lay down two last crates of en Primeur if I'd known that. Fortunately I didn't. I think they will be good crates. I found Aaron on his mobile biking around the City looking for somewhere to live that would be an improvement on the Elephant. He rang me back this evening and told me the bitter truth. I told him I'd put £320 into the post first thing. And that in six months I'd be able to give him his £500 (with recently improved income tax and some ruthless belt tightening). Naturally, I didn't exacerbate his feelings by telling him about Corney and Barrow. I do hope I did my arithmetic right. This afternoon a cheque goes to BT on my petty cash account, so it won't make any difference.

He and his mates aren't aiming at the City but at places outside it where they might get a warehouse or a railway arch . . . Like the Commercial Road . . .

Yesterday Roy sent out my supplementary Strathern review to the Amazon website. This, and my letter to Searle, safely posted now, have been complicated by my finding in Ayer's autobiography that when Ryle introduced him to Wittgenstein in 1932 he found him so Tractatus fixated that he thought he might as well go to Vienna, but I see I've already said so (and to catch up with myself I'll mention that the Australian Red really was awfully good). I suppose I'm distracted by finding a mistake in my letter to Searle and having to rewrite half of it, and by looking up my 1932 Nedo volume of Witt and finding I'd been optimistic about dates, and changing those. Really, I ought to have regarded this story of Ayer's as backing my story as it was in essence, showing how late he was still stuck in the Tractatus, but I wanted to keep to my timetable of saying he had emerged at the end of 1931. I've put early 1932 instead, but as to mid 1932 I've spun what might seem a bit of a yarn. In late May and early June it so happened that Witt had done a stint of copying passages (and sometimes cutting and pasting them out of the Russell Typescript) written in 1929 which he reckoned he could salvage. Perhaps, I said, this 'retrospection' had come out in his conversations with Ayer. Or perhaps, I suggested to Searle, he had done it deliberately to get Ayer to go to Vienna so as to have him out of the way. I must get my views on this stabilised by the time I revise my book.

9.6.99 Yesterday I got a new print of 45 minutes off to the Wren, asking Jonathan to swop it for the first (which I said he could keep for himself, but I can't see why he should want to). Today I made a start of typing my attempt at philosophical story telling. It will take weeks. An irritating technical snag, which used time I'd intended for an expansive and cheering letter to Aaron, so I cut the cackle and came clean and confessed my extravagance. I hope he doesn't feel sold down the river. I couldn't have done it if I'd known the truth, I'd not have had the nerve, but by the time my letter to Lucinda Brooke was written and ready to post with my cheque, I couldn't tear it up, and today the belated invoice came --- it would have made an awful lot of trouble for poor Hassard Stacpoole. The problem for Aaron is that to pay back £500 of interest-free student loan he will have to take out a standard loan. I promised him that the benefit of these two crates will be much more than his interest. I also told him he could tell any superiors he overheard wondering about the best way to buy wine, to go to Corney and Barrow and ask for Hassard Stacpoole and mention me. He might get a bit of kudos for that.

I took this up to note a frightful bit of snobbery in yesterday's Times 'Diary'. The Tatler's 'social arbiter', one Victoria Mather, is quoted as telling James Major's wife Emma Noble off for going double-barrelled with a hyphen, Noble-Major. Double-barrelled names are grander without a hyphen, Mather says. Tosh. It's nothing to do with being posh. Scottish names are double-barrelled without a hyphen. Clerk Maxwell is the easiest example to remember. The English go for hyphens. That's all there is to it. "It's like an Elephant trap to catch the unwary or the socially inept," says Mather. Is it the new posh thing to pretend one's a Scot? Of course, I pretend I am, but I'm allowed to, my mother was a Scot. I bet Victoria Mather's mother wasn't.

23.6.99 Typing finished (up to here) this evening. A few left-overs to fit in. The latest was hearing "Kosovan refugees jeer Clinton", but it was "cheer". Perhaps I was expecting jeering because of news that must have followed my last entry quite quickly, but it has been dropped utterly out of view and hearing, and I swear I didn't dream it. The advance into Kosovo was held up for fully 48 hours to give the Americans time to get themselves ready for it. After some 32 or so we nearly went in because the Russians had turned up in Belgrade, but they promised to be good and we didn't, so they broke their promise and got in first. Whether 48 or 32 isn't much to argue about, the important thing is that it gave the Serbs a chance to have a last and the KLA a first rampage, and perpetrators and evidence to get over the frontier. No fuss has been made about this at all. It is outrageous.

The other thing that weighed on my mind was a pair of revelations. A Spectator report on people who have now been documented as spying for the Soviets, one of them being my hero JBS Haldane (knew one of his nieces at Oxford). Terribly depressing. And a telly programme about the Bose who recruited an army to fight for the Japanese saying "give me your blood and I will give you freedom". After the Japanese defeat four of Bose's principals were prosecuted in Delhi for treason, but released as being freedom fighters. One of them was a Shahnawaz [and I ssuspect actually my Shahnawaz]. And not only that: all the surviving members of the Bose army (he himself died in a plane crash on his way to Japan) have ever since independence (ie partition) been given pensions as freedom fighters, but Indians who fought against Japan and Germany for the British haven't had a penny. They weren't freedom fighters.

Apart from those two main gripes there have been my usual complaints about what people write and say, but the only one I will mention is the almost universal spread of "effectively" meaning "in effect". It started not so very long ago and it has won the field. And yes --- in a matter of hours the BBC has taken to calling teen-age pregnancies, mums and dads teen pregnancies and so forth. Perhaps this is a folk-memory of maids who were called tweenies. At all events, it's not going to win, I can feel in my bones that it won't.

24.6.99 Alas, another left-over has come to mind, a copy of Blackfriars (Oxford Dominicans) sent to me by my old friend Owen Hardwicke (ex FAU and retired priest). All devoted to a rebirth of Thomism that has been going on. Over and above being extremely interesting it made me determined (if Larm nibbles) to make something of my Semester of Medieval Philosophy at Hamburg in 1948. Of course, my primary response was to ask "what do they want analytical Thomism for? All they need is to read me".

Last night's Newsnight, reporting new withdrawal-of-treatment rules, had something that always gets me: Arthur Hugh Clough's "thou shalt not kill but needst not strive . . .". No-one ever notices that he meant this ironically. He was Florence Nightingale's unpaid secretary, had an extremely strong social conscience, and thought the Victorian rich should strive to keep the Victorian poor alive.

Today there is an article, and there was another recently, complaining about the sloppiness of modern style --- which I do a good stint of complaining about myself --- both of which put my back up. They both take for granted that whether a particular example is sloppy or correct is perfectly well-defined. But we don't need school teachers' rules, we need sensitivity. Indeed, one of the sources of sloppy style is people trying to remember school rules and getting them wrong. Fear of the teacher over one's shoulder. One sign of this has been growing like "effectively", and comes from the sensible rule that where that-or-which introduces a definition of what one is talking about, not a bit of extra information about it, you go for "that" (or "which" if one really wants it) and drop the comma. Fine --- delighted to know that someone is still reading Fowler. But where a person is being defined rather than described, the natural thing is to have "who" without a comma. Yet all over the place one comes across people that live in glass houses . . .

Another example of the teacher over one's shoulder is when people nervously chuck in an unnecessary connective "that" just to make sure, bringing in a subordinate clause and indirect speech where straightforward narrative (Ashdown does it) is what is wanted. This brings me to one of my points of contention with the retrenchers: what one is to think of simply omitting the subordinating connective "that". It really is an awful tendency, and I moan about it myself like anything, but the fact remains that it is sometimes natural. Try telling the Marines they've got to stop to say "that". And the fact also remains that matters are far too complicated to draw a school line between where one can get away with it and where one oughtn't. I've tried. It won't work. Any rule I've thought of breaks down. You've just got to be sensitive to language.