Francis F. Steen
The Myth of the Transparents
[1]
Not for distribution
18 August 2000

 

  Momus did find an errour in Ioues Art,
Because he made no windowes in mans breast,
By which he might both see and know his heart.
 
–– Francis Hubert [2]                 

 

Introduction

For the past few years, I have been working to develop a model of the mental processes that characterize and enable the cultural phenomenon of literature. At a point I can no longer identify, the unspoken conviction that the problem might be intractable began to weigh heavily on me: the activities and objects that constitute the category literature appeared to provide no clear view into the minds that created and made use of them. Contemporary literary criticism was sensibly focused on different issues, where genuine progress could be made: the ubiquity of power, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the irony of resistance, the impossibility of signification. As for the mind sciences, they paid scant attention to the literary, whose domain is conventionally thought to be the fictional; this conveniently places it beyond the purview of science as a pursuit of facts. The claim put forward by scholars of the novel that fiction compensates for the unrelenting invisibility of mental states by rendering the mind transparent [3] only aggravated the problem: not only were the minds that fiction claimed to illuminate blatantly imaginary; my interest remained the very mental operations that created this appearance of transparency – operations that in themselves were rendered no more visible than the eyeball is to the eye. Introspection proved equally fruitless. My own mental operations, I soon learned, were in large measure impenetrable to my conscious awareness, and the subjective phenomenology of the literary experience, although immensely rich and varied, failed to offer any useful insight into what my own mind might be attempting to achieve, much less how it was setting about to do it. I reached the point where I no longer felt confident I could distinguish a literary text from any other; that some of my most brilliant colleagues shared in this predicament served only to deepen my despondency. The possibility that I had entered a profession unable to identify its subject of study haunted my dreams; occasionally, I cultivated the conviction that none existed. These difficulties had the paradoxical effect of strengthening my determination to find an answer.

The principal obstacle faced by the project of formulating a satisfactory theory of the literary mind is the utter inaccessibility of mental states to any known sensory modality. The problem is not without precedent. In the early study of heredity, researchers from Darwin and Mendel to Avery and Chargaff were constrained to rely on complex chains of inferences about a hypothesized essence. Geneticists have subsequently succeeded in developing techniques to make genes visible, helped by the large chromosomes of Drosophilia, the fruit fly. It is extremely tempting to imagine that the same advances could be made in the area of mental states. Let me not feign a dishonorable modesty: this is no more than what my collaborators and I have accomplished. We have achieved a relatively highly specified imaginative constitution of not only one but several distinct populations of a species whose innermost thoughts and emotions are reliably accessible to the human sensory apparatus. In the following, we present our preliminary results from an extensive and on-going field study. To protect their unique and sheltered habitats, we have opted against revealing the location of the various subspecies of Homo transparensis, the fruit flies of the mind sciences.

The Missing Link of the Psyche

We first encountered our subject population in the highlands of ..., following eight weeks of strenuous marches through a landscape fiercely hostile to human habitation. Sandstone and shale, sediments of an ancient shallow sea, had been raised to a height of several thousand feet, only to be sheared by faults and eroded by wind and rain into a tangle of impenetrable gorges, leaving fingers of flat table lands. Towards the east, the snow-capped peak of a more recent volcano rose into the clouds; black plutonic rocks lay scattered on the red soil. Rising above an arid desert, the highlands were relatively lush; rainfall increased sharply as the landscape mounted, creating varied microclimates of rainforest, temperate forests, and scrubland.

When we finally arrived at the plateaus of the transparents, it was early fall. Leaves clung obstinately to the trees even at this altitude and the sun bore down with a savage intensity. On the lower slopes of the volcano, hidden among the dense canopy, we spotted the first individuals through our binoculars. They were morphologically intermediate between ourselves and the African apes; our team of ethologists and paleoanthropologists hypothesized they were likely descendants of a population ancestral to us both, genetically sequestered here by the extreme ruggedness of the terrain and the rigors of the climate. Winter was setting in; high above the majestic trees the glacier was slowly expanding. Yet the plateaus remained temperate; fruiting trees abounded in the forests, providing much of the animals’ diet. We tread with the caution of intruders through this unfamiliar Eden, "with inspection deep / Considered every creature," setting up our observation posts in the unnerving silences between disorienting noises. [4]

What struck us powerfully from the moment we approached these novel and yet eerily familiar beings was that we could literally perceive their minds, though in a manner we have found impossible to describe, as it is unlike anything else we have encountered. Only gradually, and with an astonishment that can readily be imagined, did we come to realize that by a freak of nature, their innermost mental processes and representations – part conscious, partly not – were displayed to our senses, though not to theirs, made visible as if by a magic lantern. At night their ruminations shone in the darkness like a swarm of fireflies, more lucid even than in the light of day. We had come in search of the missing link in our evolutionary history – those six million years of lost ancestors, who had at best left us a handful of dry bones – yet the expedition’s goals had already been far exceeded. It did not take us long to realize that we had stumbled on an un-hoped-for treasure of a much deeper significance; a window not only into our past, but even more into our minds. Protected by their seemingly inhospitable environment – as if a benevolent magician had cast a spell to keep these creatures safe from harm – they lived and loved unknown. Overlooking the rugged escarpment and the vast plain below as the sun set in a fire of clouds, we felt an extreme sense of gratitude that we had been vouchsafed this vision, a giant laboratory of the living mind.

The Dreamers

The group of transparents we initially chanced upon seemed at first to possess such rudimentary cognitive capacities that we first dubbed them minimalists, before we realized that they were dreamers. By day, their actions were guided by memories, learned associations, and evolved patterns of interpretation and inference, but they had no awareness of this fact. For them, the phenomena of their experiences, so laboriously constructed by their intricate neural networks, appeared to be an independently existing world external to themselves, a world of color, sound, and depth, but a world devoid of mind. Sometimes a fear or joy would seize them, and although they always located the source of such emotions on the outside of their skin, yet the response itself they vaguely realized was internal to themselves. Likewise they had sensations of pain and pleasure, eating, fighting, or mating; these filled their space of awareness, tagged to the external or perceptual world, and yet at the same time imbued with a budding subjectivity, an inwardness they did not clearly differentiate.

They have no art as such; we never saw them manufacture objects to adore or contemplate. Yet in the evenings we would spot them in the trees in rapt attention admiring the setting sun, and as darkness fell they gazed in silent wonder at the stars. Intrigued by their simple aesthetics, we would quietly watch them, attempting to fathom what their minds were up to. There appeared to be no images or thoughts; no previous aesthetic experience was recalled from memory. Instead, in that suspension of external activity that marked their adoration, the whole perceptual system calibrated to a matrix that had been there since time immemorial. We saw an eerie order surface in the silent mind, a pulsing web of lights that brought the fragile wetware of the brain up to the specifications of the stars.

Reluctant to intrude on them by day, we often sought them out by night, finding them nestled together in clusters under a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye. It was then we discovered that they were secret poets of the night, their dreams cavorting around their heads and bodies. Incapable of recalling the simplest scene from memory in waking life, they came to life as they lay lifeless: daring leaps from branches high up in the canopy secured them the succulent fruits of their imagination; pouncing cats lay in wait behind the boulders; friends, lovers, and adversaries sprung to life in the darkness. These rich simulations recruited the full complexity of their cognitive capacities, tapping into their emotions, generating desire or contentment, fear and anger, training the delicate coordination of hand and eye. Just like us, during the dream they were incognizant that they were dreaming; within the theater of consciousness, they mistook the fleeting phantoms of memory for genuine perceptions of an independently existing world. Nothing was properly labeled or tracked, and not even the most outlandish conjunction of events – your lover’s head, say, as we once witnessed, transformed into the head of an antelope, while your long-dead grandfather reached out his arms for you – would suffice to raise in their minds the slightest suspicion that something was amiss. Just as incongruously – though in this again they are no different from ourselves – they fully believed their actions in this make-believe world were real and efficacious. In actual fact, their bodies would lie perfectly still, as if struck by paralysis; the link that during waking life connected beliefs and desires to action was severed in the state of dreams. Before they woke, however, the mental spaces where their imaginary worlds were constituted disappeared and the memory buffers that sustained them cleared. The skills they had rehearsed at night were incorporated into their repertoire of behaviors, although all the intermediate steps were erased. The monsters of the night were forgotten; no fantastic representations infected the memories of the real world in which they lived. A smarter, wiser, and more tightly integrated hominid awoke each morning, yet they remained ignorant of this fact. Even though we were naïve observers in those early days, we saw the germs of most of what we later so painstakingly discovered. [5]

The Pretenders

Because they seemed incapable of distinguishing between what came from memory and what originated in perception, we concluded that the imaginative activities of the transparents were restricted to the world of dreams. While we pondered the difficulties facing the development of cognitive capacities to allow the power of the imagination to enter the waking world, we expanded our studies to include a second troupe of transparents nearby. These appeared to have the same abilities as the dreamers; notably, they seemed incapable of entertaining mental images recalled from memory without making the fatal mistake of confusing what the mind had made with what it had perceived.

In fact, in this new group we repeatedly witnessed natural selection at work to stanch such representational abuse – and in the process sadly cull the brightest and most promising youngsters from the gene pool. A young adult, for instance, that had showed signs of being able to recall visual images from memory in the waking state (we called him the Waking Dreamer), was once observed by one of us right in the slender summit of a large tree, eating and surveying the landscape. Without prior warning, the vivid image of a striking snake popped into his mind; he had encountered it the day before and may have been reminded of this frightening experience – it happened too fast for us to judge with any confidence – by the sinuous meander of a branch. He leapt in terror; unable to brace his fall, he tumbled headlong to his death below. His unimaginative brother munched calmly on. In fact, dreamers were generally protected from this fate by an unwavering attentiveness that bordered on stupidity: their reality held rock steady before them, unmixed by wanton mental images. Yet we had seen them during their nocturnal flights of fancy and knew that they possessed a fully fledged, vivid, and creative imagination. If they seemed dull, it was because they lacked the tools to tame it, they had no way to integrate the true powers of the mind into their waking lives. Although this deficit seemed not to inconvenience them the least, we reasoned that that the absence of imagination in waking life must place severe limits on the dreamers’ ability to innovate.

It took us weeks to realize that right under our noses, the infants – from the moment they could crawl, if not before – had been engaging in a form of play that helped them tap into their expanding space of possibilities. When they were fed and rested, they would not simply lie still, save their strength, and keep out of trouble. Instead, they would seize the moment to engage in a behavior we at first overlooked, and whose purpose long remained entirely mysterious to us. Typically, the infant begins by surveying the field to monitor his safety, then crawls up to a parent with an expectant and teasing look we called a playface. To our surprise an ancient circuit in the limbic system suddenly kicked in, an area we had seen activated in both adults and infants when they were escaping from predators. In our unfortunate waking dreamer, it was the activation of this predator template, dedicated to the ancestral knowledge of escaping from the clutches of another, that had prompted his fatal fall. In a sleight of mind the child enlists these ancient circuits to his novel purpose. Secure in the safety of the home base, the template’s input conditions are relaxed: the drooling infant expertly remaps the mother’s eyes onto the deadly gaze of the predator. At the same time, he monitors that the environment remains safe and he does not stop perceiving his mother with the secure knowledge she is that and nothing else.

With some practice, we learned to notice how from within this executive monitoring system, a holographic projection emerged that handled the nonstandard mapping, a pretense space protected by realistic computations, nestled inside a secure reality. Simultaneously safe and frightened, he crawls away from her excitedly; he looks behind, giggling out of control, to see if she is following. With slowly stalking steps she chases him, a friendly grin upon her face, her jaw dropped and her eyes wide open with an expectant, playful expression, her arms raised and her hands clawed as if ready to seize and capture. She restrains herself to let him get away; the infant during the early attempts at chase play becomes so excited he can hardly move. His limbic system, maximally aroused by the predator template’s call of alarm, overwhelms him; he trips and falls, his mother slows to a standstill, pausing mock-menacingly on the ground before him, incongruously threatening to eat her own offspring. When the play terminates, her child requites by hugging her with great affection.

We slowly came to understand that with her connivance, he is learning to escape from predators, a skill he cannot easily acquire from real life. Once attacked by a real adversary, it would be too late to practice; his untrained body would have no recourse to safety and his clumsiness would be fatal. Pretense is as it were designed by nature to resolve this dilemma; we remain immensely impressed by the elegance with which this complex task is handled by the infant.. Fully awake, he is able to explore and hone his skills within a possibility space that is largely inaccessible to him if he were to respond only to what is real. Pretense allows him to practice hiding and escaping; it defines a learning mode that is cognitively and behaviorally distinct from the executive or literal mode of action for survival. Neither the mother nor the son were in any sense conscious of the purpose of this activity; they had no knowledge that they were training predator evasion strategies, or even training anything at all; they were simply playing for its own sake, enjoying themselves. In the safety of this privileged space – not altogether unlike the empty space of the stage, except it is constructed for the performers rather than the spectators – the child employs his spare hours to build his strength, his skill, and his ability to detect and evade. In these infantile and primitive behaviors we see the first development of pretense, the basis of the activity of literature.

In one significant respect, however, chase play fails as a paradigm of imaginative immersion. However carefully we examined the phenomenon, we never observed the mental image of a predator projected from memory into the infant’s consciousness: no phantom lion drove the limbic fright. He did not imagine an attacker; he just redirected his mother’s eyes, the stalking gait, the absurd growl, her looming posture, into the input channels of the predator template. His subjective phenomenology, generated in the pretense space, included only the vaguest sensations of a generic monster – scary, clawed, hairy, and out to get and devour him. In her double role as caretaker and monster, his mother provided a safe environment in which to practice fear: he squealed with delight as she grabbed at him. Her executive intentions mattered little; she would often be supervising her other offspring while she delivered precise cues for his play as if distractedly. Their moves were predictable yet playful, stereotypical yet innovative, repeated ad infinitum till she tired. Although he responded to her motions as if to a story, she was no poet and did not write the story of the chase. Yet without realizing it, he was the first actor and she the first storyteller; together they acted out a script so ancient and rehearsed that there was no author, so old it built their bones. A story of life and death, of seeing and being seen, of desire and fear.

The Representers

The cognitive mechanisms of pretense seemed more promising for constructing literature, since the design of the pretense space permitted a kind of imaginative immersion in the waking state. The play of the pretenders, however, was devoid of imagery and hardly deserved the name of fiction. We termed it non-representational pretense; it lacked mental images and the actors had no conception that they were pretending. Worse, they had no language: their inability to tell memories from perceptions ruled out symbolic behavior of any complexity. It was a source of immense relief to us to encounter the representers just as the returning sun coaxed winter slowly towards spring.

These beautiful and fully bipedal hominids, occupying the sparsely wooded savanna of the southern plains, had full use of mental imagery in the executive mode; our early observations indicated that they used it chiefly to sustain desire. In some, the sensory presentation of an object of desire would linger only briefly, as if in an afterglow, before vanishing. The spoor of a deer, say, or the smell of ripe fruit, would suffice to evoke the associated sensations of the animal fled or the taste of the fruit, thus rekindling some preexisting intention or desire. The image spurred them on almost as if the object itself were present; they were wholly enslaved by these representations, and would not leave their pursuit until they had recovered it – or until the cue disappeared, in which case they would stand there, as if puzzled by their own excitement, until they simmered down and went about their business.

This behavior struck us as incongruous; we could see clearly that they distinguished memories from perceptions, for had they thought the object of desire were literally present, there would have been no need to attempt its recovery. We soon realized, however, that their desires were mediated by older structures of the mid-brain where the distinction between representations and perceptions was not being made. As a result of this unfortunate neurological arrangement, the neocortex was flooded with instructions to maintain the pleasant image of the desired object, priming them for an addiction to desire itself. Even though they were technically perfectly able to tell what originated in the world from what originated in the mind, the part of the mind that handled this distinction was nevertheless under pressure to behave in a manner that struck us as being slightly demented.

In illustration of what may be termed a controlled form of representational abuse, consider the case of an aging male we mischievously nicknamed Freud. Freud, who no longer enjoyed easy access to females or the support of ambitious friends, had found a novel solution to his problem. He discovered that under conditions of relative sensory deprivation, pleasant images would float into his mind. He would often seek out a dark and sheltered spot and spend his time enjoying representations of satisfied desires, thus compensating for his frustrations in real life. These images were noticeably less vivid than perceptions – this is one of the cues the representers use to tell them apart – yet when there was no competition from perceptions, the effect was still dramatic. Some of my colleagues insisted on calling this somewhat perverse activity art, arguing it had no executive goal and constituted in effect a form of pretense – one might say, a form of controlled self-deception. This phenomenon provides, perhaps, a modest measure of vindication for the otherwise implausible theory that literature is a form of wish-fulfillment where the reader engages in activities she would find desirable in real life, and that she does so because she fails to recognize that her fictive world is not real. Freud – our Freud – was at once deceived and at the same time vaguely cognizant of what was happening; he courted madness, safe in the knowledge he would be refused.

These symbolic skills allowed the representers to develop a rudimentary communicational system, but they failed to use it for creative purposes. When one of them perceived a threat, he or she would utter a characteristic call; through repeated conditioning, the others had associated a particular predator with each call. An image of the predator would spring to mind, and appropriate evasive action taken. Curiously, the representers remained wholly ignorant of the fact that they were communicating with each other; to the best of our knowledge, they never represented the content of another’s mind and indeed seemed entirely oblivious to the possibility that other minds might exist.

In their dreams, their chase play, and their communication, the transparents exhibited a highly complex set of mental operations, yet we had to accept that their consciousness was a stranger to the literary mind.

The Symbolists

Our analyses of several months of continuous observation of the dreamers, the pretenders, and the representers led us to formulate our first hypothesis: that in Homo transparensis, pretense was an intricate adaptation for learning certain kinds of strategies. Basic skills such as running permitted in theory a vast range of strategies to be developed; in the transparents, it was possible to observe directly that the strategies they actually utilized occupied only a tiny fraction of the entire possibility space. Under specific circumstances of surplus energy and safety, this vast space would open; by means of pretense the transparents were able to access it in play and practice behavioral schemas they would not be comfortable or competent to use in real-life situations. To avoid contamination with their executive space, they constructed a fragile pretense space that easily collapsed if they were distracted. In the case of dreams, the contamination problem was solved at a physiological level, by decoupling; when they awoke, they would forget what they had done. The pretenders were no more conscious than the dreamers of the beneficial effects of such practice; the improvements in their executive skills appeared as if without cause.

While we hoped that such structural learning might provide a paradigm for understanding literature, the behaviors of the dreamers and the pretenders remained distant from anything we could wish to define as literary. Even the waking daydreams of the representers fell far short of what we were in search of. The transparents evidently had only the most rudimentary language; their communicational skills and understanding of each other appeared to be severely lacking in sophistication. At the same time, their documented if apparently entirely unconscious ability to create pretense spaces suggested to us that more elaborate forms for pretense may have developed in populations yet to be discovered.

On a hunch, we combed the dense jungle out against the eastern escarpment; after a week of extracting thorns from the oddest places, we discovered a diverse and scattered population of transparents that we christened the symbolists. Eagle-eyed, aggressive, and swift-footed, they kept us on edge, and yet we delighted in what they revealed to us. Within the largest population group we soon witnessed the recollection of a memory in the total absence of cues, accompanied by a source monitoring system far more robust than that of the representers. This permitted them a crucial innovation: the symbolists were capable of parsing their memories and recombining them in novel ways in consciousness. Seeing the patterns of the stars, for instance, they could superimpose the shape of an animal; faced with a common fragment of a rock, they could conceive of using it to cut. Yet these were uncommon innovations; to our continual disappointment, their minds were almost wholly dedicated to the immediate exigencies of survival. Although they made tools, these were elementary and drably utilitarian. Even their language (which is combinatorial, possessing a rudimentary grammar, unlike that of the representers) is exceedingly crude. It consists only of a few dozen vocal terms, conveyed in a cacophony of guttural sounds and smacks, and as many gestures. At night, their dreams were spectacular but chaotic, and during the day they appeared to have no way to tap into their possibility spaces of action, feeling, and thinking.

The closest thing they had to poetry was a litany of names, a list that utilized their small repertoire of sounds to form words that activated both their memories and their sensory attention. They could relate simple events: the fig-tree by the drying spring, the lion stalking in the grass, the water that dripped from the waterfall under the melting snow. They spoke compulsively, without turntaking. There were no stories, only incidents. It slowly dawned on us what was amiss: they were incapable of imagining being someone – not even being themselves in the past or the future, or adopting a different perspective in the present. Their identities as agents were locked; they were unable to recruit their imaginative abilities for pretense for this to us pedestrian and obvious purpose. We saw one instance of just this specific kind of fiction gone wrong: a father playing chase with his child unaccountably begins to supplement the default rerouting of predator affordances – a grabbing arm, a growl, a threatening loom – with mental imagery. Worried that his brain is not equipped to handle this daring move, we watch the father’s executive agent memories get replaced by fictive values. Suddenly, it is no longer play. The looming man really believes he is trying to attack and eat the fleeing child; he cannot track his own constructions. In his subjective phenomenology, he transformed into a wolf and she into a prey. Luckily, her mind is not infected; she breaks off the game at once, reaches out her arms towards him and cries; his paternal affections are awakened and she is saved. The symbolists, in spite of their imaginative abilities, appear to lack the intricate source monitoring skills required to handle imaginative pretense, and thus sensibly lack the swappable agent registers required to pretend to be someone else.

Our inability to detect even the slightest trace of art among the symbolists affected me personally in an sharply adverse manner. In early March, seeking solitude in the stony wastes of the upper valley, I walked in some distraction into a talus I had not previously traversed, nor have I since, perhaps because of avalanches, succeeded in retracing my steps. While pondering the dismal failure of our model to predict the hominids’ behavior, I became aware of a whiff of smoke seeping out of between the rocks. Clearing a narrow entry by removing a series of slabs and boulders, I was able to squeeze into the crevice below: the smell of smoke was unmistakable and as I retreated into the rock an eerie sound struck my ears. Its full characteristics now elude me; a confusion of distinctly hominid cries, screams, and melodious calls and lays patterned themselves rhythmically on a cacophony of percussive reverberations. I pursued these faint sensations through a succession of narrow crawlspaces until I spied a light flickering in the utter darkness. Lowering myself head first towards a small viewhole in the fractured and porous sandstone, I was able with some difficulty to gain a partial view of the scene below.

Sweaty bodies smeared with greasy ochre glistened in the flickering light of scattered fires. I could at first distinguish clearly only the slowly winding torso of a young male, almost without fur, succeeded by the similarly snaking movements of a female, their tanned skins a golden brown, her black mane nearly sweeping the floor. Craning my neck, I forced my bleeding face past the rockface to gain an almost satisfactory view of the entire cave. I cannot easily describe the scene. One might say the hominids were dancing, yet their movements were neither scripted nor arbitrary. Some movements appeared to be pure improvisations, starting a sequence of deliberate imitations. They moved to the music, but they also imitated each other, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a delay of several minutes, with great deliberateness, as if challenging each or testing other, laughing – a hoarse laugh, bouncing against the hollow chambers of the cave. They were moving purposefully, sometimes in a winding chain, sometimes small groups would assemble, face each other, and imitate each other’s gestures as if a single movement flowed through them.

It was only then that I realized they had painted the cave – or smeared it with something that would provide some affordance for their recall, stimulate their imagination. It wasn’t pictures, it was lines, enhancements to a rock, adding more clearly a bear’s mouth that could already be seen. As I could hardly see through the chink, it was difficult to make out their mental states, yet in the half-darkness of the cave they shone with an unusual vigor. It appeared that their pedestrian selves had been obliterated; there was nothing left of their real-world executive agents. As in the case of the pretenders, I witnessed a holographic image arise from within the executive space, a fully fledged virtual agent. The symbolists became what they imagined, constructing virtual agents of a bewildering variety: antelopes, deer, horses, ferocious cats and lions; they crawled, ran, and coursed through the cavernous space of the cave in a frenzy wholly foreign to me, and yet oddly familiar. Their executive agent spaces had been placed into abeyance to free up working memory capacity for their imaginative alter egos. Tellingly, the cave appeared to have no exits; either they had blockaded themselves inside it, or others had confined them, rolling large boulders into the narrow exits. Only here, protected from the consequences of their actions, could the symbolists let their minds ride.

What fascinated me the most was not the swaying and sensuous bodies, glistening in fatty earths and sweat, illuminated by numerous small fires, but the eerie synchronization of virtual agents, as if orchestrated by the deafening and incessant clatter of rocks striking on rocks, or wood on wood. It was a noise I cannot dignify by the name of music, yet it was not without an aesthetic appeal. On cue their mental representations would change from eagle to monkey; like a ripple in the dancing bodies one simulation would catch and travel the full length of the train. In spite of this communality each virtual monkey and elephant was unique, based on the personal memories formed from the particular and idiosyncratic perspective of each individual. They acted in concert and their minds synchronized their individual imagery into a common behavior, driven by common cues. I surely do not need to point out there was no indication that the participants in this ritual of darkness had any direct awareness of each other’s mental contents. Nevertheless, the constant play of imitation – they tested each other frequently, to check if the other was really paying attention and responding in synchrony – this iterated staging of mutual improvisation allowed them to realize a crucial insight about their similarity to each other. Each dancer gains a manifest experience not only of the vast possibility spaces available to her or him, but of the fact that others share a similar possibility space. In this way, the negative associations that invariably built up over the petty quarrels that typically arose in the executive mode were dissolved; the categorical judgments were tossed out and replaced with a much more appreciative sense of the unrealized potential of their conspecifics.

I was not to see the symbolists for weeks, yet when I observed them later that spring, they showed no evidence of being able to exit from their dreary realities. Although they had amply demonstrated to my utmost satisfaction that they were capable of assuming a vast space of possible actions, in real life – outside of the cave – they were slaves to routine. Their dances were a parodic inversion of Plato’s cave: it was in the fantasy of the cave, in the darkness of the flickering lights and shadows mistaken for reality, that they were really free; under the bright clarity of a bright sun they were slaves to habit, to categorized attribution and prejudices, to a life of dreary or unmitigated repetition. The realism of the symbolists was a prison to them, an open-air and free-range prison, as effective as any shackles, a prison they could only escape by locking themselves into a cave.

Was this literature? For the first time we had witnessed imaginative immersion. The pretenders had demonstrated an ability to create a pretense space which tracked the playful interpretation of the mother’s eyes as those of a monster. The symbolists were clearly capable of setting up a wide variety of virtual agents, alternative identities handled through a similar pretend space. Their calls, gestures, and actions showed that they could successfully communicate such imagined identities. Yet we were left with a feeling that the core of the literary mind was still absent: in spite of their enacted stories, they remained incognizant of the existence of other minds. We felt strangely confident that it was in the explicit discovery of the hidden mental states of others that we would find the key to the literary mind. Here, the symbolists could not help us.

The Mindreaders

In late spring, we were ready to pull up our stakes and venture into the deep interior of the plateaus in search of the elusive mindreaders, at that point no more than a figment of our imagination. We had already assembled an incredible wealth of material, but we had failed in our ambition to develop a model of the mental operations that characterized and enabled the cultural phenomenon of literature. All we could really claim to have accomplished was to set down a series of hints, a set of minimal requirements. The literary mind presupposed an ability to recall from memory and recombine parsed sensory impressions – a capacity we had painstakingly documented in the dreamers. It necessitated the cognitive adaptation of pretense, which we had seen involved the construction of a fragile and temporary mental space. We know from the representers that the literary mind could not do without a system for monitoring the source of memories and perceptions – yet that such a system was not equivalent to a full decoupling: without being tied into the emotions, the blood and juices of the heart, literature would be powerless. In the case of the symbolists, we had seen that under special conditions, full-fledged virtual agents can be constructed with the help of personal memories that enable the experience of imaginative immersion. This again required special source monitoring capacities, however, which the symbolists glaringly lacked. Finally, the conviction that mindreading provided the key to the literary mind had taken hold of us; the sense that we were close to our goal made us restless to set out. At the same time, we had voices singing in our hearts that it was folly: our chances of locating yet another species of transparents were infinitesimal.

We were captured by the mindreaders on the thirteenth of April in the year 2000 and force marched for four days with our eyes covered and a sweet-smelling cloth placed over our noses. They would not let us see them, even as we rested at night, nor did they speak to us. Their shouts and brief commands conveyed the impression of a well planned raid; we felt no inclination to attempt an escape. After four days our bands were removed; our captors reassured us our lives were not in danger and cautioned us to follow orders. The march continued for several more days through a boundless and monotonous pine forest until we suddenly halted on the brink of a precipice and beheld the golden citadel of Cliff Palace, framed in the massive vault of rock above and a bed of sunlit cedar and pines below. A precarious hand-and-toe-hold trail led down the steep cliff side.

They let us wander freely among them, as escape was impossible. The mindreaders farmed and hunted on the tablelands and the ravines, building their houses in the shelter of natural alcoves. The sandstone overhang stretched two hundred feet above me, blackened by seeping water from the mesa and tapering down towards the back of the cave, where grains were stored. This vast ceiling was not sculpted; below it, hewn stones fashioned elegant houses with sunny terraces for winter and cool rooms for the summer. The alcove overlooked the landscape we had intruded upon – a Sanctuary they vigilantly protected for the benefit of their hominid cousins.

The mindreaders had constructed circular chambers below the terrace suitable for imaginative immersion, and here finally were we able to observe the full-fledged literary mind in operation. Before they begin to tell a story, they make sure of everyone’s comfort and safety. We witnessed how this allowed the variables normally kept in the executive space – the full set of memories they needed to track who they were, what they had done, and what they were trying to accomplish – to be placed in a state of quiescence. This had the effect not only of freeing up working memory capacity; more importantly, because they did not need to act in reality, they could utilize the architecture of the executive space to generate a virtual agent. This latter was a fragile structure that depended on a safe and relatively invariant environment; it could vanish in an instant if the executive space needed to respond. Yet in the protected space of the circular chamber, the virtual agent could be sustained for hours.

Just as we had seen among the pretenders, children would utilize affordances in their environment to create pretense spaces. In simple forms of children’s play, the content of the executive space – the world as it is perceived – is inherited by the pretense space, with only a few modifications necessary. In the case of a story, however, the world inhabited by the virtual agent must be constituted from each person’s memory, aided and guided by the world and gestures of the story. The language of the story, along with numerous inferences drawn from it, evokes in the listener’s mind a spreading activation of memories. These are unique for each individual, since the story must necessarily be constituted by personal memories – and yet the transparents had a strong conviction that they were experiencing the same story. We would enjoy watching how the children and the adults would construct displays within the theater of consciousness that differed radically on the surface, and often also somewhat in the meaning of the story, and yet a common structure would generally persist.

What made imaginative immersion work among the mindreaders was that the structure of the agent from the executive space was carried over into the pretense space. Within the pretend world, the listener embodied the protagonists – the antelope woman, the medicine man, the orphaned child – by adopting their memories as her own. The executive agent was intimately connected to emotions, to a particular perspective, to the experience of embodiment, and these qualities would carry over into the pretend space in the construction of the virtual agent. When listening to the story, the mindreaders would suspend their real identities and apply their consciousness, their emotions, the proprioceptive sense of their own bodies – in short, their constructions of themselves as agents – to that of the imaginary protagonist. Within a story, multiple such virtual agents would often be constructed, each representing a particular point of view within the narrative. Unlike the symbolists, who were unable to construct a virtual agent without entirely obliterating the executive agent, the mindreaders were comfortable maintaining both at the same time: the executive was simply backgrounded, since imaginative immersion would in any case take place only when it could be placed in abeyance.

The simulation that is created in this manner allowed the listener to explore vast and often dangerous possibility spaces in perfect security. In this sense, literature was like chase play – the difference lay only in the type and complexity of the strategies explored. The stories of the mindreaders conveyed strategies of being in the world that opened up their minds in ways that were beautiful to watch. Most of this structural learning was unconscious: after a full imaginative immersion in a fictive identity and world, the results of the exploration of strategies would be recorded in memory, but largely below the horizon of conscious awareness. The final result, however, would be to change probability weightings and confidence thresholds for executing these strategies in real life. In this way the transparents learned from fiction, even if all they were aware of was the enjoyable immersion in the story.

While the pretenders limited their play to the specific domain of predators and prey, the mindreaders practiced a wide variety of socially constructed roles. Such roles are complex and context-sensitive executive schemas that they model and elaborate around intentions; they form the backbone of their culture. Stories and role play provided an efficient soft technology to pass them on from generation to generation. The fictive simulations would parse out a role into components manageable for the children, so that they could learn them individually, only later to assemble them. If some new component was introduced of a role that a child had already utilized to construct her identity, we could frequently see it integrate and become operational with amazing swiftness. The listener would from the outset identify particularly strongly with a particular character in the story, because of similarities between the possibility spaces of the fictive agent and the executive agent she had already constructed for herself. In some of these cases, we saw what we termed conscious structural learning. Due to a continual mapping of the virtual onto the executive agent in the course of the story, imaginative immersion would lead to the arousal of strong emotions. This emotion would often outlast the experience of listening, making the area of the possibility space that was explored by the story more salient and reverberating with a way of being in the world that was ready to be implemented at once. Yet such children would also listen to stories that trained roles of little relevance to them in the present, perhaps to store them away for later use. Time alone constrained us from producing an exhaustive account of these and other phenomena. The expedition’s timetable had been exceeded and we wished at all cost to avoid the possible intrusion of search parties; however painful, an immediate departure was imperative.

Conclusion

These preliminary notes from my visit among the mindreaders provide a sketch of the literary mind as it is manifested in Homo transparensis. Our research has indelibly impressed on us the functional and structural continuity of dreams, play, and self-creation in the evolution of the story-teller, humbling our earlier convictions that our most precious cultural expressions have no precedent in nature. We have witnessed first-hand the dangers inherent in the complex and partly unconscious processes that monitor – and yet sometimes fail to monitor – the distinctions between dreams and waking, the pretended and the literal, memories and perceptions. Through fiction, we have come to understand, our species has learned to explore and tap into the vast reservoir of possible ways of being in the world that other animals leave largely untouched. Perhaps most spectacularly, if we can generalize from the case of the mindreaders, we have created the fiction of other minds, a construction that they, as we among ourselves, acknowledge is entirely conjectural.

Our constant and unfolding insights into the mental operations of the transparents were extremely gratifying to us. Indeed, as we lived in intimate and familial relations among them, we slowly realized that the sensory availability to us of their mental states gave us a more profound as well as detailed understanding of them than we had of ourselves. We had perceived thought itself, naked and bare; like all-seeing gods, we had constant and immediate access to the minds of the transparents. Paradoxically, this capacity made us strangers to each other. Around this time – and I can only speak for myself – I came to feel that my research companions had become mysterious and closed to me; there were aspects of their behavior I found truly puzzling, sometimes alarming. What I found even harder to bear was that my confidence in my ability to understand my own mind faltered. "O that the glorious Architect of man / Had made transparent Glasses in his brest," Francis Hubert wrote in 1629; [6] I prayed fervently and not without hope, "in my breast." At night, sleeping out in the courtyard by the smoldering fire, I woke in a cold sweat from a dream I could not recall – perhaps, I thought with horror, this very story. The darkness was impenetrable, exacerbated by the futile fire of the stars. The methodological reservation that our results might not apply to ourselves yielded imperceptibly to the inchoate terror that we had no way of knowing.

This despondency only the stories of the mindreaders were able to relieve. Seated in their dark underground ceremonial chambers, lit if at all by a flickering oil lamp, I discovered a world that was both habitable and intelligible. They called it tlön; it was a fictive world, and as such subject at most to localized constraints of consistency, yet bound and related to the real world in multiple and surprising ways. They spoke of themselves as the tliqön or worldmakers; only with the greatest effort was I able to resist the temptation of becoming myself a native inhabitant of this semi-fabulous demesne. Their villages and cliff palaces, they pointed out to us, were incidental manifestations of tlön in this world; only after a vast expansion of the palaces of tlön would they consider making even minor alterations to their own dwellings. Moreover, the significance of this world resided wholly in tlön; its heroes and heroines provided the palette of identity through which each person created his or her own private composition. The blameless life was defined by the attempt to live in this world as if it were tlön, to labor to make it so, and indeed to keep alive and expand tlön to one’s utmost capacity.

As we parted, our hosts confronted us with our own worldmaking. Gazing across the ravine from the roof of the alcove, the storyteller gestured over the vast forests of the tableland below us. "All this you have created," she said; "the dreamers, the pretenders, the representers, and the symbolists are all your work." She paused, her wizened hands trembling slightly. "Even the words which I say now you have written." Tears came to her eyes; she fought them back. I didn’t know what to say. "And you," she finally whispered, "you have been constructed by all the storytellers before you." I tried to look straight ahead of me, but I couldn’t; there was no one to look.

 

Notes

[1] I am grateful to Stephanie Owens for collaborating on many of the ideas in this essay. See our joint publication, "Pretense as an Adaptation for Learning: The Pedagogy of the Imagination."

[2] Francis Hubert, Egypts Favourite, lines 510-512.

[3] Cf. Dorrit Cohn's observation that "Most writers on the novel have taken the transparency of fictional minds for granted" (The Distinction of Fiction, 7).

[4] John Milton, Paradise Lost, IX: 83-4.

[5] For the germs of the present paper, see my "'The Time of Unrememberable Being': Wordsworth's Autobiography of the Imagination."

[6] Francis Hubert, The Historie of Edward the Second, 476: 1-2.

 

Works Cited

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Hubert, Francis. Egypts Favorite. London: L. Chapman, 1631.

Hubert, Francis. The Historie of Edvvard the Second. Surnamed Carnaruan, One of Our English Kings. London: L. Chapman, 1629.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Scott Elledge. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1993.

Steen, Francis F. "'The Time of Unrememberable Being': Wordsworth's Autobiography of the Imagination." A/B Autobiography Studies 13. 1 (Spring 1998): 7-38. Special issue on autobiography and neuroscience, edited by Thomas R. Smith.

Steen, Francis F. and Stephanie Owens. "Pretense as an Adaptation for Learning: The Pedagogy of the Imagination." Play and Culture Studies, ed. Stuart Reifel and Mac Brown, forthcoming.

 

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