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How Matter
Becomes Conscious
A Naturalistic Theory of the Mind

Jan Faye
How Matter Becomes Conscious
 Jan Faye

How Matter Becomes

Conscious
A Naturalistic Theory of the Mind
Jan Faye
Department of Media, Cognition
and Communication
University of Copenhagen, Philosophy
Copenhagen, Denmark

ISBN 978-3-030-16137-8 ISBN 978-3-030-16138-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16138-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935564

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2019
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 Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to Mauro Dorato, Oliver Kauffmann, and

Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup with whom I have debated consciousness over
the years. I also wish to express my thanks to my former students whose
thirst for insight gave me an opportunity to do my best in explaining a
spectrum of issues within the philosophy of mind. In particular, I want to
ackowledge Liv Maria Roadottir and Geir Grimholdt for fruitful discus-
sions. As a non-native speaker of English, I have as usual benefitted greatly
from Henry Folse’s comments and assistance to bring my manuscript into
a readable shape. Finally, I wish to thank an anonymous reader and my
publisher, Brendan George, for their confidence in this work.

v
 Contents

1 Flipping the Debate 1

1.1 Consciousness and Evolution 3
1.2 Non-reductive Naturalism 8
1.3 The Externalist Thesis 19

2 Our Animal Mind 29

2.1 Mind and Consciousness 30
2.2 Sentient Creatures 35
2.3 The Thinking Animal 41
2.4 The Self-Reflective Animal 55

3 Subjectivity in a Biological Perspective 69

3.1 What It Is like to Be Something 71
3.2 Perspectives of Perception 78
3.3 The Subjective Quality of Experiences 84
3.4 Perception of Colors 90
3.5 No Hard Problem 100

vii
viii   Contents

4 A Difference That Makes No Difference 107

4.1 The Knowledge Argument 108
4.2 The Conceivable Zombies 114
4.3 Necessary a Posteriori Truth 120
4.4 Two-Dimensional Semantics 127
4.5 How to Save Physicalism 134

5 Why Identity Is Not Enough 145

5.1 Physicalism 147
5.2 The Refutation of Eliminativism 154
5.3 The Question of Multiple Realizability 164
5.4 A Structural Identity Theory 167
5.5 The Mind-Body Problem 172
5.6 Conclusion 176

6 Functionalism, Mechanisms, and Levels of Reality 183

6.1 Machine Functionalism 185
6.2 Levels of Functional States 193
6.3 Emergent Properties 203
6.4 Mechanisms 209
6.5 Mechanisms and Causal Exclusion 214

7 The Environment Is What Matters 225

7.1 One System or Many Systems 229
7.2 Flock Behavior 233
7.3 Evolutionary and Functional Explanations 242
7.4 Extrinsic Properties 244
7.5 The Brain and Its Surroundings 250

8 Understanding Consciousness 259

8.1 The Experiencing Organism 261
8.2 Visual Sensations 275
8.3 Conceptually Formed Experiences 281
8.4 The Nature of Consciousness 287
8.5 Authoritative Self-knowledge 293
 Contents   ix

Epilogue 305

Bibliography 313

Index 325
 Prologue

This is a book about situating the mental in the physical world. It pre-
supposes that the mind is a biological adaptation that plays a significant
role in the evolution of animals, from the simplest to the most complex
creatures. Finding a place for the mind in nature requires overcoming
what has been called the explanatory gap between the phenomenolog-
ical description of the mind based on our human subjective experience
and the neuro-chemical naturalistic description of the brain. This gap
has haunted the mind-body problem for centuries. Theories that con-
sider the mental to be a representation of the behavioral possibilities of
an organism in relation to its environment pursue something of impor-
tance, but I argue that such representational theories still lack a sound
naturalistic ontology.
Here my aim is to present a naturalistic theory of mind according
to which our mind exists as extrinsic properties of our brain. I main-
tain that mental states are neither inherent states of the brain nor func-
tional states that supervene on the brain. At the same time, I also reject
the traditional assumption that the mind possesses certain subjective
experiential characteristics that can be described only in terms of a first-
person perspective, and that therefore consciousness can be understood

xi
xii   Prologue

through a phenomenological approach. Instead I take the experiential

features by which mental states are presented to us as a result of an evo-
lutionary adaptation of an organism’s information-processing capac-
ity. I see this adaptation as an evolutionary strategy for processing the
overwhelming amount of sensory information that complex organ-
isms receive from their environment. Mental states, I argue, are found
in both animals and humans and should be regarded as extrinsic states
whose content is a result of the on-going interaction between the brain
and its physical and social environment. My theory presents an exter-
nalist view of the mind according to which both the experiential and
propositional content of mental states are external to the organism, by
which I mean that the environment in which the neuronal processes of
an organism take place determines all of the mental content that can be
associated with that organism.
Most scientists who assume a naturalistic perspective would agree
that the human mind and consciousness have been formed by biologi-
cal variation, selection, and adaptation, much as we would expect from
our knowledge of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. Recent evi-
dence generated by comparative neuroscience and behavioral animal
studies confirms that higher animals are much more cognitively sophis-
ticated than was thought 50–60 years ago and that their minds are in
many ways not essentially different from ours. Therefore, one might
have assumed that a naturalistic-evolutionary approach to philosophy of
mind would have been common among philosophers. Strangely enough
this is not the case. Looking back over this period, we find that more
recent naturalistic accounts of the mind, such as the central state theory
and functionalism, have been met with a priori philosophical arguments
that have questioned this or any scientific naturalistic approach to the
mind. The so-called multi-realization argument almost killed the cen-
tral state theory. That theory was replaced by functionalism, which was
taken to be a more sophisticated naturalistic account. But this account
has also eventually been discredited by many philosophers.
In 1974 Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper in which he argued
that it is impossible for human beings to understand what it is like to
be a bat, because bats navigate by echolocation, but humans do not. He
did not deny that bats may have consciousness, but he argued on the
 Prologue   xiii

basis of this example that every experience has a subjective characteristic

that is impossible to understand from the objective standpoint of nat-
uralistic science. Consciousness, according to Nagel, constitutes a par-
ticular phenomenological perspective on the world that comes with a
certain feeling associated with having a particular experience. This feel-
ing, he claims, escapes any scientific explanation. Since 1974 many phi-
losophers, including John Searle (the Chinese room), David Chalmers
(the zombie-argument), Frank Jackson (the blind Mary) and Ned Block
(the absent qualia), have produced a variety of a priori arguments to
support Nagel’s general conclusion that there is a phenomenological
aspect to consciousness that cannot be explained in (current) function-
alist terms. All these philosophers have therefore defended non-func-
tionalist positions like epiphenomenalism, property dualism, double
aspect theories, panpsychism, etc.
I think that all their arguments can be proved to be unsound. In
much of my earlier research I have argued that we have to incorpo-
rate Darwin’s naturalistic evolutionary approach into our philosophi-
cal understanding of human beings and their cognitive capacities. The
focus of this volume is to demonstrate how such a commitment works
out when applied to explaining the nature of consciousness. We already
have a variety of different naturalistic approaches to the mind, but I
argue that neither functionalism nor any improved identity theory suf-
fices as a complete naturalistic explanation. Furthermore, I offer a solu-
tion to the weaknesses of existing theory.
Most naturalist theories of the mind-body problem are mistakes,
I argue, in considering mental properties to be nothing but intrinsic
properties of the brain. I argue that neither sensory content nor seman-
tic content are intrinsic to the brain or the mind. Functionalism agrees
but fails, because its proponents believe that mental states as functional
states supervene on physical states. Thus, functionalism introduces
higher levels of supervening mental states that, by definition, cannot
be reduced to lower level physical states. Rather than supporting any
of these theories, my thesis is that a satisfactory understanding of the
mind, or what is sometimes called mental state consciousness, requires
explaining the sensory and semantic content of mental states. This con-
tent should be seen as a presentation to the organism of the environment
xiv   Prologue

that causes its beliefs and experiences. I presuppose that consciousness

is the manifestation of a capacity or disposition some organisms have
to present their environment based on sensory information, and that a
given mental presentation is precisely such a particular manifestation of
the disposition to have perceptions or thoughts. The capacity of being
aware of something, then, is explained by the fact that an organism can
be related to its mental content. Moreover, against functionalism I hold
that the ontological claims of all forms of supervenience and emergence
cannot be plausibly defended, but that any system, large or small, con-
tinuously acquires new extrinsic properties from its interaction with its
environment.
In the first of eight chapters, I begin with a discussion of what a nat-
uralist approach to explaining the mind should accomplish. I also take
issue with some of the objections against attempts to provide an evolu-
tionary account of the phenomenal properties of consciousness. More
specifically, I discuss Thomas Nagel’s most recent attack on Darwinism
as an impossible framework for ever hoping to understand conscious-
ness, and consequently this framework is probably false. Indeed, if one
mistakenly believes that Darwinism implies reductionism, then men-
tal states might seem out of the reach of a scientific explanation. But
Darwinism is not a reductionist theory, for it essentially depends on the
environment as an explanatory element. My proposal is that instead of
seeing mind and consciousness as having some intrinsic properties that
are essentially subjective, and which therefore can never be described in
physicalist terms, we should look at mind and consciousness in relation
to the environment and regard them as extrinsic properties of an organ-
ism caused by its interaction with its habitat.
Chapter 2 outlines what I regard as the evolution of the mind from
simple sentient organisms to very complex self-reflective organisms like
human beings. I argue that nerve cells are a biological precondition for
having the ability to have sensations. In general, I distinguish between
sentient beings, conscious beings, and self-reflective beings. First, the
most primitive sentient beings responded generically to various sensory
stimuli and behaved according to relatively few pre-established patterns,
whereas later more complex sentient beings evolve through natural
 Prologue   xv

selection the ability to present their environment in the form that we

know directly as our experiences. Conscious beings are organisms that
are able to form concepts and think about their own experiences; there-
fore, they can learn from their own experiences. Finally, self-reflective
beings are those organisms that know that they know and can reflect
about the consequences of their behavior with respect to themselves and
other beings. The outline of these evolutionary stages of mind and con-
sciousness draws on the substantial literature in evolutionary biology
and cognitive science.
In his seminal paper entitled “What is it like to be a Bat?” (1974)
Thomas Nagel argued that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat
because such an animal, due to its use of echolocation, has a very dif-
ferent sensory perspective on the world than a human being. Hence,
his conclusion was that our experiences contain some essentially subjec-
tive feature that cannot be described by any naturalistic or physicalistic
theory. These subjective features correspond to what are usually called
qualia. In Chapter 3, I discuss various interpretations of the notion of
qualia and reject the claim that qualia exist as subjective feelings of our
experiences. Also, I reject the attempt to take them as qualitative prop-
erties of an experience. In contrast, I maintain that sensory experiences
present us directly with qualitative properties, but hold that such prop-
erties belong to neither the experiences themselves nor to the unexperi-
enced object but instead to the experienced object.
Nagel’s paper had a huge impact on the discussion in philosophy of
mind. Various a priori arguments were presented by a number of phi-
losophers to support a claim that earlier physicalist theories like behav-
iorism, the identity theory, and functionalism had failed to provide a
satisfactory explanation of the mind-body problem. In the succeed-
ing chapter, Chapter 4, I take issue with two of them: Frank Jackson’s
knowledge argument (the blind Mary) and David Chalmers’ famous
Zombi-argument. As an evolutionary naturalist, I am in general skepti-
cal of a priori arguments, but I also think that it is possible to point to
obvious weaknesses in each argument. The blind Mary, even though she
theoretically knows all there is to know about color perception, does not
know what it is like to experience color, because she has never been in
xvi   Prologue

the brain states that corresponds to having such color-experiences. The

zombie-argument is a conceivable argument that can be shown to pre-
suppose modal realism and a two dimensional semantics. However, if
you do not accept any of these presuppositions, then the argument will
have little or no persuasive force. An evolutionary naturalist will argue
that Zombies may be conceivable due to conceptual matters. The men-
tal is not defined in terms of the physical, or vice versa. But Zombies are
not conceivable if one thinks of the mental as a natural phenomenon
which is the result of natural selection.
Frank Jackson and David Chalmers have understood their argu-
ments as supporting epiphenomenalism and property dualism respec-
tively. Both of these arguments presuppose the mental is different
from the physical. If they fail, the road seems open to a purely physi-
calist approach to the mental. Physicalist theories can be divided into
the reductive and the non-reductive ones. Two of the reductive theo-
ries, eliminativism and the identity theory, are discussed in Chapter 5.
I argue that none of them succeed. I hold that eliminativism fails to
provide conditions for individuating brain states if one has to rely on
only a physical description of neurons and pattern of them. My point
is that if we were to use a physical description of the brain to explain
behavior, we would have to be able to individuate brain states in terms
of mental states due to the fact that human actions are commonly
defined intentionally in terms of mental states. Some recent exper-
iments might be interpreted in favor of the identity theory, the other
reductive physicalist theory. Since the multiple-realization argument
was presented in the 1960s, it has normally been considered a devastat-
ing argument for any kind of identity between the mind and the brain.
Nevertheless, although I agree that this argument is flawed, and that the
identity theory is inadequate, I do so for other reasons. Like Chalmers
and others, I think qualitative experiences pose a serious problem for
at least some physicalist theories of the mind, although not because
I believe, like they do, that qualia or qualitative experiences are subjec-
tive or inexplicable. Consequently, I argue that experiencing qualita-
tive properties cannot be reduced to brain states, since it is impossible
to imagine how qualitative properties can be identical to the intrinsic
properties of nerve cells.
 Prologue   xvii

In reaction to Putnam’s multiple-realization argument, several phi-

losophers have attempted to develop non-reductive physicalist theo-
ries where the mental is taken to “supervene” on their physical basis.
Putnam himself presents a functionalist interpretation of the mind anal-
ogous to the functions of the software in a computer. According to this
view, the mind is identical to functional states, which again supervene
on the brain, in the same way as the software, though not identical to
the hardware, is said to “supervene” upon it. This model of the mind
has produced much research within the AI-program. In Chapter 6,
I contend that the problem with functionalism in this version is that
it presupposes that it is possible to simulate the mind regardless of
whether it is a biological or non-biological matter upon which the sim-
ulation is implemented. However, the general problem with function-
alism as such is that it seems unable to explain why we see the world
in terms of a wide assortment of qualitative properties. A different but
similar non-reductive theory regards the mental to “emerge” from the
mechanisms taking place in the brain. Seeing the mental as emergent
from the physical not only implies different levels of reality, just like
functionalism, but it also allows the possibility of downwards causation.
In this case the mental level may play an active causal role in determin-
ing what happens on the physical level. If we disallow the possibility of
mental to physical causation, then the mental becomes epiphenomenal.
I conclude this chapter by rejecting such a “vertical perspective” on the
relationship between the mental and the physical.
In Chapter 7, I introduce a “horizontal perspective” arguing that any
system from the behavior of atoms to the behavior of galaxies cannot be
understood in terms of its intrinsic properties alone. An environment
surrounds all systems, and the causal interaction with this environment
provides these systems with those extrinsic properties that determine
their behavior. I illustrate this suggestion with an analysis of the flock
behavior of starlings. I also argue that extrinsic properties are distinct
from relational properties. Thus, my proposal is that mental proper-
ties, like sensory properties, should be understood as extrinsic proper-
ties of the nerve system being produced by environmental stimulations
of sense organs. Apart from avoiding the problems with emergentism,
such a view is in accord with Darwin’s thesis that the environment plays
xviii   Prologue

a determining role in biological evolution through its role in natural

selection. As an evolutionary naturalist, one might expect that natural
selection not only determined animals’ anatomy and physiology but
their cognitive and mental features as well.
In the final chapter, I argue first that mental states such as experiences
can be presentations of something outside or inside the body. I also
argue that the mind is not like an operating system that monitors what
is going on, but that it is essentially nothing but these presentations.
My rejection of the monitor metaphor also means that I distance myself
from the pure representational view and prefer the term presentation
rather than representation. Next, I distinguish between the conceptual
and non-conceptual content of these presentations corresponding to my
distinction in Chapter 2 between sentient beings and conscious beings.
And I maintain that sensory impressions in the form of experiencing
qualitative properties are extrinsic properties of those brain states and
that these extrinsic properties serve as a way to present to the organ-
ism the object that caused them. I elaborate on this idea by discussing
in detail how and why sensations provide us with sensory experiences
of qualities. Here I draw on various studies in psychology and neuro-
science. The same analysis is then applied to the conceptual content
corresponding to them, and I end by suggesting that self-awareness or
self-consciousness can be understood in the terms of the same tokens.
The epilogue summarizes the flow of my discussion, and I conclude
that there is no explanatory gap between understanding brain processes
and mental processes. It is possible to explain qualitative mental pres-
entations as part of the physical world if we do not think that such an
explanation has to invoke only the intrinsic properties and relations of
the neuronal system. This possibility can be realized if we understand
these properties as the categorical basis for dispositions that are mani-
fested as extrinsic properties whenever the neuronal system or some sub-
system of the neuronal system interacts with its environment.

Copenhagen, Denmark Jan Faye

 1
Flipping the Debate

Now and then authors writing about the mind and its place in nature
will make the correct observation that trees and plants have neither
nerve systems nor sense organs, whereas vertebrates and invertebrates are
equipped with both. The common explanation of this remarkable dif-
ference is that plants and trees are stationary but animals move around.
The nutrition of plants comes from rain water and the soil in which they
grow; wind, insects, or birds help to pollinate other exemplars of the
same species; and since they are immobile they cannot escape external
dangers such as heavy fires or gusty winds. Therefore, they need no sense
organs to take care of themselves. Ecologically it would have been a
waste of energy for evolution to have given plants and trees sense organs
for no use. In contrast, vertebrates are mobile. As such they need infor-
mation about their surroundings to survive. The more efficient their
sense organs are, the better they are able to move around, gather food,
or find a mating partner. Not to mention escaping predators and find-
ing shelter. The brain and the spinal cord have co-evolved with the sense
organs. Most philosophers and scientists agree that the main function of
the brain is to process information about the environment received by
the sense organs and to coordinate this information with bodily behav-
ior. This is the evolutionary purpose of the brain.
© The Author(s) 2019 1
J. Faye, How Matter Becomes Conscious,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16138-5_1
2    
J. Faye

But why are we and at least some other vertebrates partially conscious
of these information-coordination processes? Does the so-called con-
scious mind have an additional evolutionary purpose which is not the
purpose of the brain alone? A robotic vehicle moving around on Mars
is not conscious of the information its sensors received from the sur-
face of Mars other than acting according to the instruction given to it as
part of the encoded program. The rover needs no consciousness to avoid
rocks, abysses, or steep hills. Though undoubtedly non-conscious, it
manages to move around as successfully as a conscious agent, due solely
to optical sensors and a computer program by which it avoids physical
obstacles. So why have humans evolved such that our bodily activity is
correlated with consciousness in contrast to the movement of that vehi-
cle? Answering such a question is an important task for any naturalist.
The philosophical challenge is to give an explanation of consciousness
in terms of adaptation to the environment, but also, one may argue, to
offer an explanation of how brain processes can be associated with men-
tal activities such as perception, imagination, volition, and thinking. In
short, what is the mind’s relation to the body? Is it possible to explain
mental phenomena merely in virtue of physical ongoing in the brain or
do we have to introduce some additional mental properties alongside
the physical ones?
Let me begin by stating forthrightly that I make the following
assumption: just as the functions of a brain make a significant difference
between those organisms that have it from those that do not, it seems
likewise plausible to believe that consciousness imparts abilities to an
organism that has consciousness which make it different from those that
lack it. All naturalists agree that the role of experiences and thoughts
is to guide the organism’s physical behavior. The mind is the arbitrator
of physical information about the environment and of the organism’s
behavioral responses back to the environment. Both mind and the later
evolved consciousness add to the agent’s survival faculties. However,
not all naturalists agree about the nature of the mind. Some argue that
the biological function of the brain explains only why we have a mind,
not of what kind of stuff the mind is made or the properties it can be
attributed. The objection is that no functional account of the brain can
 1 Flipping the Debate    
3

explain the phenomenal aspects of the mind. In my opinion the latter

claim is problematic, and in due course I shall argue that the nature
of mental states is that they are causal states between the brain and its
environment. Minds do not consist of a distinct stuff or of non-physical
properties.
If the brain is not just a computer, the rise of consciousness must find
its explanation in the way living system are adapted to process infor-
mation. Indeed, such a conjecture presupposes that consciousness is not
functionally identical to a computational program in case consciousness
is a natural phenomenon. Non-biological systems like computers need
not possess consciousness. The brain is far from being a computer partly
due to the fact that it cannot process information nearly as fast as any
modern computer. Therefore, nature has compensated the slowness of
the brain by adding experiential and conceptual functions to organisms’
cognitive repertoire. Artificial intelligence is one thing, natural intelli-
gence quite another.

1.1 Consciousness and Evolution

The first methodological assumption of this book is that consciousness
is the product of biological evolution and that consciousness appeared
only after the development of the mind itself. Minds came first, con-
sciousness and self-consciousness much later. I stipulate that mind can
be ascribed to any organism having nerve cells. Some organisms have a
few hundred of them and therefore have only a very rudimentary mind,
whereas others have millions or trillions so their mind is much more
advanced. Consequently having a mind comes in degree. The same holds
for consciousness. Although many organisms can be said to have a mind,
they are not merely for that reason conscious. Before consciousness
comes into existence the brain has to reach a high level of complexity.
In a changing world, the brains’ function is to coordinate an organism’s
behavior with respect to various inputs from the environment, but only
those organisms that have consciousness can be aware of their sensory
inputs as well as imagine what to do given these sensory inputs.
4    
J. Faye

Ever since Descartes philosophers have been used to thinking of the

problem of consciousness as one about the relationship between the
mind and the body, which in itself is so mysterious that many correctly
believe that we cannot grasp this relation just by knowing the mind and
knowing the body. By introspection the mind appears to have character-
istics so very different from those of the brain that their relation seems
unintelligible for any human beings. The relationship may therefore con-
sist of something extra, which philosophers have been unsuccessful in
trying to explain. Perhaps this lack of success results from the mischar-
acterization of the problem in terms of an ontology that was originally
developed from within the Cartesian epistemic perspective.
The philosophical theory of the mind took a different route than
the one followed by the natural sciences. This was because Descartes
saw the subjectivity of mental states as the starting point for any pos-
sible epistemology, and because Kant sharply distinguished between
human freedom and nature’s necessity. Descartes did not make a dis-
tinction between mind and consciousness. In this perspective it was the
Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and the German idealists’ focus on
mind over matter that climaxed in Husserl’s concept of ‘pure phenom-
enon’; i.e. the view of bracketing the natural attitude towards an objec-
tive world and seeing consciousness as it immediately appears to itself.
The Cartesian approach involves the first-person perspective of percep-
tions and mental representation. Only the conscious subject can know
his or her own perceptions, and all that the subject directly knows are
its perceptions. The basic idea behind this approach is that sense impres-
sions are mental representations of what causes them and that objects
represented do not have objectively the same properties as the mental
representations. The mind cannot get an independent view of itself,
because consciousness is just as it is immediately grasped by the subject.
My opinion is that the first-person standpoint is the wrong road to
follow, because it sticks to a mentalist characterization of the mind.
The right move is to look for a detached, or as I would say, a natural-
ist, notion of the mind, which considers all mental activities, like phys-
ical activities, as a result of complex relations between the organism and
its environment. The goal is to show that consciousness, in general, is
 1 Flipping the Debate    
5

not a result of a particular subjective nature of our own cognitive pro-

cesses. There must, I think, be a reason why consciousness is part of
nature. The mind has presumably given animals possessing conscious-
ness an advantage in the struggle for survival. In such an ontological
perspective sensory experiences are a part of the general adaptation of
the information processing capacity to match a slow bodily reaction
time. This yields a naturalist approach to the nature of consciousness,
and takes us to the third person perspective on perception and mental
representation.
Apropos mental representation. Kant spoke of the Understanding
(mind) as forming a Vorstellung of the object. That word should have
been rendered a “presentation” (of the mind to itself ) of the object; it
was how the object is presented to consciousness. Unfortunately, it got
translated into English as “representation.” But there is a big difference.
A ‘presentation’ is in some sense the real thing; a representation is a
copy (often a poor one or an arbitrary stand-in for the real thing). I
might say “I present myself to the world as a philosopher.” That means
I really am a philosopher. If I say “I represent a philosopher,” it means
that I am claiming to be a philosopher, or I am standing for a philoso-
pher, but I may not really be one, or perhaps I am a rather poor exam-
ple of one. People do not ordinarily confuse real things with copies of
things, but sometimes they are fooled. Nevertheless, the mind came to
be seen as a picturing machine, a kind of photography device, the mir-
ror of Nature. Since we have access to only the picture, naturally this led
to the crisis of being trapped in Descartes’ subjective prison. This led,
in turn, to the pragmatists’ (and the phenomenologists’, too) attempt
to break out of jail and boldly claim that we experience objects not our
mental pictures of objects. This mode of thinking is inherently hostile
to representationalism. So later I shall distinguish between ‘presentation’
and ‘representation’, saying that some mental states, like sensory impres-
sions and perceptual experiences, are to be considered as presentations
because their epistemic content is not intentionally determined by the
observer’s act of will, whereas images, thoughts, pictures, and words are
representations because their epistemic content is intentionally deter-
mined by how they are used or are put to use.
6    
J. Faye

Science is, indeed, committed to promise an explanation of the first

person perspective and how it comes about. This could be done by ref-
erence to the conscious sensory experience as a completely intersubjec-
tive feature of particular organisms that has to be understood like any
other “intersubjective” features of their cognitive abilities. Sensory expe-
riences are obviously species-specific. The world is experienced differ-
ently for a bat and a human being; nevertheless, it is the same world
experienced by both. Science is, of course, obliged to explain why infor-
mation about external and internal events has a sensory appearance.
Why phenomenal qualities appear in relation to sensation must have a
purely Darwinian answer. Such a naturalist attitude should also provide
an answer to why different organisms have different sensory experiences,
and why robots have no sensory experience at all.
Human evolution and natural selection do not by themselves tell us
how we should understand the nature of mind; however, these con-
ceptions point our search in the right direction. The traditional reduc-
tive physicalist approaches to the question of the ontological status of
the mind reject dualism and defend materialism either in the form of
behaviorism, eliminativism, or some version of identity theory. But, in
my opinion, both idealism and materialism are insufficient frameworks
of understanding the mind, although they basically get rid of Descartes’
immaterial substance and solve the interaction problem. Both theories
suffer from their inability to explain the nature of the mind in an evo-
lutionary setting. Most philosophers and scientists would agree that the
so-called conscious mind is a result of biological evolution, but the great
challenge is to explain consciousness so its defining characteristics are
something which could be selected by Darwinian mechanisms and still
pave the way for presentation, meaning, norms, and values.
It seems impossible, as eliminative forms of materialism attempt
to show, that our talk about consciousness is something which can be
removed because consciousness is not ultimately real. Consciousness
is real to us; it makes a difference for us. This is what matters. More to
the point is the Cartesian point: each subject is directly aware of his con-
sciousness; it is hard to see how I could be mistaken in believing that I
 1 Flipping the Debate    
7

am conscious. My own consciousness is not constructed or inferred from

something else. Much of our understanding of social and cultural reality
is constructed by the social community in which we live and projected
by the mind onto the perceptual world as being meaningful. We cannot
explain these kinds of phenomena just by talking about brain states alone.
Nor can we explain our scientific grasp of the natural world without
reference to the world as we experience it. We can never get to under-
stand the world as it is in itself, we can only describe it as we under-
stand it in connection with our sensory experience. For this reason it
is preferable to express epistemological criteria in terms of ‘intersub-
jectivity’ rather than ‘objectivity.’ Sensory information is the source of
our conscious perspective on the world, and based on some particular
experience it is our ability to understand this experience that determines
whether we find a particular description meaningful and appropriate.
The identity theory takes mental states to be strictly identical to brain
states. It sees these brain states as capable of forming representations, but
it is still unable to give an account of why neural properties form mental
representations, or indeed even if neural properties do represent, much
less how do they do it without being similar, at least in some respects,
to what it is that they allegedly represent. The assumption behind the
classical identity is that mental properties are one and the same as neu-
ral properties that are all intrinsic to the brain. Consciousness is nothing
but brain’s processes, which implies that mental qualities are not dif-
ferent from material properties belonging to the brain itself. However,
this is exactly where the problem of the theory is located. The so-called
conscious mind cannot be reduced to what goes on physically in the
nervous system. The old identity theory failed, not because of multi-
ple realizations, as we shall see, but because it took for granted that the
explanation of consciousness could be formulated solely in terms of
what happens in a single physical organ, the brain. The proponents of
the theory didn’t realize that whatever the nature of the intrinsic proper-
ties of the brain might be, we cannot refer merely to these properties to
provide a scientific account of the content of perceptions, thoughts, and
imaginations.
8    
J. Faye

1.2 Non-reductive Naturalism

Old materialist theories are obsolete as philosophical explanations of
consciousness. Of course, there are millions of materialists out there
who (a) are completely unaware of this alleged obsolescence and (b)
would claim that the “reduction” of mind to brain has, for all practi-
cal purposes, already been achieved by neurophysiology. However, given
the fact that the mental appears so differently from the physical, some
philosophers or scientists believe that mental states are not reducible to
brain states. Furthermore, it could be argued that none of the old theo-
ries took attention, intension, and imagination seriously enough. They
missed the evolutionary purpose of these mental powers by denying
their existence or by reducing their significance to the neuro-physiologi-
cal properties of the brain.
Sometimes naturalism or neo-Darwinism is associated with reduc-
tionism and materialism. Thomas Nagel, for instance, talks about “the
reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life,”
which he believes is almost certainly false.1 A little later he continues
in the same vein: “the orthodox naturalistic view is that biology is in
principle completely explained by physics and chemistry, and that evo-
lutionary psychology provides a rough idea of how everything distinc-
tive about human life can also be regarded as an extremely complicated
consequence of the behavior of physical particles in accordance with
certain fundamental laws”.2 I think such an association of material-
ism, reductionism, and neo-Darwinism is simply mistaken, not because
the mind may not be fully understood materialistically, but because the
Darwinian understanding of evolution cannot be caught in terms of funda-
mental physics.
Others have observed before me that we do not appear to be
approaching the goal of theoretical reductionism and as the sciences pro-
gress we seem to move further and further way from such a goal: “We
believe,” Leiter and Weisberg writes, “along with most philosophers, that
Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences
have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed
the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chem-
istry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience
 1 Flipping the Debate    
9

and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phe-

nomena in terms unrecognizable by physics.”3 This observation cor-
responds exactly to my own opinion. I would also add not only is the
proliferation of other fields not reducible to their predecessors, but also
the recognition of methodological and axiological differences among the
various sciences makes the putative reduction quite impossible.
So the second methodological assumption behind this book is a non-re-
ductive but naturalist attitude to the mind. The mind is not something
over and above matter, it does not consist of a different stuff from mat-
ter, but mental properties are not identical to the intrinsic properties of
the brain. Eventually matter has formed more and more complex sys-
tems in virtue of natural selection and adaptation, although there is
no automatic connection between greater complexities and enhanced
favorable adaptations. Over millions of years the driving force of evo-
lution has accidently formed organisms with an increasingly complex
brain structures. Only a minority among neo-Darwinists would argue
that the natural selection of consciousness, regardless of whether or not
mental processes can be identified with neural processes, can be grasped
in relation to the quantum mechanical constituents of the neural pro-
cesses. Our general experience is that complex systems have a structure
that makes them behave differently than their constituents, and that
more complex behavior cannot be explained in virtue of less complex
behavior.
Naturalism by itself does not imply reductionism, neither when it
comes to its metaphysical foundation nor to its epistemological out-
look. A naturalist merely has to argue that nature has its own inherent
order independently of any spiritual or teleological principles. Nature,
as naturalists understand it, is self-determined and self-sufficient. It
complies with its own laws and mechanisms which are sufficient for
explaining what happens in nature. Why should we assume that laws
of biology and neuronal mechanisms are concerned with phenomena
that are reducible to the most fundamental laws of physics without any
proof? Claiming that everything in the world is basically reducible to
fundamental physics is to assume that we can understand the world
as if we have access to it from God’s point of view. But a Darwinian
approach to knowledge teaches us that such a metaphysical involvement
10    
J. Faye

is exactly what we cannot undertake, because we cannot describe nature

except under the assumption that we, the human describer, are part of
that nature. We cannot understand nature from the outside; we must
always understand it from within, namely from our own Homo sapiens’
way of experiencing it as our cognitive schemata and interests are them-
selves born of that nature of which we are a part.
Moreover, naturalism does not imply materialism although it grows
out of classical materialism. A naturalist with a pragmatic attitude
will argue that materialism as a successful methodological strategy has
brought progress to science. But nothing we know about nature forces
the adherents of neo-Darwinism to claim that living organisms ulti-
mately have only those properties that characterize inanimate stuff. By
uniting Darwinism and modern genetics, the contemporary synthetic
theory is forced to deny that organisms consist of spooky stuff such as
an élan vital governed by special powers or other teleological principles.
From the perspective of today’s physics it is even doubtful that inani-
mate stuff is merely matter. Fields and radiation are not what were clas-
sically understood as matter, and in today’s physical sciences a notion
like energy plays a much more central role than matter because it cov-
ers fields and radiation as well. The neo-Darwinian can hold without
inconsistency that evolutionary processes have produced organisms
with intentions and consciousness and that some characteristics of these
organisms cannot be fully grasped in terms of physics or chemistry.
Both of these assumptions can be understood within a modern natu-
ralist worldview. A naturalist need not argue that since what is real is
only the material world, therefore all accounts of natural phenomena
can be reduced to basic physics. Solely the ontological characterization
of the natural world as material is not sufficient for explaining how
more and more complex systems evolved. Besides matter and energy the
world consists of forms and relations. New forms and relations appear
when simple systems interconnect; they are as much a part of reality.
Metaphysical realism may adopt materialism as a non-empirical specu-
lative assumption that goes far beyond anything that can be vindicated
by experience and reason, although there is no necessity that it does so.
But such a position will never give us a satisfactory explanation of the
mental.
 1 Flipping the Debate    
11

The naturalist stance that I am going to defend is a non-reductive

position holding that consciousness, intention, and meaning are genu-
ine effects of the biological evolution but cannot be grasped in terms
of physics. This is also Thomas Nagel’s view: “If evolutionary biology
is a physical theory – as it is generally taken to be – then it cannot
account for the appearance of consciousness and other phenomena that
are not physically reducible. So if the mind is a product of biological
evolution – if organisms are not miraculous anomalies but an integral
part of nature – then biology cannot be a purely physical science. The
possibility opens up of a pervasive conception of the natural order very
different from materialism – one that make makes mind central, rather
than a side effect of physical law.”4 My justification for non-reductive
naturalism is very different from Nagel’s speculative and over-intellectu-
alistic argument. I presuppose that our cognitive abilities are adapted by
natural selection to our natural environment, and consciousness became
reinforced as part of that development by helping us to understand
what we can experience and interact with physically. The origin and the
function of consciousness shaped by natural selection strongly indicate
that our cognitive resources are limited to grasping all things only as
they appear to us. The basic idea behind metaphysical realism that the
world may be very different from how we experience it is in my view
evolutionary unjustified. For the non-reductive naturalist, our cognitive
capacities determine how we can understand the world and therefore
how the mind is able grasp its own nature.
Nagel is not alone in his opposition to physicalism—at least in its
present form. Another prominent philosopher, Jaegwon Kim, who pre-
viously supported physicalism, now believes that it is impossible for
any physicalistic position to explain the existence of qualia and “that
physicalism will not be able to survive intact and in its entirety.”5 Non-
reductive physicalism, he claims, fails for two reasons: It leads to over-
determination of brain states and incorrectly supposes that phenomenal
mental properties are functionally reducible to brain states. A physical-
istic approach may account for intentional mental states by being able
to reduce them functionally to their neuronal basis, but phenomenal
properties are not explicable in functional terms such that they can be
functionally reduced to physical states. Non-reductive physicalism, as
12    
J. Faye

we shall see, relies heavily on a notion like supervenience, and thereby

the position is in danger of collapsing to epiphenomenalism or some
form of property dualism. In this sense non-reductive physicalism is not
equivalent to non-reductive naturalism in my sense, which is an attempt
to get around these challenges and look for a natural rather than a phys-
icalist description.
Naturalism takes a monistic stance towards the mind, in that it
rejects two distinct Cartesian substances, but it should not be associated
with either reductive or non-reductive physicalism. Like these different
forms of physicalism, naturalism holds that everything in nature takes
place in space and time; in other words, it subscribes to substance phys-
icalism, i.e. everything consists exclusively of bits of energy and mat-
ter.6 But it denies that properties of complex systems can be reduced
to either intrinsic properties of their constituents or supervene on these
intrinsic properties of those constituents. The position of evolutionary
naturalism that I defend here rejects any doctrine of emergence, but
holds that we must distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic proper-
ties of the brain. It maintains that most attributes we ascribe to com-
plex systems, including both physical and mental attributes, are extrinsic
properties that physical systems have only in virtue of their causal inter-
action with their surroundings. Thus, the form of naturalism being
developed over the following pages dissociates itself from non-reductive
theories that marry property dualism, emergence, or supervenience, dis-
tancing itself from the temptation to embrace the emergence of mental
attributes.
In much discussion of the mind-body relation, the terms “reduction-
ism” and “non-reductionism” are used with multiple meaning. A phi-
losopher, who defends metaphysical reductionism, assumes a group of
entities are identical with their constituents. This metaphysical form of
reductionism is a reduction of identity. Entities described as differently
as mind and body are claimed to be one and the same thing. If this
holds all the way down, ultimately what exist are only the fundamental
particles that physics describes. Any bigger system is merely an effect
of how the laws governing these basic particles operate. As we shall see
shortly, one way of avoiding metaphysical reductionism is to argue that
there are emergent properties and laws in nature. Emergence holds that
 1 Flipping the Debate    
13

complex physical systems such as atoms, cells, or brains can give rise to
ontologically distinct entities whose features cannot be reduced to the
material constituents of the system, nor do they follow the laws gov-
erning these elements.
Nevertheless, I would recommend neither metaphysical reductionism
nor non-reductionism. The naturalist need not, and should not, endorse
either side in the debate over reductionism as it has been carried out in
the philosophy of mind. Naturalists do not need to embrace superven-
ience or emergence to avoid the problems of reductionism. Instead, a
naturalist may argue that evolution has not equipped us with the cog-
nitive abilities to answer the question of metaphysical reductionism or
non-reductionism, because that question presupposes that it is mean-
ingful to talk about how the world really is apart from human percep-
tion of it. According to the naturalism defended here, as already said,
there is no God’s eye view under which humans can address such onto-
logical issues.
This does not indicate that the non-reductive naturalist—or, as I
shall call him, the evolutionary naturalist—has no metaphysical stand-
point.7 However, that viewpoint is shaped by what humans are rightly
capable of grasping, given our cognitive constitution as it has evolved
through natural selection. Above all an evolutionary naturalist is a com-
mon-sense realist. The world consists of those physical things we can
directly perceive, supplemented with those things that can be detected
with the help of scientific technology. Atoms as well as electromag-
netic fields, rivers as well as mountains, and animals as well as plants are
among those things that exist in their own right. Their identity condi-
tions cannot be expressed in terms of those of a collection of interact-
ing fundamental particles. If such a reduction were possible, why then
do different entities behave qualitatively in different ways even though
all of them consist of the same fundamental particles? The mere com-
plexity of the laws of physics for increasingly complex material systems
does not cause qualitatively different behavior. Hence, as a non-reduc-
tionist, the evolutionary naturalist also holds that nature irreducibly
contains minds with intentions, imaginations, memories, and goals.
The resulting behavior of these minds may lead to meaningful actions
such as speaking, writing, and building societies. The challenge for any
Another random document with
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Wolf swivelled his chair around and stared out of the window onto the
hospital lawn. "We thought that the deep therapy method was
something perfect. Something that would make a patient tell the
absolute truth as he saw it. But our patient is making hash out of it."
He lifted his coffee cup and tasted the black liquid tentatively.
"Follow it through. The first story he gave us was conscious. He said
he couldn't remember exactly what happened to him. Okay. This
could be a fabrication. The next story he gave under therapy
conditions. He said that he killed Glover in a fit of rage because of an
argument. Okay again. We could have accepted that at face value,
and he would have gotten away with it, except that we got curious
about a couple of things. We wondered how the paranoid tinge got
into his thoughts, and we wondered exactly what it was that he and
Glover were on the verge of discovering. So we tried again. Now we
find that he deliberately plotted to kill Glover, and the paranoid
symptoms are now so intense that he gives us a completely phony
story about making millions of dollars out of the discovery, when
everybody knows that you can't patent anything for personal profit
when you invent it in a government laboratory."
Alma Heller lifted her hand, making a one with her forefinger. "So, our
friend Jim Britten is doing two things—both of which we did not
believe him capable of doing. First, he is lying and inventing stories
under deep therapy. Second, he is withholding information. For notice
that he is still avoiding specific mention of the result which his
experiment was aiming at."
Her voice became flat, precise, and probing.
"Now, could our young physicist, Jim Britten, do this thing? No. Not
unless he is an unsuspected superman type. Or—unless he has had
special training and conditioning for resistance against deep therapy.
How does a young physics student obtain such training? And
where?"
She looked across the desk at Morris Wolf, who chewed savagely on
his pipe bit.
"If I had any sense," he growled, "I'd call up the AEC and throw Jim
Britten right back in their faces. If they give me a problem to solve
they should at least tell me how hot they think it is. And my viscera
are beginning to tell me that this is going to be a very, very warm
baby. Maybe I should holler for help. I have a wife and two kids at
home. I don't want to get hurt."
"Who you kidding?" Alma wanted to know. "You wouldn't let a juicy
problem like this escape you just when you have it clutched about the
middle. Besides, our two undercover friends from the FBI will be
keeping their eyes on things. Let them earn their pay."
"Okay." Wolf came to a decision. "We'll give it one more try, and then
we'll call for help. First thing tomorrow morning. In the meantime,
there are two things I want. First I want Britten to have a complete
physical examination. The works. Inside and outside. Blood tests,
electro-encephalograph, tissue specimens, complete x-rays—
everything they can think of. Then I'll spend tonight keeping company
with Britten while the technicians pull down some overtime pay
analyzing the examination results."
"You have an idea?"
He nodded. "At least one idea. But it needs feeding."

That evening Morris Wolf walked down the hospital corridor past the
door of Britten's room. He entered the next door and found himself in
a tiny chamber already occupied by Bill Grady. This was no surprise,
for he knew that Grady and Jones kept Britten under constant
surveillance. He motioned for Grady to keep his seat, and made
himself comfortable in another chair, which he placed so that he could
watch Britten through the one-way window set in the wall. Through
this window he could see every move which Britten made, and
through a loudspeaker he could hear every sound.
It was not clear in Wolf's mind precisely what he expected to find by
watching Britten, but he knew that if he was to unravel his puzzle, he
must know everything about the boy, including the way he walked
and talked and combed his hair.
For a time Britten sat and read, then paced the floor restlessly, as if
waiting for something. Finally he picked his guitar up from the bed
and sat down on his chair, tuning the instrument. When he began to
sing, it was quietly, as though to himself. Wolf had heard him sing
before, generally folk songs from the Southern and Midwestern
states.
Now there intruded into Wolf's mind a thought which had previously
been on the edge of consciousness, and simultaneously his hand
reached out to touch the start button on his tape recorder. The
manner in which a person sings should reveal a great deal about his
early life—about the kind of language he grew up with, down to the
very vocal structure which has developed in his body since childhood.
As a result there are many types of voices: French voices, Tennessee
voices, Italian voices, Texas voices, each with its own flavor caused
by the way in which the vocal muscles have been trained by the
native language, and also by the way in which people are
accustomed to singing in those places.
When Wolf went home that night he carried a tape of Britten's song
with him. It was convenient that he did not have to go far for an expert
opinion to corroborate what he had already decided as an amateur.
He entered his house, the pleasant place with the warm colors, the
rows of books, the grand piano, and of course his wife.
"Sorry I had to stay late, dear, but there's something important going
on. Something really important. And you can be a big help to me right
now."
"Me?" asked Lynne. "You're going back to musical therapy?"
"Not exactly," he said, dryly. "More like musical detection. I'm going to
play a tape recording of a song or two, and I want your professional
opinion as to what part of the world the singer came from."
He walked over to the recorder and began threading the tape. "Now
pay no attention to the song itself," he instructed. "I'm interested only
in the voice quality."
The tape spool unrolled slowly, and Britten's voice filled the room.
"Not bad for an amateur," Lynne commented, listening closely. For
several minutes she remained silent, until finally the tape was
completed.
"Well," she said, finally, "I don't think it's an American. A bit too rich. It
doesn't have the French quality, nor the Italian. More chesty, kind of
ripe and fruity. Central European. Hungarian, Russian, or something
of that order."
Wolf kissed her solemnly. "You win first prize, girl. That's the answer I
wanted, and that's the answer that fits."

CHAPTER III
In the morning, the act of going to the hospital produced within him a
sensation as of marching to the front line of battle.
Whitehead, the laboratory chief, was prowling about his office when
he arrived.
"Morning," Wolf greeted him. "Got something for me?"
"I have a strangeness," Whitehead said. "A very great strangeness."
"We all do," Wolf replied. "What's yours?"
"This Britten of yours. How old is he?"
"By appearance, and according to the records, about twenty-one."
"Uh-huh. And by cellular structure and metabolism he is at least
forty!"
"So."
Wolf sank down in his chair and cocked an eye at Alma Heller, who
came into the room at that moment.
"Did you hear that, Alma? In more ways than one our boy isn't what
he seems to be. By last night I was certain that he is not a native of
Louisville, Kentucky. Now we are told that he is twice as old as we
thought he was."
Alma stared for a moment.
"We do seem to get in deeper and deeper. Have any ideas?"
Wolf ran his hand worriedly through his hair. "One. But I'm afraid of it.
At any rate, we're in too far to back out. This morning we're going to
dig for more information, and we're not going to stop until we have
Britten squeezed dry."
He reached onto his desk for his tobacco can and began filling a pipe,
meanwhile organizing his thoughts.
"Somehow or other," he resumed, "Britten has received conditioning
to resist giving information under deep therapy."
"And not only that," Alma interposed, "but he has the ability to retain
consciousness under deep therapy and fabricate a story to replace
the true facts."
"Correct. So, since the ordinary deep therapy method is useless, we
have to get tough. We have to eliminate his present set of
conditioned reactions and replace them by a new set. In other words,
we must reset the controls so that he responds to a new set of
orders."
Alma pursed her lips for a soundless whistle. "Fisher's method! Do
you know how much of that a nervous system can take?"
Wolf shrugged. "Who knows? This is very new stuff. I've played
around with a little of it, but ... who knows? At any rate, we're going to
assume that Britten has a fairly tough mind in order to get as far as
he has. We'll assume this not only for his own sake, but for ours,
because we are going to shake him loose from his present set of
memories, and we want enough of his original memories left for us to
assemble. Now suppose we begin."
Whitehead excused himself. There was work waiting in his laboratory,
he said, and watched wistfully as the two disappeared into the
therapy room.
Alma began switching on the apparatus, while Wolf called for Jim
Britten to be brought in.
"Still going digging in my mind?" Britten wisecracked as he walked in,
flanked by the ubiquitous Grady and Jones.
"With a steam shovel," Wolf replied, and motioned that Britten be
strapped onto the table.
This time Wolf wasted no explanations. Without pausing he slipped
Britten a preliminary shot and began fitting electrodes onto his head
and arms.
"We're going back a long time, now," he said, quietly. "Remember
back to the days before you started college. How old are you?"
Britten began dreaming off. "Sixteen years old. It was a hot summer.
Kentucky in summer. Hot. Hot as a solar cycle ... hot as a bicycle
down the road ... a tricycle down the toad ... doctor you look like a big
pimply warty green-eyed toad...."
Morris Wolf waited until the drug-induced schizophrenic symptoms
were well under way, then motioned for Alma Heller to send a
sequence of high-frequency pulses through Britten's nervous system,
breaking down synapses and destroying memory patterns. This, in
combination with the drug, was intended to clear the mind of
memories involving the period of time to which Britten's attention had
been directed. In this period, Wolf guessed, the conditioning had
taken place. If not, then he must try another period.
Britten's body stiffened under the onslaught and perspiration rolled
out on his brow. His mouth twisted and his eyebrows writhed. Morris
Wolf himself felt perspiration starting out on his face, while in the back
of the room the two "attendants" stared in amazement.
After enough time of this, Wolf switched the controls so that a
rhythmic pattern of pulses went through Britten's system in such a
manner as to aid the triggering of synapses and the formation of
memory patterns. The slate having been wiped clean, new writing
had to be placed on it.
"Now," he said, tensely, leaning over the patient and speaking close
to his ears. "Cooperation means obey. Cooperation means obey.
Cooperation means you do what I say. Cooperation means you do
what I tell you to do, say what I tell you to say, remember what I tell
you to remember. Cooperation is the key word."
The words went from Wolf's mouth to Britten's ears in the form of
sound waves, were converted into neuro-electrical impulses, and
under the influence of the rhythmically repeating pulses, from the
machine, circulated around and around through Britten's system,
tracing a deeply etched path.
Finally Wolf ceased the talking, and Alma handed him the needle with
the antidote to the first drug.
"Now we see how successful we are," he said.
He gave the shot and several minutes went by while they waited for it
to take effect. They remained silent, as though to say a word would
break the spell.
Then: "Cooperation," Wolf said.
Britten lay still.
"Open your eyes."
Britten's eyelids struggled open, but the eyes stared blankly.
Wolf thought: what question is most basic?
Then he asked: "What is your name?"
The mouth writhed, and then whispered, "Pyotr Fermineyev."

There was a small roaring in Morris Wolf's ears, and beside him he
heard the intake of Alma Heller's breath. The FBI agents, Grady and
Jones, had moved up until they were leaning over Wolf's shoulder.
Then: "Where were you born?"
Again the whisper from the blank face: "In Leningrad."
Then: "Who sent you to America?"
"The Society for the Restoration of the Revolution."
"What is the nature of this organization?"
"It is an underground group pledged to return the Soviet Union to its
status as the leader of the world revolution and to overthrow the
present appeasers of the capitalist governments."
Wolf glowed with triumph. "Get that, Alma?" he gloated, and he
turned around half way and winked at the two men behind him.
Alma Heller shook a strand of hair back from her eyes. "The fanatical
revolutionaries—now they're trying to overthrow their own
government because the Soviet is too friendly to the Western
governments!"
"This is no comic underground group," Wolf said. "There are some
big people in it who know how to do things that we're just barely
starting to learn about."
He paused, and considered his next questions. The time had come to
dig in.
He phrased his query: "What was your task on the satellite?"
Britten's face writhed. Perspiration rolled down his cheeks in a steady
stream. Obviously some of the original conditioning remained,
causing interference with Wolf's orders.
Alma Heller's knuckles showed white and her clenched hands
trembled. The FBI agents inched forward, their bodies stiff with
impatience.
Between hard breaths the words came: "... was on the satellite to
watch ... new developments in nuclear power ... complete conversion
... matter to energy...."
Understanding grew in Wolf's mind with a brilliant glare. Glover had
been on the verge of taming the ultimate source of energy—the total
and complete conversion of matter—a source of power over 130
times more potent than the hydrogen-helium reaction. No wonder the
project had been put under wraps!
"So you killed Glover to prevent him from continuing his work. What
did you intend to gain by that? Somebody else will take it over. How
are you going to develop this power source yourself?"
Britten groaned audibly. His back arched and his arms strained
against the table straps.
Through clenched teeth: "Ruppert ... next man in line for Glover's job
... one of us."
Wolf's eyes opened wide, and he whirled to the telephone.
"I'm calling Washington—" he began, then stopped in horror.
Behind him, Britten's voice said, in a strangely firm tone: "Now is the
time."

Wolf whirled again. He saw Britten, still strapped to the table, his eyes
unglazed, and his facial expression commanding.
The FBI men had stiffened, and were standing in place, motionless.
"Cover them, and untie me," Britten rapped out, in a voice that was
greatly different from the youthful, uncertain tone he had previously
used.
Grady pulled his gun, backed Wolf and Alma Heller against the wall,
while Jones loosened Britten's straps.
"So you're one of them, too, Grady," Wolf growled. "And you, Jones.
May you burn in hell."
"Don't malign them," said Britten, sitting up and rubbing his arms.
"They are good, loyal G-men. But they sat outside my door too long,
and now they do what I tell them to do."
Wolf narrowed his eyes and stared at Britten. "Just what are you?" he
demanded.
Britten met his gaze, bleakly, and ignored the question.
"We have a rendezvous to make. The two of you will escort me to a
helicopter that Grady will order. I need not repeat that we are
prepared to blast our way out of this place. You'll save lives all around
by being as inconspicuous as possible."
He indicated that Wolf and Alma Heller would go ahead, while the two
agents took up the rear. Out in the main corridor they merged into the
confused traffic of the busy hospital, two doctors and two attendants
conducting a patient out.
Grady took the controls of the helicopter that waited for them out on
the parking lot. As they climbed to a high traffic lane, Jones took care
of tying the hands of the two doctors behind their seats.
Britten sat beside the pilot, staring through the windshield. "Head due
west one hundred miles," he said. "Then I'll give you further
directions."
Wolf looked down through the port next to him and felt his heart
constrict as he saw the houses below grow smaller and smaller. One
of those houses was his; there was a small figure beside it that could
have been his little boy. That was the thought that set his heart
beating violently and the adrenalin pumping swiftly through his veins.
For himself he didn't care so much, but his son needed a father to
come home.
He looked at Alma sitting beside him, her face pale and frightened.
He wondered how much time there was before the rendezvous. For
this was all the time he had. Beyond that were too many unknown
factors to consider.
He leaned over sideways.
"Alma," he said, in a voice not loud enough to carry forward over the
roar of the motor. "Tell me exactly what happened when Britten said,
'Now is the time.' My back was turned then. Just what did he look
like?"
Alma swallowed. She composed her face and turned her thoughts
inward, remembering.
"There was a sudden change," she said. "One moment he was in the
trance state, the next moment he was fully aware of his surroundings
and in charge of the situation. As though he received a signal at that
instant."
A signal, Wolf thought. From where? The implication was shocking.
Look at what we have, he continued to himself. Britten comes to me,
under conditioning, ready to act out his part to the hilt. We question
him under deep hypnotherapy and he comes forth with a plausible
story. We might have stopped right there, but we got curious and
began to ask more questions. He brings out another story. Why?
Obviously, red herrings to confuse the issue. To stall for time. We
apply more pressure, blank out his original conditioning so that he
gives us straight answers to questions, and we are getting along fine.
Then, suddenly he snaps out of it and into his original, pre-Britten
character, all forty years of him. Therefore there must have been
another, deeper level to the control over his mind which we did not
even touch. A level activated by a new signal which we did not even
detect, a signal which came at a crucial time.
"Now is the time" meant that the stalling was over, that the
preparations for Britten's escape were completed.
There were still questions to be answered, many blank spaces to be
filled in, but at the present instant there was only one question that
mattered. The treatment which Wolf had given Britten—had it been at
all effective?
Was it still effective?
There was one way to find out.

Morris Wolf leaned forward and called in a loud voice: "Pyotr

Fermineyev!"
The man's head snapped around.
"Cooperation is the key word!" Wolf shouted.
Confusion passed over Britten's face as conflict once more knotted
his nervous system.
Wolf threw his second punch immediately. "Tell Jones to cut me
loose," he demanded.
"Cut him loose," Britten echoed, in bewilderment.
After an interminable interval, Jones laid down his gun, found his
knife, opened it, and slashed the cords from Wolf's arms. Wolf's
muscles were already tensed. He snatched Jones' gun, lurched
forward, and even as Britten's mouth opened to countermand his
order, he slugged Britten with the butt of the pistol, hitting him
viciously and hard until he lay unconscious on the floor.
Then he said to Grady, "You'd better get us back to the hospital,"
keeping the gun in his hand.
But Grady and Jones made no trouble. With Britten out of the picture
they obeyed the one obviously in command. Poor boys, Wolf thought.
Now they were in need of therapy.
As the hospital hove into view, he said to Alma Heller, "We have just
seen the real beginning of psychological warfare. Where it took us a
whole roomful of equipment to condition Britten's responses to a
trigger word, he was able to do it to Jones and Brady single-handed.
His method is something we'd like to know. But more than that,
Britten himself was conditioned to respond to a signal unknown to us
and undetected by us. My God, it could only have been telepathic!"
Alma Heller's eyes closed for a moment.
"I think," she said, "that psychiatrists are going to reach the same
position that physicists did during World War II."
Morris Wolf looked dourly out of the window, watching the hospital
balloon up under the helicopter.
"That's the most unpleasant thing anybody has said all day," he
replied.
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