SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM | 99THE LIMITS OF STREAM-OF-THOUGHT FICTION
can we study thoughtless thoughts, the mind’s
dark matter, given that simple introspection doesn’t
work? Some neuroscientists predict that external brain-
scanning devices, such as MRIs, or arrays of implanted
electrodes will soon allow us to read minds. But this
feat would require cracking the neural code, the set of
rules or algorithms that turn neural
activity into mental activity—that
is, thoughts. The neural code is the
enigma at the core of the mind-body
problem. The more we investigate
it, the more intractable it seems.
I try to describe my thoughts in
my book Pay Attention (original
title: What Is It Like to Be a Science
Writer? ). The book is based on jour-
nals in which I wrote down what I
did, saw, said, heard and thought over the course of a
typical day, as I commuted to the university where I
work, talked to a freshman humanities class (about
James’s “Stream of Thought”), jawed with colleagues
over lunch (about Thomas Kuhn’s views of “truth”) and
spent the evening with “Emily,” my girlfriend.
In the first draft of my book, to make my thoughts
seem more raw and real, I expressed them as sentence
fragments running into each other, with little punctu-
ation. An editor who read this draft described it as
“sludge.” Even I found that draft hard to read. So I
cheated. I rewrote the book with more or less coherent
sentences with conventional grammar and punctua-
tion. I also added contextual information for readers,
information that I wouldn’t have actually thought about
because I just knew it implicitly.
To justify these moves in the direction of readabili-
ty, I could point out that the book’s narrator is an ex-
tremely self-conscious science writer trying to make his
private thoughts public. He is in a sense performing his
thoughts, first for himself and then for readers. But that
means my book consists of meta-thoughts. It isn’t an
accurate depiction of my thoughtless thoughts, which
remain veiled from me.
Nobody depicts thoughts in all their raw weirdness
as vividly as James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce plops us in-
side the heads of Stephen Dedalus, a teacher and aspir-
ing writer and an avatar for Joyce as a young man; Leo-
pold Bloom, a nerdy, genial ad salesman; Bloom’s vo-
luptuous wife, Molly; and other characters living in
Dublin in the early 20th century. We see, feel, remem-
ber what they see, feel, remember.
But Joyce’s notoriously difficult masterpiece isn’t en-
tirely stream of thought. If it were, it would be far more
difficult. To help orient us, give us a little context, Joyce
occasionally shifts his point of view from inside char-
acters’ heads to outside, that is, from a first-person to a
third-person perspective.
Joyce’s final opus, Finnegans Wake, which I “read”
in college, makes no concessions to readability. Even
Joyce’s admirers complained about its opacity, but
James defended his gobbledygookian work. “One great
part of every human existence,” he told a friend, “is
passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by
the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar
and goahead plot.” But even Finnegans Wake, an unri-
valed imagining of mental dark matter, consists entire-
ly of Joyce’s hyperconscious, insanely erudite meta-thoughts. And what about all the thoughts that cannot
be captured by words?HIDDEN-VARIABLE THEORIES OF THE MIND
a final point: I see analogies between efforts to under-
stand thoughts and the quantum realm. I alluded to one
correlation above: observing particles alters them, as does
observing thoughts. Here’s another: some physicists, dis-
satisfied with probabilistic quantum accounts of electrons
and photons, seek to explain their behavior in terms of
“hidden variables” that follow deterministic rules.
Mind scientists, similarly, have proposed hidden-
variable paradigms of the mind. Psychoanalysis holds
that our conscious minds are yanked this way and that
by deep-rooted lusts and aversions. Evolutionary psy-
chology traces our emotions and actions to instincts em-
bedded in our ancestors by natural selection. Cognitive
science postulates that our thoughts stem from compu-
tations carried out by our neural machinery and are as
far removed from our conscious thoughts as the machine
code of your smartphone is from the icons on its screen.
Although each of these paradigms has appealing fea-
tures, each finally falls short, as do all theories of the
mind. Will science ever discover a final theory of the
mind? One that solves the mind-body problem and
makes us fully transparent to ourselves? That reveals
the hidden variables underpinning and linking our
meta-thoughts and thoughtless thoughts?
I doubt it. Physicists can’t grok the behavior of a sin-
gle electron that is identical to every other electron. So
what hope do we have of capturing the thought pass-
ing through your head right ... now, a thought unlike
any that you, let alone anyone else, have ever had or will
have? And if we can’t grasp a single thought, which
melts the instant we grasp it, how can we possibly un-
derstand ourselves? Think about that.John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute
of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-
Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com. For many years
he wrote the popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.WILL SCIENCE EVER DISCOVER A FINAL THEORY
OF THE MIND? ONE THAT SOLVES THE MIND-BODY
PROBLEM AND MAKES US FULLY TRANSPARENT
TO O U R S E LV E S?