Thinks...

Thinks . . . by David Lodge. Secker and Warburg, £16.99, pp 342. ISBN 0436 20997 7. Rating: ★★★★

What is consciousness? Ask an emergency room specialist and he or she will refer to the Glasgow coma scale for its assessment. But then ask a cognitive scientist like Professor Ralph Messenger, the fictitious artificial intelligence researcher in this remarkable novel, and we are up for an answer of a quite different nature. In trying to visualise him, I could do no better than think of Francis Crick of DNA fame.

The other main character of the novel is a distinguished writer, Helen Reed, who had a delayed grief reaction after a cerebral aneurysm suddenly killed her husband, Martin, more than a year earlier. In Helen's view, literature is better than science as a means of understanding consciousness. After all, Darwin was unable to explain crying. Helen's new friend, Ralph, is forced to agree that “crying is a puzzler.”

Central to Helen and Ralph's debate is the fact that consciousness is a first person phenomenon, while science is a third person discipline. Ralph sends Helen an offprint of an article from an academic journal called Cognitive Science Review. The article is called “The Cognitive Architecture of Emotional States with Special Reference to Grief.” It begins with a definition of grief: “An extended process of cognitive reorganization characterized by the occurrence of negatively valenced perturbant states caused by an attachment structure reacting to a death event.”

Helen's response is: “So now we know. That was what I went through in the months following Martin's death: just a spot of cognitive reorganization. The desolating loneliness, the helpless weeping, the booby traps of memory triggered at every step (we watched that TV programme together, we bought that reading lamp together, we—God help me—ate that type of Sainsbury's fresh-chilled chicken curry together just a couple of hours before the aneurysm struck.”

In spite of her hope that no neuroscientific explanation would be found for consciousness (“There are some people in the field who take that view,” Ralph tells her), Helen seems to be enchanted by the mysteries of quantum explanations.

Here she strikes a personal chord in me. I once worked out and published a combined model of consciousness, according to which a form of quantum process is present even in higher animals, which gives them a positional and spatial type of consciousness. (I observed how my neighbour's Alsatian could find its way through my concealed back garden gate when he found himself locked out.)

When I first presented this model at an international conference two years ago, one eminent researcher complimented the theory and wished me luck with its future. Read David Lodge's enjoyable book and make up your mind if I had a fighting chance for its success.