Mind, Brain, and Literature: the Fiction of Iain (M.) Banks

University of Warsaw Faculty of Modern Languages Institute of English Studies Katarzyna Fetlińska Mind, Brain, and Literature: The Fiction of Iain (M.) Banks PhD dissertation written under the supervision of prof. dr hab. Dominika Oramus Warsaw, 2019 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: FRAMEWORK 1 LIFE SCIENCES, COGNITIVE SCIENCES AND NEUROSCIENCES 1 IAIN (M.) BANKS 7 MY APPROACH 17 CHAPTER ONE: MEMORY 29 1.1 INTRODUCTION 29 1.2 FRAMEWORK: MEMORY AND IMAGINATION 33 1.3 IAIN (M.) BANKS: MEMORY 38 1.4 IAIN (M.) BANKS: IMAGINATION 48 1.5 CONCLUSIONS 53 CHAPTER TWO: RELIGION 55 2.1 INTRODUCTION 55 2.2 FRAMEWORK: RELIGION 59 2.3 IAIN (M.) BANKS: RELIGIOUSNESS 64 2.4 IAIN (M.) BANKS: GODS IN THE CULTURE 72 2.5 IAIN (M.) BANKS: FEAR OF DEATH. IMMORTALITY 77 2.6 CONCLUSIONS 85 CHAPTER THREE: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF 87 3.1 INTRODUCTION 87 3.2 FRAMEWORK: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF 89 3.3 FRAMEWORK: EMOTIONS 93 3.4 IAIN (M.) BANKS: EMOTIONS 99 3.5 FRAMEWORK: ACTIVITY AND PERCEPTION 106 3.6 IAIN (M.) BANKS: ACTIVITY AND PERCEPTION 107 3.7 IAIN (M.) BANKS: THE BODY 110 4 3.8 IAIN (M.) BANKS: DREAMS 116 3.9 CONCLUSIONS 122 CHAPTER FOUR: MACHINE MINDS 123 4.1 INTRODUCTION 123 4.2 BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MINDS: DIFFERENCES 125 4.3 BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MINDS: SIMILARITIES 131 4.4 CONCLUSIONS 139 CHAPTER FIVE: STORYTELLING 141 5.1 INTRODUCTION 141 5.2 FRAMEWORK: NARRATIVE AND THE SELF 144 5.3 IAIN (M.) BANKS: NARRATIVE AND THE SELF 146 5.4 FRAMEWORK: STORIES AND CULTURE 151 5.5 IAIN (M.) BANKS: STORIES AND CULTURE 153 5.6 CONCLUSIONS 156 CONCLUSION 157 WORKS CITED 161 1 INTRODUCTION: FRAMEWORK LIFE SCIENCES, COGNITIVE SCIENCES AND NEUROSCIENCES The ideas concerning the indispensability of collaboration between scientists and humanists are not new: in 1959, Charles Percy Snow, a British scientist and novelist, published his famous lecture entitled The Two Cultures, in which he postulates that the 20th century is permeated by a deepening mutual incomprehension between scholars representing sciences and humanities. According to Snow, the 20th century witnessed the spreading of the belief in the mismatch between materialist and biology-oriented worldview of science on the one hand, and the humanist investigations into socio-cultural themes on the other. The split into the abovementioned “two cultures” has caused, according to Snow, a major hindrance in understanding the world and solving its problems. In a second edition of The Two Cultures (1963), however, Snow proposed the emergence of a “third culture”, in which literary scholars would communicate and collaborate with the scientists. Some people would argue that Snow’s “third culture” already exists, others would disagree completely, but one thing is definitely true: since the commercial world success of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in 1988, some popular books on science have become bestsellers. As Jan Plamper explains, this relatively new phenomenon has contributed to the propagation of scientific ideas in the areas not restricted to science, and has brought inspiration to representatives of various disciplines, literature included. Scientists such as Giacomo Rizzolatti or Antonio Damasio are cited in works in the human sciences “no less frequently than Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault were in the 1980s” (225). In other words, life sciences1, and especially neuroscience2, have been seeping into other disciplines3. The popularization of 1 ‘Life sciences’ is a terminological extension of biology. The concept emerged in the 1980s in order to include young areas or research such as brain science or cognitive psychology (Plamper 8). I am using the term ‘life sciences’ for medicine, neuroscience, psychology, and related disciplines. 2 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines neuroscience as “a branch of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous tissue and especially with their relation to behavior and learning”. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/neuroscience 3 The rise of pop-science can, among all, be attributed to John Brockman’s New York literary agency, which specializes in natural sciences, and represents the works of neuroscientists such as Marco Iacoboni, Steven Pinker, or Joseph LeDoux (Plamper 223). Alluding to C. P. Snow’s ideas, Brockman proclaimed the 2 concepts such as Theory of Mind4 or mirror neurons proves the current importance of neuroscience, as well as the general rise of interest in the life sciences (Plamper 219-237). But why have life sciences become so popular? Plamper associates their dominance with the post-postmodern era, as well as with the reaction against the idea of fluid identities and porous borders. It turned out that people desire a solid anchor in the world, a world of vivid and natural relationships (Plamper 225-227). Life sciences grant this sense of security. Nevertheless, the turn can also be perceived as a reaction towards a retreat from Enlightenment ideas and the appreciation of religious fundamentalism. As Daniel Smail puts it: In an age when biblical literalism is on the rise, when presidents doubt the truth of evolution, when the teaching of evolutionary biology in the United States is being dumbed down and school boards talk seriously about creation science and intelligent design, it is all the more important for historians to support their colleagues in the biological sciences. (11) In short, life sciences might have gained appeal because they offer straightforward answers to questions concerning human physiological and psychological nature. They also tend to counterbalance the anti-scientific, or religious, sensibilities. But why has neuroscience – a particular branch of life sciences - become so popular? It may be attributed to the fact that in the 20th century, due to advances in biology and computer science, the human nervous system could finally be studied in detail. In fact, the last decade of the 20th century was dubbed the Decade of the Brain (Nalbantian, Introduction 3). Steven Shaviro states: [R]ecent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have taught us a lot about the brain. This is largely due to new technologies, like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), first developed in 1992, which allows us to track brain activity in real time; and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), first existence of a slightly different kind of “third culture”, consisting of “scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world, who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are” (17). 4 The use of capital letters is a convention. Theory of Mind is also referred to as ToM. For more information, refer to: Vittorio Gallese and Alvin Goldman, “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2/12 (1998), 493–501. 3 successfully used in 1985, which allows us to affect targeted portions of the brain in such a way as to alter a person’s feelings, attitudes, and judgments. Through these techniques, together with advances in computing power, we have arguably learned more about the physical functioning of the brain in the past thirty years or so, than we did in all of previous human history. (chap. 4, n.p.5) Developments in research on brain functions have been capacitated by sophisticated technologies. This rapid progress made in the field of neuroscience, combined with the heightened popular interest in the workings of the human brain - and also with the pop- science publishing dynamics - contributed to brain studies gaining an interdisciplinary dimension. As Terence Cave observes: From these cross-disciplinary dialogues, a number of key strands are emerging: new ways of thinking about language as a cognitive instrument, a significantly different understanding of the relations between perception, affect, imagination, and the so-called higher-order rational functioning of the mind, and (thence) fresh approached to the understanding of the mind-body problem. (13) To recapitulate, new fields of research such as neuroeconomics, neuropolitics, neuroaesthetics, neuroliterary criticism, or neurotheology have sprung up in the last decades (Plamper 225). To make matters more complicated, these disciplines often draw from the research performed in the field of what is known as cognitive science6 - an intellectual movement stemming from the 1950s (Miller 141), when developments in the nascent fields of neuroscience, computer science, and the field of artificial intelligence, caused a growing interest in the workings of the human brain. George A. Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, states that: 5 I use the form “n.p.” to indicate that in case of this particular reference no page number is given, as the source I use is an electronic one. 6 “Cognitive science” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an interdisciplinary science that draws on many fields (such as psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy) in developing theories about human perception, thinking, and learning”. Neuroscience and cognitive science tend to overlap, as both disciplines focus on the issues related with learning and thought. The boundary between these two is often blurred, and the meeting point of “neuroscience” and “cognitive science” is especially pronounced if we consider the attempts to bridge the gap between the brain and the mind. See: https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/cognitive%20science 4 [B]y 1960 it was clear that something interdisciplinary was happening ... What you called it didn’t really matter until 1976, when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation became interested. The Sloan Foundation had just completed a highly successful program of support for a new field called ‘neuroscience’ and two vice-presidents of the Foundation, Steve White and Al Singer, were thinking that the next step would be to bridge the gap between brain and mind.

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