Buying beans and composing

sonnets: Contrasting views

of consciousness

Do monkeys think? Do plants? No, or at least not like humans

anyway. They just appear to be thinking as they may follow

pre‐programmed evolutionary strategies; a bit like computers

(or Big Brother contestants). But, unlike computers, they’re

‘undoubtedly’ conscious of something. For if nowadays sci-

entists agree that the body, indeed the whole universe, is a

machine, still no one is quite able to say that a ghost isn’t

riding along in the centre of it.

One of the most famous philosophers of them all, Descartes,

once wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’, or at least, many people

think he wrote that. Of course, Critical Readers will check such

quotes very carefully and find that actually he said something

a little bit different. But as I say, everyone ‘thinks’ he said that,

so in a sense he did. He was suggesting that awareness of

the brute fact of existing was the only thing he could be sure

of, and he used this nugget not only to get himself up in the

morning but also to make sense of and rediscover the world.