PHILOSOPHY THE MIND
Creating the World
A playwright and novelist argues that reality is all in your head.
The Human Touch
Our Part in the Creation of a Universe
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By Michael Frayn
Metropolitan. 505 pp. $32.50
Michael Frayn, renowned playwright and novelist, has written a long and ambitious book on the relationship between the objective world and the human mind. His question, central to philosophy, is to what degree, and in what ways, is the world dependent on the mind? Do we construct the world, or is it thrust upon us? He contends that reality has neither substance nor form without the constructive activities of the knowing subject, that space, time, causality and matter are all mental products, the results of our "traffic" with the world, not antecedent realities. He admits that the universe must exist independently of us in some way, but only as a kind of "undifferentiated mass." This is, he thinks, the basic paradox of philosophy: that we both create and are created by the world.
Frayn covers a lot of ground in a chatty, avuncular style designed to appeal to the general reader. But his amiable ramble makes no serious contribution to philosophy, is quite unconvincing in its main thesis and seems to rest on some obvious errors. The book begins, ominously, with quantum theory, and Frayn reiterates the popular, but misguided, view that this branch of physics demonstrates the dependence of the material world on the consciousness of the observer. That has certainly been one interpretation of it, but it's by no means the only interpretation, and I side with those physicists and philosophers who regard quantum theory as having no such implication. In brief, although measurement can change the state of what is measured, it simply does not follow that the state has no reality independent of the act of measuring.
Frayn also claims that the selectivity of attention shows that what we perceive depends on us, as when you focus on a bird in flight and ignore the sky behind it. But this rests on confusing the world as it appears to us with the world as it is in itself, a confusion that runs through the entire book. It is quite true that we contribute to the way things appear to us, but it doesn't follow that we construct the world that thus appears.
It is also a mistake to suppose that because we must always be aware of the world through the medium of our own consciousness, we cannot think of the world except as represented by our consciousness. I cannot refer to things without using words to do so, obviously, but it is wrong to conclude that objects cannot exist without words. Frayn is here committing the same fallacy as the idealist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, who reasoned that objects had to be ideas, since no one can conceive of an object without having an idea of it.
Frayn's subjectivism is also self-refuting. If everything depends on the observer, what about the observer herself? Isn't she at least a determinate reality? We can't confer form and substance on the world, resolving its inherent indeterminacy, unless we have it to begin with. Frayn goes so far as to suggest that reality is just a projection of our stories about it, with the line between fact and fiction erased. But isn't it at least an observable fact that we construct fictions? It may sometimes be hard to decide what is factual and what is fictional, but it doesn't follow that there is no distinction between the two.
Once these points are kept clear, Frayn's putative paradox disappears. He writes: "This is what it comes down to in the end: the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas -- and we are standing on the globe we are supporting." But this is simply an outright logical contradiction, generated by Frayn's own misunderstanding of the issues, not an interesting and inescapable conundrum. Frayn confides that his philosophy tutor at Cambridge, Jonathan Bennett, having read his manuscript, told him he was guilty of rampant anthropocentrism. He should have listened to his old teacher. ?
Colin McGinn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami and the author, most recently, of "Shakespeare's Philosophy."
