The Trouble with Qualia: II. The Feeling of the Feeling

In the previous post, we began with a seemingly innocuous question:

What is it like to feel pain?

The question seems to point towards something beyond the pain itself: its subjective character, its phenomenal quality, perhaps its quale.

But there is a curious feature of the question that is easy to overlook.

If there is something it is like to feel pain, what is it like to feel that?

Perhaps the answer is obvious. Nothing further is required. The phrase what it is like does not describe another experience. It simply describes the character of the original experience.

If so, we have arrived at an important possibility.

Perhaps there is no feeling of the feeling.

And if there is not, then we should ask why we were tempted to posit one.

The experience behind the experience

Suppose I burn my finger.

I feel pain.

Now imagine that someone asks:

But what is it like to feel that pain?

I can answer:

It hurts.

Perhaps I could elaborate: it is sharp, hot, unpleasant, localised, distracting.

But notice what I have not done. I have not reported a second experience standing behind the first.

I have simply described the character of the experience.

The pain is not one thing, followed by an experience of the pain as another thing. The hurting is part of what we mean by the pain being experienced.

Yet philosophical discussion can make the structure appear more complicated:

physical event → neural processing → pain → phenomenal experience of pain.

The last two terms can begin to look like separate stages.

But perhaps they are not.

Perhaps experiencing pain and the pain as experienced are not two events. They are two ways of describing one event.

That distinction may seem pedantic.

It is not.

What would a second feeling be?

Imagine that the feeling of pain really were a separate phenomenal item.

I experience pain.

Alongside it, I experience a second thing: the feeling of the pain.

But then I could ask:

What is it like to experience the feeling of pain?

If the answer is that there is another phenomenal character associated with this second-order experience, we have simply moved the problem upwards.

There is now:

1. pain;

2. the experience of pain;

3. the experience of the experience of pain.

And if the third is itself something experienced, we can ask about the experience of that.

The familiar philosophical regress appears.

It is tempting to conclude that the regress proves that qualia cannot exist.

That would be too quick.

A perfectly good response is that the regress arises only because we have misunderstood the expression what it is like. The phrase need not refer to another experience at all.

When I say that a wine is dry, I do not imply that there is another wine called the dryness of the wine. When I say that a melody is melancholy, I do not imply that melancholy is an additional object hidden inside the melody.

Likewise, saying that pain has a particular phenomenal character need not imply that there is another experience hidden inside the pain.

The regress therefore does not refute qualia.

But it does reveal something important:

The phrase “what it is like” cannot by itself establish that there is another thing there.

Description is not addition

This distinction is easy to lose because language encourages us to turn descriptions into nouns.

We say:

The apple is red.

Then:

The apple has redness.

And eventually:

There is a property of redness.

Sometimes that is perfectly legitimate. Properties are not simply grammatical inventions.

But the movement from adjective to noun does not itself establish an independent entity.

The same applies to experience.

We say:

Pain feels unpleasant.

Then:

Pain has an unpleasant phenomenal character.

And finally:

Pain instantiates the quale of unpleasantness.

The increasingly technical vocabulary can give the impression that we have learned something new about the ontology of pain.

Perhaps we have.

But perhaps we have merely repackaged the original observation in increasingly substantial grammatical forms.

The danger is particularly great with consciousness because the thing being described is already private and difficult to compare directly between observers. The terminology can therefore acquire explanatory authority before its referent has been made clear.

But surely the feeling is real?

At this point an obvious objection arises.

If someone is in severe pain, surely the feeling is real.

Of course.

But this does not settle the ontological question.

Consider the difference between saying:

The pain is real.

and:

The feeling of pain is a distinct phenomenal entity.

The first statement is entirely compatible with a naturalistic account of organisms, nervous systems, behaviour and experience.

The second requires considerably more explanation.

The question is not whether the person is genuinely suffering. The question is whether suffering requires the existence of a further ingredient called a quale.

Those are different questions.

Indeed, treating them as the same risks making a genuine phenomenon mysterious simply because we have chosen a particular vocabulary for describing it.

The first-person perspective

There is, however, something genuinely distinctive about experience.

When I feel pain, I do not merely observe a neurological event happening somewhere in my nervous system.

The pain is happening to me.

This first-person character is important.

But even here, we should be cautious about what follows from it.

The fact that an organism occupies a particular perspective does not necessarily imply that there is an additional object constituting that perspective.

A bird does not need to contain a little bird-shaped observer in order to see the world from the bird's perspective.

A nervous system does not need to contain an inner spectator in order for the organism to be affected by what happens to it.

And a person does not need to contain a private phenomenal object called pain in order for pain to be experienced.

Perhaps the first-person character belongs to the organisation of the organism's relation with its world.

If so, the first-person perspective is real without being a separate substance.

This would be a significant shift.

Instead of asking where the phenomenal object is located, we would ask how an organism comes to have a perspective at all.

The strange case of consciousness itself

This becomes particularly interesting when we move from particular experiences to consciousness as such.

Suppose I see a red apple.

There is something it is like to see the apple.

Suppose I feel pain.

There is something it is like to feel the pain.

But now ask:

What is it like to be conscious?

This question sounds profound.

But what exactly are we being asked to imagine?

Conscious of what?

If I am conscious of the apple, there is an experience of the apple.

If I am conscious of the pain, there is an experience of the pain.

If I am conscious of a thought, there is an experience involving the thought.

But if we remove everything of which I am conscious and leave only consciousness itself, what is left to experience?

Perhaps there is an answer.

Perhaps there is a distinctive phenomenal quality belonging to consciousness as such.

But if there is, we need to say what that quality consists in.

And if the answer is simply:

It is what it is like to be conscious,

we have not explained anything.

We have returned to the same phrase.

The question has folded back upon itself.

Consciousness without an object?

This raises a deeper issue.

Perhaps consciousness can exist without being consciousness of anything. Some philosophical traditions have proposed precisely this: a bare or contentless consciousness, an experience without an experienced object.

Whether such states exist is an empirical and philosophical question, and reports of unusual states of consciousness are notoriously difficult to interpret.

But even if such experiences occur, they would not automatically establish the existence of a quale of consciousness.

There would still be a question about what the phrase means.

If consciousness is an activity, process, capacity or mode of organisation, its occurrence need not involve a further phenomenal object corresponding to the word consciousness.

We might be trying to make consciousness into something it does not need to be: an object that could itself become an object of experience.

The spectator hidden in the vocabulary

Perhaps this is why discussions of qualia can sometimes seem to produce a peculiar picture of the mind.

There is the physical organism.

There are its neural processes.

There are its experiences.

And somewhere behind the experiences seems to stand a silent observer, receiving the qualia.

But who is that observer?

If the observer is itself conscious, then it too has experiences.

And if those experiences require an observer, we have begun another regress.

If the observer is not conscious, it cannot obviously be the one to whom the experience is presented.

The apparent solution is to say that there is no inner observer.

The organism itself is the subject of the experience.

That is not a problem. It is simply a different conception of what a subject is.

The subject need not be a thing hidden inside the organism.

It may be the organism considered as a centre of activity, responsiveness, memory, anticipation and self-maintenance.

On this view, the first-person perspective is not produced by an inner spectator.

The organism is the perspective.

What, then, is a quale?

We are now in a position to ask the question more carefully.

A quale might be understood in at least two ways.

In the first, it is simply a name for the distinctive character of an experience: the painfulness of pain, the appearance of red, the sound of a particular note.

There is nothing objectionable about this usage.

In the second, the quale is treated as an ontologically distinctive ingredient of experience—something whose existence is not captured by describing what the organism is doing, undergoing or experiencing.

That is a much stronger claim.

And it is the stronger claim that requires justification.

The important point is that the first does not automatically lead to the second.

We can accept the reality of experience while remaining agnostic about the ontology of qualia.

Indeed, perhaps this is the position from which we should have begun.

A different question

There is therefore a subtle change in the question we should ask.

Instead of:

How does the brain produce the feeling of pain?

we might ask:

How does an organism come to experience events in ways that matter to its activity and persistence?

Instead of:

How does neural activity generate the quale of red?

we might ask:

How does an organism come to discriminate and experience its environment as coloured?

And instead of:

What is the phenomenal character of consciousness itself?

we might ask:

What kind of organisation makes a first-person perspective possible?

These questions are not easy.

But they do not presuppose that experience contains an additional ingredient whose existence has yet to be established.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of the apparent regress.

It does not show that experience is unreal.

It shows that we should be careful not to mistake the description of an experience for another experience, and not to mistake either for an ontological addition to the world.

The feeling does not necessarily contain a feeling of itself.

Pain does not need a second pain in order to hurt.

And consciousness may not need to feel consciousness in order to be conscious.

Perhaps the strange thing about experience is not that there is something behind it called a quale.

Perhaps the strange thing is simply that an organised living system can have a world that matters to it at all.

That question takes us somewhere rather different.

And perhaps, when we finally ask it, we will find that the mystery of consciousness lies not in a private phenomenal substance hidden inside experience, but in the emergence of a relation between an organism and its world.

That would leave us with plenty of mystery.

But perhaps rather less metaphysics.

The Trouble with Qualia: I. When Feeling Became a Thing

There is something odd about the way philosophers of consciousness talk about experience.

Suppose I stub my toe.

There is no mystery about the ordinary statement that I feel pain. My toe has been damaged, my nervous system responds, I withdraw my foot, my attention is drawn to the injury, and the event may influence what I do for some time afterwards. The pain matters to me because something has happened to my body that matters to the organism that is me.

But philosophical discussions of consciousness often take one further step. They ask:

What is it like to feel pain?

At first this sounds like an entirely innocent question. Of course there is something it is like to feel pain. Pain hurts.

But what, exactly, have we added?

We have moved from pain is felt to there is something it is like to feel pain. And from there it is a short step to talking about the phenomenal character of pain, or its quale: the supposedly distinctive subjective quality that makes pain feel the way it does.

The terminology can make the move seem inevitable. It may not be.

From a verb to a thing

Consider the ordinary sentence:

I feel pain.

Here, feel is a verb. It describes something the organism does, or more precisely, something that happens to the organism in a way that is available to its experience and behaviour.

Now consider:

There is a feeling of pain.

Nothing particularly strange has happened yet. We have simply turned the verb into a noun.

But then:

The feeling has a phenomenal character.

And finally:

The phenomenal character is a quale.

At this point something rather different seems to have happened. What began as a way of describing an organism's experience has acquired the appearance of an entity or property in its own right.

This may be entirely legitimate. But it requires an argument.

Why should the fact that pain is felt entail that there exists, in addition to the pain and the organism's experience of it, a further thing called the feeling of pain?

Perhaps there is such a thing. But we should not confuse the usefulness of a word with the ontological independence of what the word names.

What does “what it is like” add?

The phrase what it is like is central to modern discussions of consciousness. Thomas Nagel famously used it to characterise the subjective aspect of experience: there is, he argued, something it is like to be a conscious organism.

The expression is extraordinarily suggestive. It seems to point towards something that ordinary physical descriptions leave out.

But it is worth noticing what kind of expression it is.

When I say that falling into cold water feels shocking, I am not necessarily identifying another event that occurs after the falling and the shock. I am describing how the event is experienced by the person undergoing it.

Likewise, when I say that pain feels unpleasant, I have not obviously identified a second experience that accompanies the pain. I have described the character of the experience itself.

This distinction matters.

If what it is like is simply another way of describing the experience, then it is not obvious that it identifies an additional constituent of reality.

If, on the other hand, what it is like identifies something over and above the experience, then we need to know what that something is and how it relates to the experience.

The philosophical literature sometimes seems to move between these two senses without noticing the change.

Pain and nociception

There is, of course, an important distinction between nociception and pain.

An organism can detect potentially damaging stimuli and respond to them without necessarily experiencing what we ordinarily call pain. Conversely, the experience of pain can be influenced by expectation, attention, context, memory and other factors in ways that are not reducible to the amount of tissue damage.

This is an important empirical fact. It tells us that pain is not simply a passive read-out of bodily injury.

But it does not by itself establish the existence of a quale.

We might instead say that pain is a particular way in which an organism is affected by, responds to, and interprets what is happening to it. Its distinctive character is part of the organisation of that experience.

The question then becomes not:

How does the brain produce the additional thing called the quale of pain?

but:

What is involved in an organism being affected in the way we call pain?

That is a different question. It may be difficult, but its difficulty does not depend upon first assuming that pain contains an extra ingredient.

The temptation of “red”

Pain is perhaps too complicated an example for some philosophers, so discussions of qualia often turn to colour.

Suppose I look at a red object.

There is a physical object, light reflected from its surface, a visual system responding to particular patterns of stimulation, neural processing, perceptual discrimination, and eventually my report that the object is red.

But then comes the familiar question:

What is it like to see red?

The answer seems to be that there is a particular quality to the visual experience: redness.

Again, there may be no problem with describing the experience this way. The difficulty begins when we infer from the description that there must therefore be a further entity—the quale of redness—whose existence requires a special explanation.

Perhaps there is.

But perhaps we have simply taken a perfectly ordinary fact about perception and changed its grammatical form.

The organism sees red.

The seeing has a particular character.

We call that character redness.

Nothing has yet required us to posit another object inside the experience.

A small grammatical experiment

Try replacing the noun quale with a verb.

Instead of:

I have a quale of pain.

say:

I am affected painfully.

Instead of:

I possess the quale of redness.

say:

I experience this object as red.

The second formulations do not solve the problem of consciousness. But they do something useful: they keep the organism and its activity in view.

They also make it harder to imagine that experience consists of a subject standing on one side, an external world on the other, and a collection of private phenomenal objects somewhere in between.

Perhaps experience is not a container in which qualia are stored.

Perhaps it is a way an organism is related to its world.

That possibility deserves consideration before we decide that experience contains special objects whose existence physics cannot explain.

The first-person fact remains

None of this means that subjective experience is unreal.

That would be an extraordinary conclusion.

Pain hurts. Red looks different from blue. Music sounds different from silence. A remembered face is not identical to the neural description of remembering it.

The point is much more modest.

The reality of experience does not automatically establish the ontology of qualia.

There is an important difference between saying:

Experience has a particular character.

and saying:

That character is a distinct kind of entity or property requiring an explanation over and above the explanation of the experience itself.

The first is almost certainly unavoidable.

The second is a philosophical hypothesis.

And once we recognise that distinction, a familiar question begins to look rather different.

We are often told that the great mystery of consciousness is that physical processes somehow produce what it is like to experience them.

But perhaps we should pause before asking how physical processes produce what it is like.

Perhaps we should first ask:

What exactly have we identified when we say that there is something it is like?

That may turn out to be a much harder question than it first appears.

And it may also turn out that the famous hard problem has inherited some of its hardness from the way the problem was formulated.

That is a possibility worth exploring.

But first, there is an even stranger question.

If pain has a particular character, and seeing red has a particular character, what would it mean for consciousness itself to have a character?

What, exactly, would it feel like to be conscious?

That is where the distinction between experience and what experience feels like may begin to unravel.

The Shadow That Stayed — A Senior Common Room Discussion

“I have it.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“The shadow?”

“The shadow.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“I wondered when you would get to it.”

“I have understood the entire story.”

Quillibrace put down his newspaper.

“That is unfortunate.”

“The shadow follows the boy.”

“No,” said Stray.

Blottisham looked at her.

“No?”

“The boy follows the shadow.”

“Exactly.”

Quillibrace raised an eyebrow.

“That isn't quite what you said.”

“It is the essential distinction.”

“Which is?”

“The boy thinks he is following the shadow.”

“Yes.”

“But the shadow isn't following him.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore the story concerns the asymmetry between agency and appearance.”

There was silence.

Stray looked at Quillibrace.

Quillibrace looked at Stray.

“I don't know,” said Stray, “what that means.”

“It means,” said Blottisham, “that we often mistake what accompanies us for what guides us.”

Quillibrace nodded slowly.

“That is almost intelligible.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn't a compliment.”

Blottisham ignored him.

“The shadow appears to be responding to the boy's movement.”

“But it isn't,” said Stray.

“Precisely.”

“It responds to the sun.”

“Precisely.”

“So the boy is following something whose movement has nothing to do with him.”

“Yes.”

“And yet he learns something from it.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham smiled.

“Exactly.”

Stray looked thoughtful.

“What does he learn?”

“That the shadow isn't following him.”

“Yes.”

“But what does that mean?”

Blottisham paused.

“It means that appearances deceive.”

Quillibrace sighed.

“We have arrived.”

“Arrived where?”

“At the oldest conclusion available to human thought.”

Blottisham frowned.

“It's a perfectly good conclusion.”

“Indeed. It has survived thousands of years.”

“Then it must be correct.”

“Not necessarily.”

Stray looked towards the window.

“I think the interesting thing is that the boy follows the shadow even though he doesn't know where it is going.”

“Yes,” said Blottisham.

“He isn't trying to solve it.”

“Yes.”

“He just wants to see.”

“Yes.”

“And when the shadow disappears behind the cloud, he waits.”

“Yes.”

“He doesn't know whether it will return.”

“No.”

“But it does.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“So the shadow represents uncertainty.”

Quillibrace closed his eyes.

Stray laughed.

“I knew you would do that.”

“What?”

“Turn it into a noun.”

“A noun?”

“Uncertainty.”

Blottisham looked puzzled.

“What else would you call it?”

“I wouldn't call it anything.”

“Then how would we discuss it?”

“We might just follow it.”

There was a silence.

Quillibrace looked at her.

“That's rather dangerous.”

“Why?”

“It sounds almost methodological.”

Blottisham stood.

“I think the story is really about knowledge.”

Quillibrace looked alarmed.

“Don't.”

“The boy doesn't know where the shadow will go.”

“Yes.”

“He follows it.”

“Yes.”

“He learns from following it.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore knowledge comes from inquiry.”

Quillibrace stared at him.

“You have managed to turn a boy following a shadow into a research proposal.”

Blottisham looked pleased.

“Thank you.”

“I wasn't—”

“I know.”

Stray was still looking out of the window.

“The boy doesn't follow the shadow the next morning.”

Blottisham stopped.

“What?”

“He sees it.”

“Yes.”

“And then he goes to school.”

“Yes.”

“He doesn't need to follow it again.”

“Why not?”

“Because he knows where it is.”

Blottisham frowned.

“No. He knows that it moves.”

Stray nodded.

“Perhaps that's all he needed to know.”

Quillibrace picked up his newspaper.

“And perhaps he didn't need to know even that.”

Blottisham looked towards the door.

“I still think the shadow represents something.”

“I'm sure it does,” said Quillibrace.

“What?”

Quillibrace turned a page.

“I have no idea.”

Blottisham stared at him.

Stray smiled.

Outside, the tree at the end of the road cast a shadow across the grass.

The three of them watched it for a while.

Nobody said what it meant.

The Shadow That Stayed

There was a tree at the end of the road.

In the morning, its shadow fell across the grass.

By midday, the shadow was smaller.

In the afternoon, it stretched across the road.

Everyone knew this.

The children played in it when the day was hot.

The postman walked through it.

The dog sometimes stopped in it.

Nobody thought about the shadow very much.

One afternoon, a boy was sitting beneath the tree when he noticed something strange.

The shadow was moving.

He watched it.

It moved slowly across the road.

The boy moved with it.

He stepped into the shadow.

Then he stepped out.

Then he stepped back in.

The shadow moved again.

The boy followed.

Soon he was standing in the middle of the road.

He looked back at the tree.

The shadow stretched from the tree to where he was standing.

He wondered how far it would go.

So he followed it.

It went across the road.

Across the footpath.

Across the grass.

It reached the fence.

The boy climbed over.

The shadow reached the other side.

He followed it through the long grass until he came to a little pond.

The shadow stopped at the water.

The boy stopped too.

For a moment, neither moved.

Then a cloud passed over the sun.

The shadow disappeared.

The boy waited.

The pond was still.

The grass was still.

The tree stood at the end of the road.

Then the cloud moved away.

The shadow returned.

But now it was on the other side of the pond.

The boy looked at it.

He laughed.

He had been following the shadow all afternoon.

But the shadow had never been following him.

He walked home.

The next morning, he passed the tree on his way to school.

Its shadow lay quietly on the grass.

The boy stopped.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he went on.

By the time he reached the corner, the shadow had moved.

He did not turn around.

But he knew where it was.

The Stone That Was Warm — A Senior Common Room Discussion

“I have solved the stone.”

Professor Quillibrace lowered his newspaper.

“You do realise that stones are generally easier to solve than doors?”

“The warm stone.”

“I know which stone.”

Miss Stray looked up from her tea.

“What have you discovered?”

“The nature of experience.”

Quillibrace closed his eyes.

“We've moved quickly.”

“The stone is cold in the morning.”

“Yes.”

“It becomes warm in sunlight.”

“Yes.”

“The girl touches it.”

“Yes.”

“She notices the change.”

“Yes.”

“And therefore the story concerns the relationship between physical reality and perception.”

Stray smiled.

“Does it?”

“Obviously.”

“What is the relationship?”

Blottisham paused.

“The stone is warm.”

“Yes.”

“The girl experiences its warmth.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore warmth exists in the relation between object and observer.”

Quillibrace opened one eye.

“Does the sun have anything to do with it?”

“Of course.”

“Then perhaps we need a third party.”

Blottisham ignored him.

“The girl discovers a property of the stone through touch.”

“She discovers that it is warm,” said Stray.

“Exactly.”

“Did the stone become warm when she touched it?”

“No.”

“Then she didn't create the warmth.”

“Not strictly.”

“Then what exactly has been discovered?”

Blottisham looked irritated.

“The stone's warmth.”

“Which was there before she noticed it.”

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps the story isn't about perception creating reality.”

Blottisham hesitated.

“No.”

“Perhaps it's about noticing something that was already happening.”

“Yes.”

“Then why does the girl keep coming back?”

Blottisham brightened.

“Because she is developing a relation with the stone.”

Quillibrace sighed.

“Of course she is.”

“She observes it each morning.”

“Yes.”

“She learns its changes.”

“Yes.”

“She begins to expect them.”

“Yes.”

“And the stone becomes part of her morning.”

Stray nodded.

“That seems closer.”

Blottisham looked pleased.

“Then we agree.”

“No.”

He frowned.

“What is wrong with it?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you saying no?”

“Because you said you had solved the story.”

“I have.”

“You've described one thing that happens in it.”

“That is what solving means.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“No, Blottisham. That is what description means.”

Blottisham sat back down.

“There is still the final sentence.”

“What about it?” asked Stray.

“The stone is waiting.”

“Yes.”

“Stones don't wait.”

“Probably not.”

“Then the story is anthropomorphising.”

“Yes.”

“Which means the stone is standing for something.”

“Or,” said Stray, “the story is letting us imagine what it would be like if the stone were waiting.”

Blottisham considered this.

“That amounts to the same thing.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because one is an interpretation of the stone and the other is an invitation to imagine.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“An important distinction.”

Blottisham looked at him.

“Between interpretation and imagination?”

“Between claiming what something means and seeing what happens when we imagine it differently.”

There was a pause.

Blottisham glanced towards the window.

“Do you think the stone actually knows the girl is coming?”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Miss Stray?”

She smiled.

“I don't think the story asks us to decide.”

Blottisham frowned.

“But surely we must decide something.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise what are we left with?”

Stray looked at him.

“A girl who keeps visiting a stone.”

Blottisham waited.

“That's all?”

“Perhaps.”

Quillibrace picked up his newspaper.

“Apparently that is sometimes quite a lot.”

Blottisham looked dissatisfied.

Then he smiled.

“I still think the stone is waiting.”

Quillibrace did not look up.

“Of course you do.”

Outside, the sun came out.

Somewhere in the garden, a stone became warm.

Nobody was there to notice.

The Stone That Was Warm

There was a stone beside the garden path.

It was not a special stone.

It was grey, and round on one side and flat on the other. It had a small white mark near its edge, and when it rained, water collected in a little hollow on top.

Nobody knew how long it had been there.

Every morning, the gardener walked past it.

Every afternoon, the cat stepped over it.

At night, the stone became cold.

One morning, a girl came into the garden very early.

The sun had only just risen.

She sat on the path to tie her shoe, and when she put her hand down beside her, she touched the stone.

It was warm.

She looked at it.

Then she looked at the sun.

Then she touched the stone again.

It was still warm.

The girl picked it up.

It was warmer underneath than on top.

She carried it to the edge of the garden and put it in a patch of sunlight.

For a while she watched it.

Nothing happened.

So she went inside.

The next morning, she came back.

The stone was cold.

She picked it up.

It was cold all over.

She put it in the sunlight again.

By the time she had finished eating her breakfast, it was warm.

The girl began to visit the stone every morning.

Sometimes it was warm.

Sometimes it was cold.

Sometimes it was wet.

Once, after a very hot day, it was almost too warm to hold.

She began to wonder whether the stone knew when the sun was out.

Then she decided it probably didn't.

But she still checked.

One morning, the sky was cloudy.

The stone was cold.

The girl touched it and was about to walk away when the clouds moved.

A small patch of sunlight fell across the garden.

It fell across the grass.

It fell across the path.

And it fell across the stone.

The girl waited.

After a little while, she touched it again.

It was warmer.

She smiled.

The stone did not know why.

Neither did the girl.

But the next morning she came back.

And the stone was waiting in the same place.

The Tree That Lost a Leaf — A Senior Common Room Discussion

“I have been thinking about the leaf.”

Professor Quillibrace looked over his newspaper.

“I was afraid you might.”

“The particular leaf.”

Miss Stray looked up.

“The one the girl put in her book?”

“Precisely.”

Blottisham leaned forward.

“It is clearly a story about attention.”

Stray smiled.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

Quillibrace folded his newspaper.

“This should be interesting.”

“The tree loses thousands of leaves.”

“Yes.”

“Almost nobody notices.”

“Yes.”

“But the girl notices one.”

“Yes.”

“She picks it up.”

“Yes.”

“She keeps it.”

“Yes.”

“And therefore”—Blottisham paused for effect—“attention creates value.”

Stray considered this.

“Does it?”

“Obviously.”

“Was the leaf valuable before she noticed it?”

Blottisham hesitated.

“Potentially.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Ah. The potential leaf.”

“It possessed value in itself.”

“Then why did nobody notice?”

“Because they failed to recognise its value.”

“Which raises the question,” said Quillibrace, “of how they were supposed to recognise something that wasn't yet valuable to them.”

Blottisham frowned.

“That is a technical objection.”

“No,” said Stray. “It's quite an important one.”

She looked out of the window.

“I think the story is doing something smaller.”

“Smaller?”

“The girl simply notices the leaf.”

“Yes.”

“She likes it.”

“Yes.”

“She puts it in her book.”

“Yes.”

“Years later, she still has it.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing else needs to happen.”

Blottisham looked disappointed.

“But that cannot be the whole point.”

“Why not?”

“Because then attention is merely attention.”

“Perhaps it is.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“Careful, Blottisham. You are approaching a dangerous proposition.”

“What proposition?”

“That something may matter without needing a theory of why it matters.”

Blottisham sat back.

“But surely we can distinguish between subjective and objective value.”

“We can distinguish many things,” said Quillibrace.

“And should we?”

“Not necessarily.”

Stray looked at him.

“That sounds almost anti-academic.”

“Don't tell anyone.”

Blottisham stood and walked towards the window.

“The tree doesn't care about the particular leaf.”

“Probably not,” said Stray.

“The girl does.”

“Yes.”

“So the same leaf matters differently to different participants.”

“Yes.”

“Then value is relational.”

Quillibrace sighed.

“Here we go.”

“But it is!”

“It may be.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘may be’?”

“Because you keep turning observations into conclusions.”

Blottisham looked at the tree outside.

“What if the girl had never picked up the leaf?”

Stray thought about it.

“Then the leaf would have fallen.”

“And nobody would have remembered it.”

“Probably.”

“So what changed?”

Stray looked at him.

“Someone noticed.”

Blottisham was silent.

For once, he did not immediately produce a theory.

Quillibrace noticed.

“Remarkable.”

“What?”

“You have been quiet for nearly ten seconds.”

Blottisham turned.

“I was thinking.”

“Another dangerous development.”

Stray smiled.

“Perhaps the leaf was not important because the girl understood something about it.”

“What, then?”

“She simply saw it.”

Blottisham looked back towards the window.

Outside, the tree stood beside the road.

A leaf fell.

None of them saw it.

Blottisham watched the ground for a moment.

Then he said:

“I think I missed one.”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“Don't worry.”

“Why?”

“There are several thousand more.”

The Tree That Lost a Leaf

There was a tree beside a road.

It was an old tree.

Nobody knew how old.

Every spring, green leaves appeared along its branches.

Every summer, the leaves grew larger.

Every autumn, some of them turned yellow.

Some turned red.

Some turned brown.

And then they fell.

The tree did not seem surprised.

One morning in autumn, a single yellow leaf came loose.

It floated down.

It landed on the road.

A bus went past.

The leaf moved.

It travelled a little way along the road, then stopped beside the kerb.

A man walking to work stepped over it.

A dog sniffed it.

The dog went on.

A bicycle went past.

The leaf moved again.

It crossed the pavement and came to rest against a wall.

That afternoon, it rained.

The leaf became wet.

It stayed beside the wall.

The next morning, a girl walking to school saw it.

She stopped.

She picked it up.

It was very yellow.

She held it against the light.

She could see the little veins running through it.

She put it in her schoolbook.

At school, she showed it to her teacher.

“It's a leaf,” said the teacher.

“I know.”

The teacher smiled.

The girl put it carefully between two pages.

That afternoon, she carried the book home.

She put it on a shelf.

The leaf stayed there.

Outside, the tree lost more leaves.

Winter came.

The branches became bare.

Rain fell.

The wind blew.

Sometimes birds sat on the branches.

Sometimes they flew away.

The tree stood beside the road.

Nobody looked at it for very long.

Spring came.

Small green leaves appeared.

Then more.

Then hundreds.

The tree became green again.

One afternoon, the girl opened her schoolbook.

The yellow leaf was still there.

It had become dry and fragile.

She touched it carefully.

A small piece broke away.

She stopped touching it.

For a long time she looked at it.

Then she closed the book.

Years passed.

The girl grew older.

She moved to another house.

She took the schoolbook with her.

The leaf remained between its pages.

The tree beside the road grew larger.

One autumn, another yellow leaf came loose.

It floated down.

It landed on the road.

A bus went past.

The leaf moved.

It travelled a little way along the road, then stopped beside the kerb.

Nobody picked it up.

The wind carried it into the grass.

It disappeared beneath the fallen leaves.

The tree stood beside the road.

It lost another leaf.

And another.

And another.

No one noticed the particular moment when the tree became winter.

The Button in the Grass — A Senior Common Room Discussion

“I have solved the button.”

Professor Quillibrace did not look up.

“I'm beginning to think you have too much time.”

“The button in the grass.”

“I know which button.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“The brown one?”

“Precisely.”

Blottisham sat down.

“It is a story about identity.”

Quillibrace sighed.

“Of course it is.”

“The button is lost from a blue shirt.”

“Yes.”

“Then it lies in the grass.”

“Yes.”

“A boy finds it.”

“Yes.”

“He gives it to his mother.”

“Yes.”

“She recognises it.”

“Yes.”

“She sews it back onto the shirt.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham spread his hands.

“Identity restored.”

Stray looked thoughtful.

“Was it ever lost?”

“Of course.”

“The button?”

“Yes.”

“Or its identity?”

Blottisham paused.

“The button was lost.”

“That's not quite the same thing.”

“It was separated from its proper context.”

Quillibrace raised an eyebrow.

“Ah. Context.”

“Exactly.”

“The button was still a button.”

“Yes.”

“So what was lost?”

Blottisham frowned.

“Its place.”

“Which is different from its identity.”

“Not entirely.”

“Why not?”

“Because things are what they are in relation to other things.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“That is a sentence.”

“A good one.”

“Not necessarily a true one.”

Stray looked at the table.

“I think the boy's marble is interesting.”

Blottisham looked puzzled.

“The marble?”

“Yes. The boy wasn't looking for the button.”

“No.”

“He was looking for his marble.”

“Yes.”

“And he found the button instead.”

Blottisham considered this.

“So?”

“So the button becomes important because the boy wasn't looking for it.”

“That's absurd.”

“Is it?”

“He finds it by accident.”

“Yes.”

“And then he gives it to his mother.”

“Yes.”

“She knows what it is.”

“Yes.”

“And puts it back where it belongs.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham smiled.

“Exactly. The narrative confirms my thesis.”

“What thesis?”

“That objects have a proper place.”

Quillibrace looked at Stray.

“Does it?”

She shook her head.

“I don't think so.”

“But the button goes back onto the shirt.”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So that's where it ends up.”

“Where it belongs.”

“Perhaps.”

Blottisham groaned.

“Not again.”

Stray smiled.

“The story doesn't tell us that the button was unhappy in the grass.”

Blottisham stared at her.

“Buttons don't have feelings.”

“Then why are you so concerned about where it belongs?”

Quillibrace made a small approving sound.

Blottisham ignored him.

“The button is reunited with the shirt.”

“Yes.”

“The shirt needs a button.”

“Yes.”

“The button fits.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore—”

“Therefore,” said Quillibrace, “someone repaired a shirt.”

Blottisham looked annoyed.

“You are both determined to trivialise the story.”

“No,” said Stray. “We're trying not to make it say more than it does.”

“But surely the ending is significant.”

“What ending?”

“The button is where it was always meant to be.”

Stray smiled.

“Or perhaps it is simply where it is now.”

Blottisham looked at her.

“That distinction is unnecessarily subtle.”

“Perhaps.”

He looked at Quillibrace.

“Do you agree with her?”

Quillibrace thought for a moment.

“I think the button has had a remarkably eventful week.”

Blottisham frowned.

“That's not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I have.”

There was a pause.

Then Stray said:

“I wonder what happened to the marble.”

Blottisham looked alarmed.

“The marble?”

“Yes.”

“Don't.”

“What?”

“Don't start another story.”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“Too late.”

Outside, beneath the clothesline, the grass moved in the breeze.

There was nothing there.

The Button in the Grass

There was a button in the grass.

It was a small brown button with four holes in it.

It had been there since Tuesday.

On Tuesday, a woman had hung some washing on the line.

One of the shirts had been missing a button.

She had noticed this when she took the shirt off.

She had searched the grass.

She had searched beneath the clothesline.

She had searched around the basket.

But she had not found the button.

So she had gone inside.

The button stayed in the grass.

On Wednesday, it rained.

The button became muddy.

On Thursday, the sun came out.

The mud dried.

On Friday, a snail passed over it.

The button did not move.

On Saturday morning, a boy came into the garden.

He was looking for a marble.

He had lost it somewhere near the fence.

He looked under the bushes.

He looked behind the watering can.

He looked beneath the garden chair.

He did not find the marble.

But he found the button.

He picked it up.

“What's this?”

He rubbed it against his sleeve.

The button became cleaner.

He put it in his pocket.

Then he forgot about it.

That afternoon, the boy's mother was sitting beneath the tree.

She was sewing.

The boy came and sat beside her.

“What are you making?”

“A pocket.”

“For what?”

“For your jacket.”

He took the button from his pocket.

She looked at it.

“Oh,” she said.

She held it between her fingers.

“I know this button.”

The boy looked at her.

“It came off my blue shirt.”

She turned the button over.

There was a little thread still caught in one of the holes.

“I couldn't find it.”

The boy looked towards the grass.

“You found it?”

“I found it,” he said.

She smiled.

“Thank you.”

Then she put the button on the table beside her sewing.

The boy went to look for his marble again.

He found it beneath the garden chair.

The next morning, the woman sat beneath the tree with the blue shirt.

She took out the needle.

She threaded it.

She held the shirt in one hand and the button in the other.

For a moment she looked at them.

Then she sewed the button back on.

The shirt looked almost exactly as it had before.

The woman put it on.

She went outside.

The boy was playing near the fence.

He looked at the shirt.

“That's my button.”

The woman looked down.

“Yes.”

The button was where it had always been meant to be.

Or perhaps it was simply where it was now.

The boy ran off to find his marble.

The woman hung the washing on the line.

The shirt moved gently in the breeze.

The button held on.

And in the grass beneath the clothesline, there was nothing to find.

The Door That Was Open — A Senior Common Room Discussion

“I believe I have solved the door.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up from his newspaper.

“You have solved a door?”

“The door in the story.”

Miss Stray looked across the room.

“The one that was open?”

“Precisely.”

Quillibrace folded the newspaper.

“I had hoped it would remain unsolved.”

“The door is clearly a metaphor.”

“For what?”

“Possibility.”

Stray smiled.

“Of course.”

“The door is normally closed. Then it is found open. People hesitate. Someone goes in. Others follow. Eventually the room becomes occupied, and the door remains open.”

“Yes,” said Stray.

“Therefore the door represents the emergence of possibility from constraint.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“A respectable beginning.”

Blottisham looked pleased.

“Thank you.”

“I wasn't complimenting you.”

“I shall take it as one.”

Stray picked up her tea.

“But why was the door closed?”

“Because it was closed.”

“Yes, but why?”

Blottisham hesitated.

“That is irrelevant.”

“Is it?”

“Obviously. The important thing is that it becomes open.”

“But if the story never tells us why it was closed, how do we know that the opening represents possibility rather than, say, ventilation?”

Blottisham looked at her.

“Ventilation?”

“Yes.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“An underappreciated philosophical force.”

Blottisham ignored him.

“The inhabitants of the story respond to the open door.”

“Do they?” said Stray.

“Yes.”

“They respond to the room.”

“Because the door is open.”

“Perhaps.”

“Not ‘perhaps’.”

“Why?”

“Because the story says so.”

“No,” said Stray. “It says the door is open. It doesn't tell us why the people enter.”

Blottisham frowned.

“They discover the room.”

“Yes.”

“And then they use it.”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So perhaps the important event isn't that the door opens.”

Blottisham waited.

“It is that people begin to use what becomes available.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“That sounds suspiciously like an interpretation.”

Stray looked at him.

“It is.”

“Good.”

Blottisham leaned forward.

“Then I was right.”

“No.”

“But you just—”

“I said it was an interpretation.”

“Which means it is the meaning.”

Quillibrace sighed.

“Blottisham, if interpretation were identical with meaning, we could close the university.”

Blottisham looked genuinely puzzled.

“But then what are we doing here?”

Quillibrace looked around the room.

“I have often wondered.”

There was a pause.

Blottisham glanced towards the door.

It was open.

He stared at it.

Stray noticed.

“You've never noticed that before?”

“Of course I have.”

“You just looked surprised.”

“I was considering its semiotic significance.”

Quillibrace followed his gaze.

“It's been open all morning.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Who opened it?”

“I don't know.”

“Why hasn't anyone closed it?”

“No one has needed to.”

Blottisham stood up.

He walked towards the door.

He touched the handle.

Then he looked back.

“You realise this is exactly like the story.”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“No.”

“No?”

“This is the Senior Common Room.”

Blottisham looked at Stray.

“What's the difference?”

She thought for a moment.

“In the story, people discovered a room.”

“And here?”

“We're already in one.”

Blottisham considered this.

Then he looked at the open doorway again.

“But perhaps,” he said slowly, “the story has been happening here all along.”

Quillibrace looked over his newspaper.

“That would be unfortunate.”

“Why?”

“Because then we'd have to interpret ourselves.”

Stray smiled.

“Perhaps we already have.”

The three of them looked at the open door.

Nobody closed it.

The Door That Was Open

There was a door at the end of a hallway.

It was usually closed.

Nobody thought much about this.

When the door was closed, people walked past it.

When the door was open, people walked through it.

This seemed perfectly sensible.

One morning, the door was open.

Nobody had opened it.

A woman walking down the hallway stopped.

She looked at the door.

Then she looked at the room beyond it.

There was nothing unusual in the room.

There was a chair.

There was a window.

There was a little table with a plant on it.

The woman walked through the doorway.

She stood in the room for a moment.

Then she walked back into the hallway.

She closed the door.

The next morning, the door was open again.

The woman stopped.

She looked at it.

She closed it.

She walked away.

The following morning, it was open again.

This time she left it alone.

After a while, other people began to notice.

Some closed it.

Some walked through.

Some stood in the doorway and looked into the room.

One man said, “I thought that door was supposed to be closed.”

Nobody knew whether it was.

A little boy came along.

He pushed the door until it was almost shut.

Then he pushed it again.

It opened.

He pushed it shut.

It opened again.

He laughed.

He pushed it harder.

The door stayed closed.

The boy walked away.

A few minutes later, the door was open.

Nobody had seen it move.

By lunchtime, people had stopped trying to decide what to do about it.

The door was open.

So they left it open.

People began to use the room.

Someone brought in a chair.

Someone else brought in a book.

The plant on the little table was watered.

In the afternoon, the woman who had first found the door open returned.

She stood in the doorway.

The room looked different.

Not because anything had changed.

There was still a chair.

There was still a window.

There was still the little table with the plant on it.

But now there were people inside.

The woman stepped in.

She sat down.

Someone gave her the book.

She read for a while.

When she finished, she put the book on the table.

Then she got up and walked out.

As she reached the hallway, she turned around.

The door was still open.

She almost closed it.

Then she didn't.

That evening, everyone went home.

The hallway became quiet.

The room was empty.

The door remained open.

During the night, a moth flew through it.

It circled the lamp.

Then it flew back into the hallway.

In the morning, the door was still open.

Nobody was surprised.

And after a while, nobody could remember exactly why it had once been closed.

The Sock on the Fence — A Senior Common Room Discussion

“I have been thinking about the sock.”

Professor Quillibrace looked over the top of his newspaper.

“That sounds ominous.”

“The sock on the fence.”

“I know which sock you mean.”

“Good.”

Miss Stray was arranging biscuits on a plate.

“What have you discovered?”

“The underlying meaning.”

Quillibrace sighed.

Stray looked interested.

Blottisham leaned forward.

“The sock is displaced.”

“Yes,” said Stray.

“It is separated from its proper pair.”

“Yes.”

“It is discovered by a beetle.”

“No,” said Stray. “The beetle discovers the sock.”

Blottisham frowned.

“An important distinction.”

“Apparently.”

“The spider then encounters it.”

“Yes.”

“And the magpie moves it.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore the sock passes through a series of relations.”

Quillibrace folded his newspaper.

“Does it?”

“It is moved from one context to another.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is, in this case.”

“Why?”

“Because that is what happens.”

Quillibrace looked at Stray.

“I'm beginning to fear he may have stumbled upon the narrative.”

Stray smiled.

“But the sock doesn't seem to change.”

“Ah!” said Blottisham.

He pointed at her.

“Exactly.”

“The sock remains a sock.”

“Which proves my thesis.”

“What thesis?”

“That identity persists through relational transformation.”

Quillibrace stared at him.

“The sock falls into grass.”

“Yes.”

“It gets rained on.”

“Yes.”

“A magpie moves it.”

“Yes.”

“A girl finds it.”

“Yes.”

“She takes it home.”

“Yes.”

“She washes it.”

“Yes.”

“And eventually it is reunited with its other sock.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore—”

“Therefore,” said Quillibrace, “someone lost a sock.”

Blottisham stopped.

Stray laughed.

“That is unnecessarily reductive.”

“It is also entirely accurate.”

“But surely the story is asking us to think about displacement.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“In the fence.”

“No.”

“In the sock.”

“No.”

“In the narrative structure.”

Quillibrace waited.

Blottisham frowned.

“In the reader.”

“That is a dangerous place to put it.”

Stray sat down.

“I think the interesting thing is that nothing particularly interesting happens.”

Blottisham looked offended.

“Excuse me?”

“The sock is lost.”

“Yes.”

“It is found.”

“Yes.”

“It is moved around.”

“Yes.”

“It is reunited with its pair.”

“Yes.”

“And that's about it.”

Blottisham shook his head.

“No. There must be more.”

“Why?”

“Because we are discussing it.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“A devastating argument.”

Stray looked at Blottisham.

“Perhaps the story is simply about a sock.”

Blottisham stared at her.

“That cannot be the case.”

“Why not?”

“Because then why would anyone write it?”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“An excellent question.”

Blottisham stood up.

“I refuse to believe that an author would devote several hundred words to a sock without concealing something beneath the surface.”

“Perhaps,” said Stray, “the author was watching a sock.”

“Why?”

“Because it was there.”

Blottisham looked genuinely troubled.

“So there is no deeper meaning?”

Quillibrace glanced over the newspaper.

“There may be.”

Blottisham brightened.

“What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Professor!”

“I merely said there may be one.”

“But how can we know?”

“We can't.”

Blottisham sat down again.

Stray pushed the plate of biscuits towards him.

“Have one.”

He took a biscuit.

They sat quietly for a moment.

Then Blottisham said:

“I still think the sock represents something.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Probably laundry.”

Stray laughed.

And for once, nobody tried to stop him.