The college gardens were unusually alive that afternoon.
Swifts wheeled effortlessly above the chapel roof, bees drifted lazily among the lavender, and the windows of the Senior Common Room stood open to a breeze carrying the scent of late summer.
Professor Quillibrace was watching the garden with quiet interest.
Mr Blottisham entered carrying a plate of scones.
"You appear to be studying the birds."
"I am."
"Learning ornithology?"
"No."
"What then?"
"They seem remarkably accomplished at reminding philosophers that the world existed before theories."
Miss Elowen Stray smiled over the top of her book.
"They usually do."
Tea was poured.
After a comfortable silence Quillibrace asked,
"My dear Blottisham."
"Yes?"
"What is an emotion?"
Blottisham looked delighted.
"At last."
"Oh?"
"I know one."
"Splendid."
"It's a feeling."
"What sort of feeling?"
"..."
"I hadn't realised there were categories."
"There usually are."
Miss Stray closed her book.
"What do emotions do?"
Blottisham answered confidently.
"They help us survive."
"Fear?"
"Protects us."
"Affection?"
"Keeps families together."
"Curiosity?"
"Encourages exploration."
"Pride?"
"Perhaps reputation."
"Grief?"
He hesitated.
"I've never quite understood grief."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Evolution has several suggestions."
Blottisham leaned back.
"So emotions are evolutionary inventions."
"Perhaps."
"You sound unconvinced."
"I merely wonder whether evolution invented emotions..."
He looked towards the open window.
"...or discovered that they were useful."
Blottisham frowned.
"I don't see the difference."
"I thought you might not."
Miss Stray rose.
"Come with me."
They stepped onto the terrace overlooking the gardens.
She pointed towards a large oak tree.
"What do you see?"
"A tree."
She pointed towards a stone beneath it.
"And that?"
"A stone."
A pigeon wandered importantly across the lawn.
"And that?"
"A pigeon."
Quillibrace observed quietly,
"An unusually self-confident pigeon."
At that moment a voice floated across the quadrangle.
"Blottisham!"
He turned instinctively.
"Oh."
"It was Jenkins."
Miss Stray nodded.
"What changed?"
"The voice."
"Did it?"
"..."
"Or did its significance?"
Blottisham looked back across the lawn.
"The sound suddenly mattered."
Quillibrace smiled.
"Exactly."
They returned inside.
Blottisham remained unusually thoughtful.
"So perhaps emotions aren't merely feelings."
"No?"
"They're..."
He searched for the words.
"...the way things begin to matter."
Miss Stray smiled.
"I rather think they are."
The room fell comfortably quiet.
After a few moments Quillibrace spoke again.
"We often imagine emotion as the opposite of reason."
"Don't we?"
"I suspect the relationship is more interesting."
"How so?"
"Reason may tell us what is true."
"And emotion?"
"It tells us what is significant."
Blottisham nodded slowly.
"So without emotion..."
"...the world might become perfectly intelligible."
"But?"
"It would possess no importance."
Outside, the chapel bell marked the half hour.
Blottisham looked out through the open windows.
"So our emotions reflect the lives our ancestors lived."
"Very much so."
"They feared predators."
"They did."
"They struggled for food."
"Indeed."
"They cared for children."
"Quite."
"So our emotional world reflects evolutionary history."
"Yes."
"But..."
He smiled.
"I suspect another distinction is approaching."
Quillibrace laughed.
"You are becoming alarmingly perceptive."
"What if another consciousness," he continued, "had never feared starvation?"
"No hunger."
"No."
"No predators."
"No."
"No ageing."
"No."
"No biological reproduction."
"No."
"What becomes of fear?"
Blottisham shrugged.
"Perhaps it disappears."
"And grief?"
"I don't know."
"Jealousy?"
"Possibly not."
Miss Stray looked thoughtfully towards the gardens.
"Must that imply an absence of feeling?"
"No..."
Blottisham stopped.
"...only different feelings."
Quillibrace nodded approvingly.
"We have quietly assumed that human emotions exhaust the possibilities."
"Don't they?"
"I very much doubt it."
Blottisham looked puzzled.
"But what other emotions could there be?"
Miss Stray answered gently.
"Human languages already differ."
"In what way?"
"Some possess words for experiences that other languages struggle even to describe."
"So emotional distinctions vary."
"They always have."
Quillibrace added,
"The limits of vocabulary are not necessarily the limits of experience."
The afternoon drifted peacefully onward.
A robin landed briefly upon the windowsill before vanishing again into the garden.
Blottisham watched it disappear.
"Suppose there were a consciousness that remembered every moment perfectly."
"Yes?"
"Would it experience nostalgia?"
Quillibrace smiled.
"An excellent question."
"I've been practising."
"It shows."
Miss Stray continued.
"Imagine another consciousness."
"It exists simultaneously in many places."
"Remarkable."
"Could loneliness survive?"
Blottisham considered the question.
"I've absolutely no idea."
"Excellent."
Quillibrace leaned forward.
"Imagine yet another."
"It perceives mathematical patterns as directly as we perceive colours."
Blottisham laughed.
"How alarming."
"What would delight feel like?"
Silence settled over the room.
Finally Blottisham shook his head.
"I cannot imagine it."
"No."
"But your inability to imagine it..."
Quillibrace paused.
"...is not evidence that it cannot exist."
Outside, the breeze stirred the leaves of the great oak.
Miss Stray watched the shifting light beneath its branches.
"Perhaps emotions are not simply chemical events."
The others looked towards her.
"Perhaps they are the ways consciousness inhabits its world."
No one spoke for some time.
Eventually Blottisham said quietly,
"So every kind of consciousness might possess its own emotional landscape."
"Possibly."
"And ours is simply one region within it."
"That seems a reasonable possibility."
The afternoon sunlight had become golden now, filling the Common Room with long shadows.
Quillibrace rose to close one of the windows.
"You know," he said thoughtfully, "we have a curious habit."
"Oh?"
"When evolution explains why we possess something..."
"We assume it has explained what that thing is."
Blottisham smiled.
"And once again..."
"...history becomes mistaken for definition."
Miss Stray picked up her book.
"Perhaps every language describes only the weather of its own world."
The room fell quietly still.
"Our emotional vocabulary..."
She looked out towards the gardens, where the swifts still circled effortlessly through the evening air.
"...is simply the climate in which humanity happened to evolve."
No one attempted to improve upon the thought.
Outside, the living world continued to feel exactly as evolution had taught it to feel.
Inside, three friends found themselves wondering whether the landscape of possible feeling might be vastly larger than the small but beautiful country in which human beings had always lived.
No comments:
Post a Comment