The Senior Common Room: What Are We Supposed to Believe?

Mr Blottisham was looking distinctly dissatisfied.

“I have read the five essays,” he announced, placing a printed copy on the table. “All five. And I must say that I find the whole exercise rather unsatisfactory.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up from his tea.

“An impressive achievement, Blottisham. What, precisely, has disappointed you?”

“The absence of a conclusion, naturally. We have consciousness, experience, the brain, explanations, and finally the unexplained. And after all that, what are we supposed to believe?”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Stray, “that the questions are not quite as simple as we thought.”

Blottisham gave her a look of mild alarm.

“But surely we know whether the brain produces consciousness or not?”

“Do we?” asked Quillibrace.

“Well, it must do one or the other. Either consciousness is produced by the brain, or it isn't.”

“An admirably economical arrangement. Have you considered the possibility that the alternatives you have offered are not exhaustive?”

Blottisham frowned.

“I don't see what other possibility there could be.”

“Then perhaps,” said Quillibrace, “we have discovered the first difficulty.”

Miss Stray turned a page of the printed essays.

“There is something else. The series distinguishes between having an experience and knowing what that experience establishes. An experience may be entirely real without our interpretation of it being correct.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Blottisham, “that people don't know what they've experienced?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “I'm suggesting that knowing what happened to us and knowing what happened in the world are not necessarily the same thing.”

Blottisham considered this for a moment.

“It sounds suspiciously like refusing to believe people.”

“Or,” said Quillibrace, “refusing to decide in advance what their experiences must mean.”

Blottisham looked again at the essays.

“And what about all these unexplained phenomena? Near-death experiences, for instance. Surely they must tell us something.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Quillibrace.

“Then why not accept what they tell us?”

“Because we have not yet established precisely what they tell us.”

Blottisham sighed.

“I begin to suspect that this series was written by someone who doesn't want to answer questions.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps it was written by someone who wants to ask better ones.”

There was a brief silence.

Quillibrace put down his cup.

“Consider, Blottisham, what an explanation does. It accounts for something we have observed, but it also determines what we are prepared to investigate next. If we decide too quickly that we know what consciousness is, we may find ourselves investigating only what our explanation permits us to see.”

“So we should believe nothing?”

“An unnecessarily dramatic conclusion.”

“Then what should we believe?”

Quillibrace glanced at Miss Stray, who had returned to the essays.

“I think,” she said, “we might begin by taking experience seriously, without assuming that we already understand it. We might take the brain seriously, without assuming that its relationship to consciousness has been fully explained. And we might take the unexplained seriously, without making it prove more than it can.”

Blottisham stared at her.

“But that leaves everything open!”

“Not everything,” said Quillibrace. “Only the questions we have not yet answered.”

Blottisham gathered up his papers.

“I cannot say that I find this reassuring.”

“Perhaps reassurance,” said Quillibrace, “was never the purpose.”

Miss Stray looked out of the window.

“Perhaps the interesting thing,” she said, “is that we began by asking what we should believe, and have ended by asking what we might yet discover.”

Blottisham stood.

“Well, I shall have to think about that.”

Quillibrace returned to his tea.

“An excellent beginning.”