And we need to recall that what seems to be a compelling reductive version is telling you nothing, except that this is an intrinsic element in a complex reality. Behind that reductionism, as again I’ve suggested, is what’s often an unexamined notion of matter. Daniel Dennett (a philosopher for whom I have a great deal of respect) has said that we have to bear in mind in any discussion of consciousness that there is only one kind of stuff. And while that’s very tempting, I want to know a little bit more about what he means by ‘stuff’. Because, of course, the world is not full of stuff; the world is a very complex set of interactions of information-bearing energy. And when you’ve said that, and recognized that the word ‘information’ is, as the professionals say, ‘analogical’ (that is, that it works on a number of different levels in interestingly different ways), it’s no longer particularly interesting to say ‘there’s one sort of stuff’. The world we inhabit is not a world where little solid things bump into each other and nudge each other around. It is a world in which information and instructions (interesting we use these nakedly intellectual metaphors) are conveyed through material exchanges of energy, and the more we analyse those material exchanges of energy, the less it looks like little bits of stuff.
No new discovery, no new method, will ever give a final victory to either interpretation. For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn’t read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.