Thought and Calculation: Examining Tom Stoppard’s Theatrical Invention in 3 Plays

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Session Four

Stoppard-Session4-THP.pptx https://1drv.ms/p/c/bdc1f311ae670521/ETT3FJ3ZfsBEm4hPPSBk3hwBJm_u_FeEv-4FkTLbPONp8w?e=ARHAeh

The Hard Problem: Ideas and Themes

“The Hard Problem of the play’s title is a phrase coined by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers to describe the way in which consciousness arises from a physical world. What makes it hard is that we don’t understand it. What makes it a problem is slightly different. It isn’t the fact of consciousness, but our representations of consciousness, that give rise to most of the difficulties. We don’t know how to fit the first-person perspective into the third-person world that science describes and explores. But this isn’t because they don’t fit: it’s because we don’t understand how they fit. For some people, this becomes a question of consuming interest.”

Andrew Brown in The Guardian

A New York Times article on the friendly 25-year bet about consciousness between David Chalmers and a neuroscientist, Christof Koch: Can scientists find a clear neural correlate of consciousness?

An explanation of why Chalmers called consciousness the hard problem is here

Motherhood and trade-offs

Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem (2015) from Kathleen R. Hart

Hart writes about the play offers “a unique window onto two types of biases that affect people contending with Sarah Hrdy’s revelation that women weigh the costs as well as benefits of nurturing”

The principal setting of The Hard Problem is “The Krohl Institute for Brain Science,” a British think tank founded by American “squillionaire” (13) hedge fund owner Jerry Krohl. Unlike Jerry, who only values research for predicting stock trends, psychology chair Leo Reinhart is open-minded enough to hire Hilary Matthews, a doctoral candidate from a lackluster university who shares Leo’s interest in what philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard problem” of why consciousness exists. What is the relationship between physical properties and subjective experience? If science can’t account for “what consciousness is like,” then do mind and matter have different properties? (Chalmers, 1995, 201-2). Hilary’s attraction to the Hard Problem is fueled by her desire to believe in a benevolent force that would protect the child she relinquished at the age of fifteen. As she tells her high school friend Julia Chamberlain, she initially “felt relieved” when the adoption was prearranged, since she had no mother or “granny” and “wasn’t into babies.” But, she adds, “it was different when it came to it” (20). Hilary has since prayed nightly for “forgiveness” (9) and a chance to learn that her daughter, Catherine, is “all right” (52). The possibility that her prayers will be answered rests on the hope that human consciousness and altruism operate in a realm distinct from the body. Her outlook is scorned by the play’s neuroscientists, who take for granted that natural selection favored aid-giving behavior due to the benefits accrued to an organism or its genetic kin.

Stoppard shares Hilary’s outlook. Speaking of The Hard Problem, he remarked: “I’m exploring myself.” Troubled by claims that “altruism has a secret agenda which is self-serving,” he “invented a young woman who doesn’t think that it’s necessarily true. In fact, she’s pretty damn sure it’s not true” (“Interview” 2018). We might expect Stoppard to reject Richard Dawkins’ assertion in the 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene—recanted by Dawkins in the 30^th-anniversary edition—that “we are born selfish” (Dawkins 2006, 4). But the playwright also takes issue with David Sloan Wilson’s view that helping behavior prompted by concern for others emerged because parts of the brain evolved by group selection (Wilson and Sober, 1999). As Stoppard explained in a joint interview with Wilson, evolutionary explanations fail to “touch the mystery of altruism” or “do justice to the way we shape our lives.” People won’t feel morally accountable, he argues, unless they conceptualize “goodness” as something “outside the orbit” of science. Whether or not Stoppard sees himself “mixing facts with values,” as Wilson puts it (Wilson and Stoppard 2015 TVOL), the playwright holds out, like Hilary, for the possibility of a spiritual force that transcends physicality (Lee 2021 711-12). For Stoppard, the universe only seems indifferent to morality because humans can never see “the whole picture” (Demastes 2012, 26). And yet, despite his rejection of evolutionary approaches to altruism, Stoppard enlists them in order to work through what may be his own fantasy of sacrificial motherhood. The result is a maternal melodrama that concludes not with the reunion between mother and daughter but with Hilary’s transition from the field of psychological science to philosophy.

Throughout the play, Hilary seems in search of her true calling. In some ways, her character sustains the melodramatic fantasy of a penitent fallen woman who dreams only of restoring her maternal role: “I missed her like half of me from the first day.” Her guilt takes the form of classic mother-blame when she pictures herself callously deserting her baby for “a career: “I’ve been letting her go, as though I’d swapped her for a doctorate” (44). Hilary’s weakness in math, resulting in a study compromised by missing data, reinforces the Victorian notion that she was destined for motherhood, not science. And yet, if Hilary is correct that “people out for themselves” could “think they’re justified by biology” (40), then dramatically central is what role Hilary could play in scientific debates, and not just whether she can find Catherine. Indeed, though it implies that Hilary too must change, the play is primarily an indictment of the institutional structures and attitudes that exclude her.

The opening scene, presumably set in the late 1990s, points to a mutually reinforcing relationship between indifference to mothers’ perspectives and “an intellectual pecking order in which an egoistic explanation for a given behavior, no matter how contrived, [was] favored over an altruistic explanation” (Wilson and Sober 1999, 8). Hilary, twenty-two, is being prepped for job interviews by Spike, her thirty-year-old tutor who has her role-play the Prisoner’s Dilemma of game theory according to which “two rational prisoners will betray each other even though they know they would have done better to trust each other” (4). Hilary stubbornly opts to sacrifice herself to give the other prisoner, whom she fancifully calls her lover, “a chance to go straight”; when an exasperated Spike demands to know why, she replies “Because I’m good.” Spike’s lecture of rebuke parodies the overreaching claims of gene-centered evolutionary psychology that had yet to incorporate research by feminist and female sociobiologists who were more likely to “see human behavior as responsive to its current environment and capable of within-individual change” (Liesen 2007, 52-3). His declaration that the human brain is “hard-wired for me first” and that “altruism is an outlier unless you’re an ant or a bee,” echoes Dawkins’ explanation of Robert Trivers’ theory of reciprocal altruism as it applies primarily to non-human species (Dawkins 2016 216-244). Furthermore, Spike’s claim that “a statistical tendency” proves “self-interest is bedrock” is contradicted in Scene III by Amal, a Krohl candidate who calls “the Dilemma” “oversold” “with the one-shot game” (18), as research confirms (Raihani and Bshary, 2011). However, audience members need not be acquainted with the science to perceive Spike as less preoccupied with truth than with his own status in a male-dominated environment that equates kindness with being what biologist Maynard Smith called a “sucker.” In addition to uncritically dismissing Hilary’s objections in favor of his totalizing narrative, he exploits his pupil’s pessimism over her job prospects to engage her in a sexual relationship.

Altruism

“The first hard problem is altruism and goodness in all of its forms. For Tom and his protagonist Hilary, science is a parched desert when it comes to explaining the nature of goodness. As Spike, the supremely confident scientist in the play puts it, ‘Above all, don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science!’”

“The second hard problem is that everything cannot be reduced to physical causes, but science pretends that it can. We don’t need a fictional character to express this opinion because we have Sir Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, who is quoted in the playbill of The Hard Problem as writing in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambition, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’”. [TJE Note, I think that Spike says it more entertainingly than Crick]

“The third hard problem is that even if science can explain the kind of instinctive altruism found in bees and brainworms (an example that Tom lifted from Unto Others to use in his play!) it can’t or at least hasn’t explained the kind of consciously motivated altruism found in humans.”
David Sloan Wilson

More of the exchange in the topic between TS and DSW can be found here

“Stoppard’s characters argue not just about machine intelligence, but about the possibility of altruism as humans experience it, rather than as evolutionary biologists can analyse it. Consciousness can’t be reduced to brain mechanisms, says the heroine, and love can’t be understood entirely as self-delusion, or as a tarpaulin thrown over the horrible mechanisms of genetic selfishness to conceal our real motives from ourselves.”
Andrew Brown in The Guardian

Bo: I think it’s good to be good, I don’t see that it matters what makes you good.

Hilary: It might matter if people who are out for themselves think they’re justified by biology.
—Tom Stoppard, The Hard Problem

consciousness, free will

A pivotal scene setting out the argument is here

“Someone tells you you can run the film backward billions of years to an enormous bang and nothing but particles joining up into big clumps like this one, except not like this one—because on this one the chemistry came alive and kicked into an algorithm that kept unspooling till there was you collecting spit from a poker game, and you don’t bat an eyelid.”
–Tom Stoppard, The Hard Problem

TS: There’s an exchange in THP where a young woman, (Hillary) believes X and a man (Spike) who believes Y, and the man asks her why she’s afraid to make her own values instead of wanting them underwritten by a “supreme being”, and she says to him something like, “What is the difference between a supreme being and being programmed by your biology?” He replies: “Freedom. I can override the programming.” And she says: “Who can? Who is the you outside your brain? Where?” And I still do not understand how you escape that loop.”

More from DSW and TS on what consciousness is

Wilson: There’s a moment in the play where Hilary challenges Spike to explain consciousness, and he grabs her finger and pushes it into a candle flame and when she quickly withdraws it, he says: “That’s consciousness for you – the signal went to the brain … and that’s all there is to consciousness.”

Stoppard: She rejects that with contempt and asks him to do the same thing for sorrow … I think the reason we’re talking about this at all is that for most people that doesn’t do justice to the way we shape our lives, and this is why I asked you about using a word such as transcendence. There’s a discontinuity that shows up at various points in the sciences. There’s a moment of discontinuity when brain activity becomes content, and that is our mystery, it’s what makes us human. Human beings of course are animals, but are we just very, very sophisticated animals or does being human mean something beyond biology, and if it seems to, is that something only our illusion, our conceit?

Science looks fair to solve the technical mysteries one by one. And when they are solved the question is: what is the meaning of that, does it have any meaning? I think a lot of our altruism, which we all exhibit, happens on a one-to-one level, with family, for example. You’re impassioned about making the world a better place in your town and ultimately in the planet and you’re going to do it by manipulating the environment so that the environment produces objectively better social behaviour. That’s admirable, but in the truest kind of way it misses out altruism completely. Altruism is what you do for somebody you love, and you don’t love good order and sociality in the same sense that you love your family.

Here’s the whole interview

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Session Five

Conflicting Idea and Conclusions

Stoppard-Session-5-Ideas-collide.pptx

The Playwrighting Process

“Stoppard, who has written only one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), quips that “dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself”. His imagination is drawn to situational paradox. Yet he waits for a spark. “I’m so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play,” he says. “It doesn’t happen very often. I don’t have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.”

“After The Real Thing (1982) – for Billington, ‘one of the most painful plays about the agony of infidelity written since the war’ – his work became even more of an intellectual stretch. In Hapgood (1988), he combined quantum mechanics with cold-war spying, and in Arcadia, chaos theory with Byron and 18th-century landscape gardening. He says he reads popular science “for pleasure, not research – and not for the prose. I do try to be as accurate as I can.” Yet he can also be ‘completely cavalier: if I discover something didn’t really happen, I say the whole thing’s made up, a parallel world.’”
The Guardian

Further References

Tom Stoppard’s Plays Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony By Nigel Purse

https://web.kamihq.com/web/viewer.html?document_identifier=BDC1F311AE670521%3A%3ABDC1F311AE670521!s4a91a7161e704069bc9d51f05904b343&filename=FaberCriticalGuide_1.pdf&microsoft_user_id=00000000-0000-0000-bdc1-f311ae670521&kami_user_id=5534267&source=onedrive

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32298621/

https://charlierose.com/videos/11157

https://charlierose.com/videos/19247

https://www.radioswissclassic.ch/en/music-database/title/427787a0d4726e6ce3c060393d4dab143fe6b

https://openlibrary.org/account/loans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3InxM58pKGM

https://math.bu.edu/DYSYS/arcadia/sect5.html

https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/5552

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/500996

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZaZP-WuR_oC&pg=PA177&dq=dramatic#v=onepage&q=dramatic&f=false

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il5CT1n4ql0&t=5s

https://www.academia.edu/1120868/Genius_Isn_t_Like_Your_Average_Grouse_The_Science_and_Politics_of_the_Particular_in_Tom_Stoppards_Arcadia?uc-g-sw=41735796

https://www.storylineproject.com/

https://nextact2follow.com/#home

https://actorstheatreworkshop.org/play-readings/

https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/e/1FAIpQLSeyDR6OVGMemZqn36hkLZZ7yYdfAf6C1mkvJ9DwKr1FGtmJkw/formResponse

https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCUZM_TI5S1MHV54gTOem-zQ

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279326090_Consciousness_myth

https://books.google.com/books?id=CCVoDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA191&dq=the+hard+problem+stoppard+-ai&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj4-Lrmur6QAxXjFlkFHbtFJhUQuwV6BAgMEAg#v=onepage&q=the%20hard%20problem%20stoppard%20-ai&f=false

https://www.studiotheatre.org/plays/play-detail/2012-2013-the-real-thing/tom-stoppard-and-intertextuality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAJLBDCCTg8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DL0z3SOboY

https://www.howardgardner.com/synthesizing/stoppard-staging-and-synthesizingnbspa-case-study-of-a-leading-playright

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331577655_The_Mote_in_God’s_i_Fourier_Fractals_and_Imaginary_Numbers_in_Tom_Stoppard’s_Arcadia

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/926806/summary

Tom Stoppard’s Plays : Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony [1 ed.] 9789004319653, 9789004318366 – DOKUMEN.PUB

Arcadia Quotes by Tom Stoppard

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/theater/tom-stoppard-the-hard-problem.html

https://georgelamplugh.com/2012/08/01/adventures-in-interdisciplinary-land-1-the-uses-of-history-in-tom-stoppards-arcadia/

https://www.commentary.org/articles/terry-teachout/tom-stoppard-greatest-living-english-playwright/

https://swiatislowo.publisherspanel.com/article/147963/en

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