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In what now feels like a distant time, when we could still travel and meet people, I went to Oxford,to the home of author Philip Pullman. He made a pot of tea with his favoured blend of two spoons of Assam, one of lapsang souchong (“for the smokiness”), and we sat surrounded by books and pens and pads and knick‑knacks, and spoke of science, daemons and Dust – Pullman’s particle for consciousness.

Pullman had been writing for years before he became a global sensation with the His Dark Materials trilogy. The story of two children crossing into parallel worlds in a quest to understand the nature of reality and humanity draws on fantasy as well as theology, physics and neuroscience, with strong influences from poets William Blake and John Milton.

Perhaps his most celebrated creation is the daemon, a physical manifestation, in the form of an animal, that represents a person’s consciousness, spirit or soul. Pullman is following up the trilogy with another, The Book of Dust. The second part of this, The Secret Commonwealth, was out last year.

Philip Pullman: Consciousness is something that’s extraordinarily interesting and important, and we still haven’t cracked the hard problem [how it emerges from matter]. Ů��С��Ƶs can show consciousness happening in the brain, they can find the bit that lights up when you feel hungry or you’re frightened. But that isn’t the same as being hungry or frightened. This is the hard problem and it’s a very intriguing one.

RH: It is. But what I struggle with is that the hard problem of consciousness, what it is and how it works, doesn’t really give us anything concrete to get to grips with. It doesn’t give us anything experimental to work on.

PP: No, it doesn’t. Since Galileo, the approach of science has been a mathematical one, where you measure things, you’ve got a quantity that’s measurable, you measure it, and that’s part of what you do.
But science can’t deal with qualities. It can’t deal with experiences. It’s just not set up to do so. You need to accept that there are things that are important to us all, which science can’t yet get a grip on. How do you explain nostalgia for example? How would you build nostalgia into an artificial intelligence?

RH: You could assign different values to its memories and experiences in its algorithm. That would be a sort of artificial nostalgia.

PP: Would that be like Proust [famously reminded of his childhood by the taste of a madeleine cake dunked in tea]? I think a lot of the things that science is either dubious about or sceptical about, or refuses to have anything to do with, are these qualities that are so well expressed in terms of literature or music, poetry or the visual arts. Those are the tools with which we examine this kind of stuff. That doesn’t mean I’m a dualist [the idea mind and body are distinct]. I think dualism is wrong. There are not two kinds of stuff. There’s one kind of stuff, but it’s conscious.

RH: How do we move towards a scientific theory of consciousness without going down the dualist road?

PP: Gung-ho triumphalist proponents of science would say, “We haven’t got there yet. We’ll measure it one day.” I’d say, “Well, you won’t because it’s just not measurable.”

RH: I feel that’s a pessimistic outlook on what we will be able to explain about consciousness. Perhaps I am being a gung-ho scientist, but I feel that we will be able to get there eventually.

PP: I’d point out we’ve got there already. You read it in Shelley and Keats and Shakespeare, you hear it in Debussy and Stravinsky. We’ve got there. We’ve done it. But we don’t do it with science.

RH: At the beginning of The Secret Commonwealth there’s a quote from William Blake: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.” Tell me about that.

PP: I came across William Blake at that important stage in adolescence when the wind that blows on you there sets your course for the rest of your life. I was about 16. I’m very attracted by what he says, for example, about consciousness: “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five?” Or, “Man has no body distinct from his soul, for body that portion of soul discerned by the five senses.”

I like that way of thinking. I like that inclusiveness. I like the emotional power he gets from it. “Let me show you a world where every particle of dust is alive with joy.” That seems to me highly joyful, highly encouraging and healthy, an all round good way to look at the world.

RH: Going back to the things that Debussy and Keats do, and the things that scientists do, I want to believe there’s not that much difference between them, that there is an imagination going on.

PP: Science is clearly a field where the imagination can be triumphant. Einstein wasn’t terribly at home with mathematics. But he was good at visualising the physical properties of things and seeing deeply into the nature of them. I suppose a biologist would have the same affinity to think themselves into the being of whatever it is, squirrels, beetles, fish.

RH: What was your intention with the message about religion in His Dark Materials?

PP: I don’t believe in a god. But the questions that religion poses and tries to answer are the important questions about human life. Where do we come from? Is there a purpose in our living? How can we be good? Do we have to be good? What happens if we’re evil? Those are big, important questions. And the Christian religion did give answers, which worked for most of 2000 years and still do work for people. But then other religions have answers which aren’t so different. All that demonstrates is that people need stories. A story will help us make sense of anything. But a story is a story. You don’t have to believe everything in the story to find it satisfying.

RH: At the end of The Amber Spyglass, the main character Lyra and her daemon Pan say they need to build “the republic of heaven”. Do we need to build it? Or has it built itself?

PP: William Blake again: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” That raises questions too. Do we need a system to live by? Can we build our own? What would it be like to try and live without one? Well, in fact, I don’t think you can, because whether you consciously built it or not, your mind, everybody’s mind was formed not only by evolution, but also by experiences, by genetic factors that might predispose one to depression or its opposite.

So we have a system, most of us, but it’s a ragbag of memories, superstitions, inclinations, things we worked out for ourselves, things we bought wholesale from the nearest church. We all do have a sort of system, a thing that helps us to live in a meaningful way. And I think what Lyra and Pan were agreeing at the end of The Amber Spyglass is that we need to do that for ourselves. And poor Lyra is discovering in The Book of Dust that it’s not as easy as she thought.

RH: Were the daemons in your fictional worlds created or did they evolve?

PP: The question I’ve had more often than any other is, how do daemons get born? And I will say, well, you’re welcome to come up with any answer you like, but I’m going to answer it for you, because it’s a metaphor. It’s a very useful metaphor for human psychology. I found it in The Secret Commonwealth to be a very good analogy for depression. You don’t like your daemon. Or your daemon wants to leave you and go and live with someone else. It’s a very tight, neat, easily graspable way of picturing something that isn’t easily picturable otherwise. ❚

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