Game of Thrones and Philosophy (12 page)

Sometimes we too perceive our surroundings without consciousness. In the classroom where I lecture, I often pace back and forth in the front of the room near the desk. And although I’m not paying attention to the desk—I’m not consciously aware of it—I navigate around it easily enough. My senses are detecting it, but there’s no conscious awareness attached. A more familiar example that philosophers like to discuss is
the long-distance driver
. This happens to everyone: You’re driving along on a highway for hours; you look up and see that you’re already near your destination, and you have no awareness of having gone past many familiar sights. Maybe you were listening to music or to
House and Philosophy
on audio, but you weren’t paying attention to the road at all. (Contrast this with the driving experience you have in heavy traffic in a rainstorm, when your awareness is totally present and focused.) Yet you don’t hit anyone or drive off the road; you still perceive the environment.

Wargs Again

“When I touched Summer, I felt you in him. Just as you are in him now.”
8

Much of the time, our perception isn’t so lacking in consciousness, but it might be possible that animal perception is
always
like this. That’s what Descartes thought. In our world, it’s possible, but extremely unlikely. Again, given all we know about animals biologically, and the similarity of their brains and sense organs to ours, we have every scientific reason to think that most higher animals have conscious sensory experiences very similar to our own.

That’s in our world; but what about Westeros and beyond? If we revisit wargs, there are some very interesting possibilities. Consider a case where Bran’s consciousness is “inside” Summer, so that Bran is experiencing what is happening where Summer’s direwolf body is located, perhaps very far away. Summer could be operating just as Descartes suggested, at sensation level one, while Bran’s consciousness provides the two higher levels—the awareness of the sensations and the ability to make judgments about them.

At first, the possibility of wargs looks bad for materialism. If one can transfer one’s consciousness somewhere else, then it appears that consciousness must be separate from brain function. In a world with wargs, must materialism then be false? Does this mean, in other words, that consciousness must be some sort of nonphysical phenomenon? No. There are several possibilities.

Perhaps consciousness is some sort of energy field generated by brains—pure speculation here—and wargs’ brains can send this energy field into other brains. Now, there are two ways to think about this. If we say that physical things obey physical laws, and warg brains violate these laws, then the existence of wargs would mean that materialism is false. That’s one possibility. The other possibility is
magic
. Wargs are supernatural creatures, after all. The fact that they can do what they do requires only that physical laws get violated, not that anything nonphysical occurs. This, to me, seems to be the more plausible explanation in this strange world.
9

What about in our world? Remember, we started talking about wargs as a way of exploring Nagel’s “what it’s like” problem—the problem of
subjectivity
. If there are subjective facts about what it’s like to have a given experience, and if such facts can be known only from the point of view of the experiencer, does that show that the physical facts aren’t
all
the facts? I don’t see that it does at all. The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) argued that our experiences, which he thought were identical with brain events, were different from other physical facts only in how they are known (not in what they’re made of). We know our experiences
directly
because they occur in us (in our brains); other physical events that occur outside of our brains (in a different space-time region, Russell would say), we know
indirectly
, by inference. If Russell is right (he is; trust me on this), then subjectivity poses no problem for materialism in our world either.

What about the Wights?

A shard from his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye.

The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.
10

Another way that philosophers try to argue against materialism is by the supposed possibility of zombies. Now you might be thinking that what they have in mind—the philosophers, not the zombies who lack consciousness and have nothing in mind—sounds a lot like those terrible creatures created by the Others: the wights.
11
But you would be mistaken. The zombies that philosophers are talking about, I like to call
phenomenal zombies
. A zombie of this type would be some physical duplicate of a conscious being but would lack conscious experience altogether.

So imagine a creature physically just like Sansa, who lacks consciousness. It’s all dark on the inside. Some of you might think that I’m describing the real Sansa here, but that would be mean. Anyway, “Zombie Sansa” is a physical duplicate of the real Sansa who behaves, both verbally and nonverbally, exactly like her counterpart. But Zombie Sansa has no conscious experiences of any sort taking place. If this is possible, then it seems like materialism must be false; there is more to a person than just their physical being.

Many philosophers think that phenomenal zombies are possible, but I believe they are not. If materialism is true, then we know that when your brain is in the right state, you are conscious. Even if materialism is not true and consciousness is nonphysical, it’s connected to the appropriate brain states in a lawlike way (even Descartes granted this). What this means is that whether or not materialism is true, given that your brain is in the right state, and given that the laws of nature are the way they are, there must be consciousness. So when someone thinks they can conceive of Zombie Sansa—remember, a being that’s an exact physical duplicate of Sansa but without consciousness—what they are conceiving is a case where the laws of nature are operating differently. But a brain state that operated according to different laws of nature would be a different brain state. This is true because which brain state one is in is relative to some theoretical description of the brain. If brains operated according to different laws, then a different theoretical description would be in order. The phrase “same brain state” in part means “operates according to the same laws in the same way.”
12

Thus, in our “thought experiment” where we try to imagine a physical duplicate of Ned Stark’s oldest daughter who lacks consciousness, we’re actually imagining a being that has a different sort of brain operating according to different laws of nature. A materialist would not be troubled by this; such a being would after all
not
be a physical duplicate of our Sansa. Because of magic, however, in Westeros I think we would have to say that Zombie Sansa
is
possible to imagine. There it might be that sometimes the lawlike functioning of our brains can go awry. Different metaphysics, different conclusion.

Back to the Wights

Then he saw it, a shadow in the shadows, sliding toward the inner door that led to Mormont’s sleeping cell, a man-shape all in black, cloaked and hooded . . . but beneath the hood, its eyes shone with an icy blue radiance.
13

When we return to thinking about the wights—the real zombies like those we see in monster movies as opposed to the philosophers’ phenomenal zombies—we can again wonder whether they are possible, and if so, what that tells us about ourselves.

First, is there an analogous thought experiment in which we imagine a physical duplicate of a living person, but the duplicate is not alive? Well, there used to be a popular view known as
vitalism
, which claimed that living things differed from nonliving things by having an additional substance, a vital fluid or life force. In other words, living things were made of different stuff. Vitalism has been thoroughly discredited by the biological sciences. We now understand life pretty well. We know that living things aren’t made of different stuff, and that being alive is a matter of your physical stuff having a certain structure and function.

As a consequence, imagining a functioning physical duplicate of a person who is not alive doesn’t seem possible. The wights coming from beyond the Wall, however, is a real and terrifying scenario; but their existence, just like the Zombie Sansa of my earlier thought experiment, is possible only because the supernatural is at work. The normal laws of nature don’t always apply in this world.

Moreover, a closer examination of the wights reveals that they’re not entirely without life anyway—and the same is true of familiar movie zombies as well. The Others, who seem to be a demon race we know very little about (as of
A Dance with Dragons
at least), somehow are able to reanimate certain corpses, thus creating the wights. They have some signs of life—they can move, for example, and appear to have limited brain function—but they don’t show evidence of most normal metabolic processes. They don’t eat, eliminate waste, or reproduce, and they can’t be killed in common ways. So what we have here is perhaps best described as partly dead and partly alive. This changes little, however, when it comes to their conceivability.

Neither wights nor phenomenal zombies pose any threat if one wants to defend a materialist view. Neither is possible in our world; both are possible in Westeros and beyond because of supernatural forces at work, rather than nonphysical ones. In our world, we think we can imagine phenomenal zombies because we don’t as yet have a fully worked-out theory of consciousness. Our theories about life, on the other hand, are pretty much settled, and this is an important difference. What we know, as well as what we don’t know, impacts what we can and can’t conceive. When you throw some supernatural elements into the mix, mind and metaphysics become as tangled as the roots of a weirwood tree, and as mysterious as the messages in Melisandre’s fires.

NOTES

1
. George R. R. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 11.

2
. George R. R. Martin,
A Clash of Kings
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 766.

3
. George R. R. Martin,
A Storm of Swords
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), pp. 883–884.

4
. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Philosophical Review
83 (1974), pp. 435–450.

5
. George R. R. Martin,
A Dance with Dragons
(New York: Bantam Books, 2011), p. 61.

6
. René Descartes,
Letter to the Marquess of Newcastle
, Nov. 23, 1643. Reprinted in Tom Regan and Peter Singer,
Animal Rights and Human Obligations
, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 17.

7
. Voltaire remarked, “Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.” In his
Philosophical Dictionary
, “Animals,” reprinted in Regan and Singer, p. 21.

8
. Martin,
A Clash of Kings
, p. 438.

9
. Some might question this distinction at first, but saying that physical laws got violated is
not
the same as saying that something nonphysical occurred. If there was real magic and someone could, for example, actually make cards disappear and then reappear, no nonphysical cards would be involved. But maybe the laws of physics holding the atoms of the cards together could temporarily be suspended, so the disappearing could occur.

10
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 11.

11
. Keep in mind that the Others and the wights are not the same. The Others are a demon race who can reanimate corpses; the animated corpses are the wights. The Others can be killed by
dragonglass
, but not by fire, while the opposite is true of the wights. Adding to the confusion is that the wildlings often refer to the Others as “White Walkers.”

12
. Think of it this way: The laws of nature aren’t “added on” after the fact to objects, like, say, the laws of chess (or I could’ve said
cyvasse
). You can take a chess piece and use it in some other way (as a paperweight, for example) where it’s no longer obeying the laws of chess. But you can’t do the same for water, or for a particular brain state.

13
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 565.

Chapter 10

MAGIC, SCIENCE, AND METAPHYSICS IN
A GAME OF THRONES

Edward Cox

In Westeros and beyond, before the beginning of
A Game of Thrones
, magic has been disappearing.
1
The dragons, the children of the forest, and the Others are gone. They live only in tales told to the young. In this way Westeros is like our world. There seems to be little place for magic or the supernatural in our world, and even the long-held belief in immaterial souls is threatened by the advance of physical science. Yet magic returns to Westeros. Part of the appeal of fantasy in general, and
A Game of Thrones
in particular, is the idea that there might be room left in the world for a sense of wonder, for things that escape the net of explanation in terms of the physical sciences. There is room in our world for the wonders of science. But is there room for the wonder of magic, or at least for nonphysical things?

Let’s Get Physical

Physicalism
is the philosophical view that there are only physical things. Is physicalism true, or are there ghosts, immaterial souls, or other nonphysical things? These are questions of
metaphysics
—questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Science can help us answer such questions. A fantasy novel can’t give us answers, but it can help us imagine ways in which the world might differ if physicalism were to be false.

So let us reason like maesters and begin by getting clear on our concepts. A more precise definition of physicalism includes two ideas. First, everything that exists is physical. That means there are no immaterial souls, minds, or vital forces. Second, everything about the world depends on arrangements of this physical stuff. It may not be obvious why this second claim is necessary for a statement of physicalism, so consider this example: Imagine that there are two people who are completely physically identical. When speaking of duplicates, I do not mean twins, but physical duplicates down to the exact arrangement of the molecules making up their bodies. According to the first of the two statements of physicalism, these two bodies won’t be made up of any nonphysical parts, but it is still possible that they could differ in other ways. For example, one exact duplicate might be happy while the other is sad, or one could be conscious and the other asleep. If only the first part of the statement of physicalism were true, some features, or
properties
, as philosophers call them, of the world might differ without there being any difference in the physical stuff that makes them up. The second claim, that everything about the world is determined by the arrangement of physical stuff in it, emphasizes the dependence of everything on the physical world. For one identical person to be happy and the other sad, there would have to be a corresponding difference in their brain chemistry; they could not have identical atoms in all the same locations while being in a different mental state.

Now that we have a definition of physicalism, we can try to decide whether it is true in our world or in Westeros. One way of trying to show that physicalism is true is by arguing that only physical things could have any effect. Consider, therefore, these two statements:

Before trying to decide whether these claims are true, we should show how they support physicalism. Let’s start by considering what must be the case for something to be a cause, to have any effect at all. For something to have an effect, it must either have a physical effect or a nonphysical effect. So, when Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window of the First Keep in Winterfell, perhaps ironically, he attributes his action to his love for Cersei.
2
According to our statement 2, if Jaime’s love causes the physical damage to Bran’s body, by means of his physical pushing and Bran’s physical body falling, then Jaime’s love must be a physical state, presumably some brain state. So, if the first alternative is true, that Jaime’s love causes a physical effect, then that emotion must itself be physical as well.

On the other hand, we might think that Jaime’s brain state causes the physical pushing, the physical falling, and ultimately the physical damage to Bran’s body, but Jaime’s love is something else, something nonphysical. Then, we might ask, if Jaime’s love is not a physical state of his brain, what is there for it to do? The only remaining possibility appears to be that it has some nonphysical effect. For instance, it might affect some nonphysical state of Bran’s. But how this would work is a mystery.

It seems more likely that, given what we know through empirical studies, anything that affected Bran’s nonphysical mind—assuming for the moment that there are such things—would have to do it by affecting his brain. We know that our conscious experiences, for example, are affected by drugs, alcohol, and blows to the head; our mental states are altered by the chemical changes that occur in our brains. So in our example, assuming that Bran’s mind is nonphysical, if Jaime’s love is to have an effect on it, we can best explain this by describing how it affects Bran’s brain. We would then be left to conclude either that Jaime’s love did nothing (which is ruled out by statement 1), or that it somehow affected Bran’s brain. But, by statement 2, for Jaime’s love to have that physical effect, it must be physical. Therefore, love, and everything else, has to be physical.

Philosophers are a contentious bunch, and not all of them agree with every assertion from the previous paragraph, but we can use some illustrations from
A Game of Thrones
to see why those assertions are nonetheless likely to be true. Let’s start with the idea that everything that exists has to have an effect. The reason to think this claim is true is that if something existed and had no effect, we would have no reason to believe in it. For example, one of the reasons Maester Luwin believes the Children of the Forest no longer exist is that they never seem to do anything. No one in the Seven Kingdoms has seen the Children of the Forest or been affected by them in any way for thousands of years. It is the fact that they don’t do anything that leads people to doubt whether they are real. Admittedly, we are assuming that to know something or to have reason to believe in something, it would have to have an effect. While there might be other ways of knowing, if we tried to imagine something that not only did not do anything but
could
not do anything at all, we would have to wonder why anyone would believe in it. We could never
disprove
the existence of something that never does anything, but its existence would be completely unknowable. So statement 1 looks like a reasonable thing to believe.

The main reason to believe statement 2 has to do with the success of science in explaining the world in physical terms. And we also have reason to believe the second part of our definition of physicalism—that everything that happens in the world depends on the arrangement of the underlying physical stuff that makes it up—based on the perceived authority of the physical sciences. That means we should talk a little about what science is and how it can tell us about reality.

Science, in the actual world, can tell us a lot about what sorts of things exist and what sorts of things do not exist. In fantasy novels such as
A Game of Thrones
, magic limits the possibility of comprehensively explaining everything in terms of physical things and forces, and the laws governing them. Fantasy novels show different ways things could be, and the happenings in Westeros can serve to expand our view of the way things are, and the ways in which these things relate to one another.

Science in
A Game of Thrones

There is an organized system of knowledge of the natural world in
A Game of Thrones
, but it is not a topic much discussed in the books. The maesters, the closest equivalent to scientists in Westeros, are highly respected as knowledgeable advisers to rulers. Each maester is a generalist, with knowledge of medicine, politics, engineering, and warfare. The maesters’ expertise is practical, but to have such applied knowledge, they must have theoretical knowledge underlying it.

Although not all of the science in George R. R. Martin’s world resembles that of our world, the maesters’ knowledge shows that some of it does. For example, the maesters know to boil wine to clean wounds, and so it is likely that there are microorganisms that cause infections in Martin’s world.
3
In addition, the maesters’ understanding of physical forces allows them to construct the Wall and the elaborate pulley system that brings people and goods into the Eyrie.
4
So there are likely to be laws of motion and physical force much like our own.

There also appear to be biological units, perhaps genes, that explain the heritability of physical characteristics. For example, by reading
The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms, With Descriptions of Many High Lords and Noble Ladies and Their Children
,
5
and following up on Robert Baratheon’s bastard children, Eddard Stark discovers that the Baratheons always give birth to black-haired children. “Always [Stark] found the gold yielding before the coal.”
6
This indicates that something at least similar to actual-world genetics operates in Westeros.
7
In a similar vein, we see that children of the Starks and Tullys inherit coloration and facial structure from one side of the family or the other. Indeed, we discover that some of the Starks—for example, Arya Stark, Jon Snow, and Lyanna Stark, Eddard’s sister—have longer faces than other members of the family.
8
These facts suggest there are units of inheritance that offspring take from their parents and that these units explain how traits are passed down from one generation to the next.

It is even possible that some of what the inhabitants believe to be sorcery might simply be advanced technology. The folded steel of Valyrian blades, reputed to be the product of sorcery, may be simply the result of advanced sword-making techniques such as those practiced by medieval Japanese swordsmiths.
9
These scientific and technological facts suggest a world operating in many respects according to the same principles and made up of the same constituents as our own. If this evidence were all that was available, we might conclude that physicalism was true in Westeros.

Magic and Causation

These examples show that there is some reason to think that all the features of Westeros are determined by arrangements of physical stuff. The more complete scientific explanations in terms of physics, chemistry, and biology become, the more likely it is that the world depends on these physical things. However, magic might limit these scientific explanations and show how things could have different effects even if all the arrangements of physical stuff were the same.

We now come to the evidence for the principle that everything depends on the constituents of the physical world. What would it mean for some of the features of the world
not
to depend on the arrangements of physical stuff underlying them? It would mean that a change could occur without any change occurring in the physical stuff. That does not seem plausible, and one illustration from
A Game of Thrones
can help show this.

When Jafer Flowers and Othor are reanimated and attack the Night’s Watch, their bodies appear to undergo some sort of physical transformation in order for them to be animate. It is very unlikely that something could be physically exactly the same as a corpse and act as Dead Othor did. Put simply, corpses cannot walk, see, or be cut into pieces and continue to fight. Given the ordinary physical, chemical composition of a human body, there does not seem any way that it could do these things while in the same physical state as ordinary dead matter. We do indeed find this to be the case given the physical differences between their bodies and other, more normal corpses. As Samwell Tarly notes, the bodies of Dead Othor and Flowers do not smell like other bodies and have not decayed as ordinary flesh would.
10
In order for them to be reanimated, it appears there must be some change in the underlying material structure or organization of their physical bodies. Another way of putting this idea is that Dead Othor and Flowers cannot be wights, or the walking dead, without some change in their physical bodies. If you recall, this is the second part of our definition of physicalism, that every feature of the world depends on arrangements of physical stuff.
11

Let’s now see what support there is for our statement 2, that every physical effect has a physical cause. If statement 2 is true, then given what’s been argued so far, physicalism seems to be true as well. So, what reason is there to think that this principle is true?

In our world, statement 2 is supported by achievements in the physical sciences. As scientists discovered laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and the neurosciences that appeared to explain events independent of immaterial minds, souls, or life forces, it suggested that nothing outside the physical could have any effect on the physical world. The physical sciences seem to provide complete explanations for the events in our world. But what would a world in which the physical sciences were
not
complete in this way be like?

Science and Magic in Westeros

In Westeros, magic limits the methods of science in discovering the truth. Maester Luwin, the maester of Winterfell, believes there is no magic, and that the children of the forest, and the Others, no longer exist.
12
The science of the maesters is actually quite useful, and the maesters themselves, given the evidence available to them, might reasonably believe that by following scientific principles, they will eventually discover all the facts about the world around them. But in Westeros, science fails to perceive certain important aspects of reality in that world, in particular, the existence of magic. Magic is based on apparently unrepeatable events or phenomena and would thus forever escape discovery by the maesters’ science.