A Talk with Jonathan Miller:

“INTERVIEWER:

Being as passionate about the subject of philosophy as you are, how does it enter into your work as director?

MILLER:

It comes into it all the time, in that I’m watching people behaving intentionally. I keep asking myself, What do they intend by what they are doing? Are they fully aware of their own intentions? What is it that motivates Hamlet? How much does he know what he is doing?

I am less interested in the Freudian unconscious than in another form of unconscious about which I have written recently, which is what I call the Enabling Unconscious. We can, for example, go to sleep with a problem in our mind and wake up with a clear solution. There are deep levels of capability which don’t reach consciousness and yet deliver their results into consciousness. This is again where science is so much better than metaphysics. There were people in the nineteenth century who began to see this; in fact, most philosophers have had vague intuitions, but they were not smart enough to think clearly about it. The reason they now think about it is because we have a device which enables us to do so—the computer. The computer gives us a metaphor to consider what it is to have mental activities we are not aware of. We once thought that chess was a high-level spiritual capability which only human beings possessed. We now get machines which are better at it than we are. Once we examine how machines do it, we get a pretty good idea how our brains might do it. These are profitable questions because there are procedures you can follow to produce an answer. The questions which you say won’t go away—metaphysical ones—are like flies which won’t go away. But it doesn’t mean that they are interesting.” Paris Review