This is #54 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community.
my own photo, from a number of years ago
As I trace the path around the lake, I stop to watch a mother pushing a baby carriage who is talking to her baby and pointing excitedly at a mother goose and her goslings nearby.
It’s obvious what the woman is thinking. But what, I wonder, is the baby thinking? Is the baby thinking at all? How exactly does one ‘think’ without the scaffolding of language? And is the mother goose thinking, or just behaving purely instinctively to do what evolution has dictated needs to be done to protect the goslings? And, of course, what are the goslings thinking? And if only the woman is thinking, in the sense of ‘consciously’ conceptualizing, making sense of what her sense perceptions are signalling to her eyes and hence to her brain, what exactly is going on in the brain of the ‘unconscious’ creatures?
I’ve written before about imagining what it might be ‘like’ to be a bird. But I’ve concluded we can’t imagine. We only imagine through metaphor, and there is no accessible metaphor for a way of simply and utterly being in the world without the scaffolding of language and ‘consciousness’.
Even though we were once babies ourselves, I would even venture to say that we can’t imagine what it’s like to be a baby. Because our consciousness of self and separation only arose as we climbed out of the carriage, ‘being a baby’ is before, and beyond, our conception and hence our comprehension.
My friend Don Marshall pointed me to a recent interview with Michael Pollan that referenced Alison Gopnik’s work differentiating “lantern” consciousness and awareness (dispersed, allegedly like that of small children) from “spotlight” consciousness and awareness (focused, supposedly like that of ‘adults’). It’s an interesting metaphor, but, I think, a hopelessly flawed one. If anthropomorphism is attributing human qualities and thoughts and behaviours to the more-than-human world, are we guilty of ‘adultomorphism’ (yes, that’s a real word) when we view babies as merely adults-under-construction, rather than as a completely different and alien creature we can’t possibly hope to comprehend?
. . . .
I watch the goslings, descendants of a species that has thrived for 12 million years, about twice as long as our species, apparently without the need for ‘consciousness’ or even, as biologists are now saying, any sense of self or separation. This is incomprehensible to us.
The baby, it seems to me, likely has much more in common with the goose and goslings, in its way of simply ‘being in’ and ‘seeing’ the world, than it has to us self-afflicted adults. Are young children, I wonder, actually closer to seeing (and being in) the world as it really is than we adults, conditioned to believe ourselves as the central actors in a complicated but fragile model of the world, can any longer hope to be? Or am I romanticizing?
Reading through the most oft-repeated and celebrated quotes on the subject of ‘consciousness’ immediately had me thinking: This must be what it’s like to be in divinity school, or a member of a ‘spiritual’ cult. Our human ‘consciousness’ is absolutely and unquestionably revered as the quality that makes humans the Crown of Creation, the godlike species “through which the universe reveals and understands itself”. Gag me with a spoon.
I’m afraid I was never much of a fan of religious and spiritual beliefs, including the new religions of capitalism, libertarianism, and humanism. The fundamental requirement of all the -isms — to suspend your disbelief and accept what you’re told without challenge or the requirement of evidence — just turns me off. And most of the -isms require a devout and unquestioning reverence for ‘consciousness’, variously defined but essentially meaning “the subjective experience of an individual”. (Not to mention the inclusion in the definition of a fervent belief in free will, responsibility, and the morality of right and wrong.)
As someone who has seen no compelling evidence that the ‘individual’ is anything more than a made-up idea in the abstracting brain, that ‘experience’ is anything more than just a label for how the brain abstractly models what it thinks it has perceived, or that the ‘subjective’ is anything more than an arbitrary category in the brain’s sense-making to distinguish it in its model from the ‘objective’ (ie ‘everything else’), the whole idea of ‘consciousness’ being a real ‘thing’ just leaves me shaking my head. But we desperately want to believe ‘consciousness’ is real, and that it’s what makes us different from, and better than, ‘lesser’ species.
These days, as a recovering former-believer in human exceptionalism, I generally prefer to spend my time in the company of non-human creatures and young children who remain free of that conceit, and whose apparent ability to see the world in a way utterly impossible for us ‘grown up’ humans to still even imagine, fills me with awe, delight, and perhaps a little envy. They seem to be utterly unafflicted with the dis-ease of consciousness, that monstrous and horrifically contagious ailment that drives us to hate, to suffer from countless imagined terrors, and to succumb to suffocating depression and other debilitating mental illnesses.
. . . .
As I wander in my community and start — at last! — to pay attention to the illiterate and dumb (meaning non-users of abstract written and oral language respectively — note how negatively biased and derogatory these terms are in our languages!) — I cannot help but smile and nod at the wisdom of their simple, direct communications.
Just beyond the lake is the ‘water park’ for small children, and I stop again to see if I might, somehow, see what they see. I’m wearing a sweater against the wind and drizzle, but the little kids running back and forth delightedly through the sprinklers, wearing thin bathing suits or less, seem oblivious to the weather and to my curious gaze.
On the deserted volleyball court nearby, a little boy has assembled a remarkable construction in the damp sand. As I watch, a little girl comes running up with a large plastic watering can, presumably filled from the water park sprinklers, and the two work together to create canals and moats around what they’ve built. What’s left of the water is then poured on top of the main ‘building’ which promptly collapses. They both laugh. They move over a bit in the volleyball ‘beach’ and start over.
Between the concrete water ‘park’ and the volleyball ‘beach’ is a playground of plastic tunnels, ladders and slides. A little girl far too small to climb the ladder is being carried up by her father, who then places her between his legs and slides down with her. She shrieks with delight and immediately points back up to ‘go again’.
I sense that these creatures — wild animals and pre-linguistic children — have no illusions of consciousness. Not because they’re not ‘smart’ enough to conceive of the idea of ‘consciousness’, but because they have no need of this burdensome, oppressive conception, with its baggage of judgement, morality, and responsibility. They have no need to imagine themselves as separate from everything else, or as having agency or duty or even continuity. These imaginings, it seems to me now, are all illusions, the culturally indoctrinated unlearning of the simple reality of what actually is, so that as adults we replace the astonishing territory with the convoluted and unsatisfactory model — the 2D map — that we’ve invented to try to make sense of it, and which we now mistake for ‘real’ reality.
Oh, to be free of that illusion and that burden! To be wild and free of the prison of our constraining, imagined, ‘conscious’ self-hood! And I have no expectation that being free of this prison would bring a life of endless bliss. I suspect that, coming from our shabby but constantly-reinforced sense of the world as knowable, ordered and controllable, freedom from it would instead bring startling, disconcerting disillusionment, though also perhaps a necessary acceptance, relief, and relative peace.
Just as I would willingly change places with a bird, if I could do so, I think I would likewise see the loss of my illusion of consciousness and selfhood as a wonderful, and wondrous, trade-off.
. . . .
Three adults have brought a bevy of little kids onto the running track of the park’s little stadium. The boys, already displaying the early signs of terrifying, separate, selfhood, immediately start running competitively with each other. The girls are more engaged in watching the other people. One of them runs backward along the track, while another does cartwheels and handsprings. A third, apparently just starting to walk, clings anxiously to the adults’ pant legs, but looks somehow hopeful and excited at the same time.
What is she thinking? I can adultomorphize. But I can’t imagine.
I try to remember what it was ‘like’ to be that much in and of the world and not something reduced to a separate self with ideas about the world, apart from it.
But this is impossible. That very young child had neurons arrayed in an utterly different way from the narrowed, entrenched, ‘sense-making’ way mine are now. That very young child was not ‘me’. It was not any ‘one’.
. . . .
On the way home, I wander by the off-leash dog park. There are two adults there, bundled up and clearly unhappy as the drizzle turns into a mild shower. But their two dogs clearly recognize and know each other, and immediately commence a happy dance, with that wonderful bums-raised play-invitation posture every dog person knows. They run around each other, oblivious to the weather, tumbling over each other and roughhousing a bit before chasing each other in circles some more.
I just smile and shake my head. I can’t remember what it felt like, what it was like to be that truly alive. And that’s not just the memory loss that comes with age. I can’t remember.
Michael Pollan acknowledges that our ‘self’ is an illusion, and that in many real ways we humans are less ‘conscious’ than other animals. But all of his studies and psychedelic explorations have apparently led him to the edge of a cliff he’s not prepared to traverse. He clearly believes that we humans have free will, and is not troubled by the concern of how that can be when there is no self to have it. And, a creature of his conditioning like all the rest of us, he’s now a serious student of meditation. Like all of us, he believes what he’s been conditioned to believe, and what he wants to believe.
To acknowledge that our acquisition of ‘conscious’ ‘subjective’ ‘selfhood’ was a retreat from reality to the safety of abstraction and theory, rather than an evolutionary ‘advance’, is too much of a stretch for most. Maybe even for me.
But when I look into the eyes of small children and (other) wild creatures, what I see is not a primitive, ‘unconscious’ being, but something that beckons to me, tells me I’ve somehow lost the thread of what it is to be truly alive.
And quietly welcoming me, if only I could truly see, home.
