How does a butterfly remember being a caterpillar?
We like to think that conversations only happen through speaking and listening, but this isn’t true.
It’s through this human-centric lens that we dismiss other living things as not being sentient.
Conversations can happen on so many levels of subtlety, all the way down to proteins and beyond.
How else can a butterfly remember being a caterpillar if it turns entirely to liquid inside its chrysalis? How else can a Monarch butterfly return to the home of the parent it never met, hundreds of miles away?
We now understand much more clearly several more subtle forms of communication, from quorum sensing in bacteria, to electrical signals under the ground in forests, and waggle dances in bees.
We finally know enough to know that we know almost nothing about most of these things.
As always, accepting ignorance is the first step.
I’ve started to think a lot about the ideas in Philip Pullman’s various works of genius: the universal battle between consciousness, curiosity, and the forces that seek to repress them. I’ve started to think about the notion of pan-consciousness too, and whether it could be true that we are all manifestations of one conscious whole…
If true, then cruelty to others is cruelty to ourselves, and vice versa.
If true, perhaps it would go some way to explaining why great ideas are so often had by multiple people at once.
If true, it would be in line with the thinking that the universe is derived from a single whole, which coalesces into complex forms. This also chimes with Stephen Wolfram’s ideas of simple repeating patterns and processes creating increasing levels of complexity.
This is the thinking wherein particles and quantum effects are the “far end” of the creation of the universe rather, than the origins of it. In other words, rather than a Big Bang immediately yielding particles, a homogenous whole symmetrically vibrates into increasingly complex subdivisions and manifolds of energy… and perhaps consciousness too.
Particle physics is beautiful, but particle physicists might be looking in the wrong direction if they want to understand where everything comes from and where it’ll return to: diving ever-deeper into details that will continue to yield more complexity, risking losing sight of the whole.
On a side note, it’s interesting to see that complimentary ideas appear in old mythologies, wherein subsequent living things arose from subdivisions of beings of higher consciousness. This makes me wonder if this is because, whilst we have become very accomplished at recording and accumulating knowledge, we have also become very good at ignoring certain elements of it.
Perhaps ideas like progressive pantheons made more sense for those who are in closer touch with the rest of nature. The same could be said of the ideas of chaos and order within Norse mythology, whose roots are in far greater keeping with the basis of reality than the particle-like notions of “good” and evil”.
It’s possibly that Phillip Pullman’s great battle is still very much underway.
Anyway, I have digressed away from where I intended to go…
We like to think of progression as being 1-dimensional, but of course it isn’t. The Incas were far ahead of the Europeans with their soil (biochar) and masonry (forgotten) technology. We’re only just realising now how far behind the rest of the world is, even now, when it comes to soil.
An octopus is among the most conscious creatures on Earth: it is all curiosity and discovery, and its choices are regularly unpredictable and experimental.
It also spends its whole life being hunted down by beings optimised to find and kill it. Which of these are more “progressed” or “advanced”? Creatures like sharks are of course conscious too, but perhaps there is some hierarchy. Not so much a hierarchy of an ability to be conscious; perhaps more one of a propensity to embrace it…
So what does this mean for consciousness in the human body?
We are all extremely aware that our mind exists in our heads. So why have I been taught to point to my heart when I speak about myself when, in other cultures, people point to their nose?
Afterall, biologically, we are a highly complex, conscious brain, fortified and isolated from the rest of the bodily system by the blood-brain barrier. The rest of the body spends its life in servitude to the brain and will mostly sacrifice itself to protect it if required to do so.
Does this mean that consciousness is more inherent in the cells of our brain? Or does it mean that a trade is made wherein most elements of our bodies forgo a great deal of consciousness in order to protect and perpetuate a small region of consciousness amidst the chaos?
Without threat or need, would we choose to be only consciousness and nothing besides?
There is also a temporal element to how consciousness is distributed. I have spent much of the last few hours cycling, carrying bags, finding food, eating, and trying to find time to be focused. Perhaps a hierarchy is a necessary condition of consciousness forced upon us by a world of limits.
However, I don’t believe that this means that consciousness must be unfairly distributed, nor that it isn’t worth striving for fairness in every aspect of it.
Anyone who has ever meditated will know how it feels to distribute and share consciousness around the body, and will perhaps feel more inclined to point to their hearts instead of their heads when speaking of themselves.
Anyone who is raised to understand interconnection, by learning through nature instead of abstraction and isolated silos, is perhaps always bound to be kinder to the whole, and to be in support of consciousness and freedom rather than unthinking, looping process and the resultant cruelty so often justified by it.
Perhaps the ultimate pursuit of consciousness, and its manifestations of discovery and connection, is a world without adversary, threat or fear of others. Perhaps its pursuit is to return to the coherent whole from which it all first came.
