Consciousness is Organic
3/17/22 – The Human Mind and the Anthropocene
Hello everyone:
A quick repeat from last week: To help Ukraine, here are lists of recommendations from scholar Timothy Snyder, starting with the most recent: here, here, here, and here. For a specific list of ways to help the Ukrainian military, read his latest post.
Also, for a deep and brilliant read on the Russian political and historical context for the invasion of Ukraine, here’s an excellent video interview at the New Yorker with esteemed Russian historian Stephen Kotkin. You have the choice of watching the 19 minute video or reading the transcript.
Please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
Here’s a little story I don’t think I’ve told anyone. For the last year or two of college, and for a year or two thereafter, I carried a small scrap of paper hidden away in my wallet. I had scribbled in pencil a three-word phrase on a notebook page and then ripped it out to keep as private currency. Eventually its frayed edges, like the mildly agitated mind that produced the phrase, smoothed out as time and life worked their magic. In the interim, though, the three words were helpful.
Consciousness is organic. This was some thirty years ago, so I won’t claim to speak accurately for my younger self, but I believe I know what I had in mind. It was meant, first of all, as a balm. I needed a reminder that however confused I felt, however difficult the world seemed, my mind was only a light cast by my brain, and my brain was merely enthusiastic flesh. And all flesh is, as we know, no more exotic than grass. I found it comforting – and still do – to remember that life on Earth pulses onward regardless of our personal or societal turmoil.
Thus, consciousness is organic was meant as a reminder of the real world in the midst of my cognitive turmoil. Civilization is a painted theater in a forest. Or, it was. Now, with nearly eight billion cast members, we’ve reduced the forest to a set piece in the theater. Yet life is indefatigable, even if diminished in the Anthropocene.
Though I couldn’t have articulated it very clearly, I had a growing awareness that our recent assemblage of pavement, participles, plastics, and politics had become fundamentally at odds with Earth’s 3.5 billion year history of life. I had nurtured this awareness in part by taking a semester off to hike half the Appalachian Trail while reading Robert Frost’s poems and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, among others. One of the people I’d left behind was an acquaintance who, bewildered at my plan to walk the woods for a few months, asked with genuine horror, “You’re bringing a credit card, right?”
So it wasn’t a stretch for me to fret about human consciousness. Even then I felt that the problem was our failure to succeed rationally. We’ve succeeded, undeniably, as we dominate the planet and live longer lives than our ancestors. And rationality has played a role, particularly in the highest uses of science and the slow outward ripple of empathy to embrace other humans and other species. But in the big picture, particularly over the last century or two, success has required an irrational cascade: a profound destruction of the natural world, a blindness to much of the destruction, a callousness to its visible impacts, and a willful ignorance of the consequences for us.
None of this was new, other than to me – I was just another college kid sorting things out – and consciousness is organic wasn’t a particularly poetic or lucid statement. To be honest, I don’t even recall the tribulations that led to the scribbling, only that as an overeducated and underqualified young poet I found my mind both awhirl and afloat. I needed context and comfort, and luckily for me a few good words could soothe a young writer’s soul.
I bring all this up because my little note came back to mind when I read about a recent academic thought experiment, “Intelligence as a planetary scale process,” published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. It is an exploration of the concept of planetary intelligence, which the authors introduce this way:
Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives [e.g. bees or ants]. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species.
Their phrase “the appearance of technological intelligence” is the key here, I think. They’re trying to map our rapid planet-wide Anthropocene spread – like smartphone-toting bacteria filling a sugary Petri dish – onto the evolutionary timeline of life on Earth, and at the same time use it to help define what to look for when searching the galaxy for other civilizations.
The image above, “Four possible domains of planetary intelligence,” charts an imagined course from Immature Biosphere (before life began to profoundly influence and regulate the planet) to Mature Technosphere, in which our civilization profoundly influences and responsibly regulates the planet. Unsurprisingly, the authors place us currently in the Immature Technosphere, in which we are impacting planetary systems but are “unconstrained by intention relative to the health of the civilization producing the technology.”
To their credit, the authors acknowledge that such uncontrolled technological growth may well be more civilizational epitaph than signature, and thus they posit their (hopeful) idea that a planetary intelligence on our part will be required to guide the planetary transition to a mature technosphere.
They define planetary intelligence as “the acquisition and application of collective knowledge, operating at a planetary scale, which is integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems.” For those of you who have survived my recent four-week-long discussion of the planetary boundaries, you can visualize this definition as humans carefully regulating each of those boundaries through scientific management and an empathy for the community of life. Imagine our global civilization attuned to the consequences of our collective actions and responsive enough to make changes as quickly as needed to maintain planetary balance. That’s the “new type” of planetary intelligence the authors are exploring.
In other words, this isn’t the Gaia Hypothesis, which postulated that the Earth is a finely-tuned self-regulating system of biology and geochemistry that we might as well think of as an organism. Nor is it Gaia Theory, which understands Gaia less as an organism and more as a vast collective of interacting ecosystems: a living planet, rather than merely a planet with life on it.
This exploration of planetary intelligence suggests that humans, as a natural part of the biosphere now armed with our Earth-shaking technological wizardry, can take the helm of Gaia and serve our own galactic purposes as well. To put it mildly, that seems like a considerable leap in the application of human consciousness. You and I might want to snap our fingers and begin the transition this instant, but as a species we so far seem unlikely to accomplish that.
Let’s back up. What is consciousness? This is a very deep rabbit-hole question, and a confounding one too. There’s the simple sense we all share, that consciousness is an awareness of both self and the world. After that, though, the quest for a definition quickly bogs down in efforts to untangle perception from self-awareness, and existence from mind. To that end, here’s a fine spark of grumpiness and doubt from the 1989 Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology: “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”
Grumpy muttering aside, there are good questions still being asked: Is consciousness electromagnetic? Are there many different types of consciousness? Or merely different aspects or layers to it? Should it be defined broadly enough to include some or all of other species, or even more broadly to include stones and mountains, or should it be limited to observable human-like attributes?
As the images which begin and end this essay suggest, indigenous cultures have always held, each in their own way, that everything in the world is endowed with a life and meaning linked inextricably with our own. To date, theirs are the only cultures which we know were built for the long-term survival of human-occupied ecosystems. As Elizabeth Kolbert noted some years ago in the New Yorker, this might help us understand why we’re not seeing signs of high-tech alien life:
Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not. Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens.
I should be clear that the authors of “Intelligence as a planetary scale process” do not use the term consciousness, perhaps because it is so much harder to satisfactorily define or because many definitions include a self-awareness that “intelligence” does not. And maybe that’s the Anthropocene problem that the authors are hoping we might conquer: intelligence without broader consciousness.
So I’m going to go out on an evolutionary limb here and conflate intelligence with consciousness. Let’s just think of cognition, emotions, intelligence, perception, self-awareness, and empathy as one big mental activity that perhaps all species participate in to some degree. The “planetary intelligence” authors note there’s plenty of evidence suggesting microbes have cognition – assessing and interacting with their environment to meet their needs – and here’s an article on some spiders’ capacity to practice “extended cognition” with their webs, like humans offloading a memory task onto their grocery lists or maps. Trees and plants share warnings and provide aid via fungal networks. Turtles have personalities. All animals, as we intuitively know despite the conservative science we grew up with, share much of our experience of the world. Here’s how the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals, in 2012, put it:
Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
To add another shade of meaning to consciousness is organic, then, I might say that it’s everywhere in the natural world. It pulses within individuals and ecosystems, rises out of the soil like a nutrient into our neurons, and returns back to the soil with our passing. There is no natural reason, then, for our minds to feel divided from and divided against the rest of life. Look at the Inuit sculpture which graces both ends of this essay; see how woven into the real world we are. Whether Earth has a collective intelligence or a host of disparate minds does not matter; we’re in the hive or in the mix. It’s only culture that has driven a conscious wedge between us and Gaia, and culture can be changed in a moment when the moment is right.
Within the logic of the “planetary intelligence” thought experiment, humans have created an “immature” technosphere, i.e. a globe-spanning network of influence without any real control:
For all its reach, what Homo sapiens have constructed with our industrial civilizations appears inherently unstable. If we consider civilization as a Technosphere (human population plus technological support systems) coupled to the other planetary systems (biosphere, atmosphere, etc.), we can frame questions of stability in terms of these coupled systems' forcing and response times.
Clearly we’re so far more engaged in force than response, though many of us are working to change that. We know the most urgent problems in our world are those we have made for ourselves. A pretty solid case can be made for the human mind as the fundamental threat of the Anthropocene. Head upstream from any of the planetary crises – climate, biodiversity, plastics, acidification, etc. – and you eventually arrive at the enthusiastic neurons of non-indigenous humans acting without sufficient consciousness.
Which means, as this Quartz article points out, that to patch up the Earth we need to improve ourselves. I find this statement alternately brilliant, depressing, and dangerous: “To survive and flourish in the Anthropocene, we must look inward. In an era defined by human impact, the most pressing questions of this time are about ourselves.” It sounds like the cure for narcissism is more narcissism, but their intent is clear: we need to become more rational. To do that, we need to apply the best research on the human mind to solving the problems of the Anthropocene.
In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael he posits that the problem with humans is that unlike other species we don’t know how to live. Because we’ve evolved so fully around our prodigious and flexible tool-making capacity, we’re guided more by culture than intuition. We build religions or libraries and hire messiahs or politicians to provide instruction. We are, as Edwin Arlington Robinson (famed Maine poet and, according to family lore, an ancestor) once wrote, “a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
“One lesson of the Anthropocene,” write the authors of the thought experiment,
appears to be the importance of developing global regulatory feedback loops across the whole of the host world's coupled planetary systems. In this way, it is useful to consider the establishment of mature planetary intelligence as a potential necessary condition for the existence of long-lived technospheres.
The key word here is “mature.” We need the right blocks, and the right kindergarten.
One final note in relation to my bewildered younger self: I recently stumbled across a thought from Thich Nhat Hanh which made me want to reach out to that 20-year-old and let him know he was on the right track:
“In the practice of Buddhism, we see that all mental formations — including compassion, love, fear, sorrow, and despair — are organic in nature.”
“Organic” in Thich Nhat Hanh’s usage seems to mean something which grows and can continue to grow or change, and that’s the final (hopeful) shade of meaning for consciousness is organic that I’ll leave you with.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In curated Anthropocene news:
A must-read extraordinary story about a turtle rescue hospital in Southbridge, MA, from Orion. The Turtle Rescue League site is here; learn more and donate if you can.
Science Moms, a nonpartisan site created by climate scientists (who are also mothers) to provide answers to questions about climate science from mothers and their families.
Listen to the acoustic crisis: Here’s a 45 minute podcast conversation between The American Scholar and David George Haskell, whose new book, Sounds Wild and Broken, documents the evolution of the natural world’s marvelous sounds and our ongoing disruption of that soundscape.
Amazon deforestation is reaching a dangerous threshold, as its resilience against increasing heat and drought diminishes. Parts of the Amazon may turn into savanna, with a massive loss in biodiversity and a huge impact on the freshwater cycle. Here is a New York Times article and a Mother Jones article.
Electrify for Peace: Download the new plan from Rewiring America, which is pushing for the electrification of everything. The Electrify for Peace plan is a response to the Russian fossil fuel trap that Ukraine and the E.U. find themselves in; it offers a massive build-out of our capacity to build heat pumps here in the U.S. and ship them to Europe.
The problem with the mad rush to plant trees is that too often biodiversity is sacrificed to fight climate change or profit from timber sales.
Brilliant!