Consciousness is Organic - redux

2/8/24 – The human mind and the Anthropocene

Man Holding Bird, John Kurok and Leo Napayok / credit: The Matchbox Gallery

Hello everyone:

Heather and I are away this week on a non-vacation trip. I’m happy, though, for the opportunity to offer you an essay on the link between our consciousness and the transformed world. I first published this essay here two years ago, when the audience for it was much smaller. It has been updated and revised.

As always, 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. During a stressful period, I had scribbled in pencil a three-word phrase on a notebook page and then ripped it out to keep as private currency.

Eventually, the frayed edges of the scrap of paper smoothed out like a small stone in a stream. As did I. Time and life worked their magic. In the interim, though, every time I opened my wallet I’d catch a glance of the three words and find them helpful.

Consciousness is organic. This was some thirty years ago, so I won’t claim to speak accurately for my younger self, but I think 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 or durable than leaves. We emerge, we flutter on a twig on a branch of the tree of life, and then we rejoin the soil from which we emerged. I found it comforting – and still do – to know with all my heart that life on Earth pulses onward regardless of our cognitive or cultural turmoil.

Thus, consciousness is organic was meant also as a reminder of the real world - what we now call nature - which embraces us despite the distance we imagine we’ve traveled from it.

Civilization, I came to realize, is a painted theater in a forest. Cultures strut and fret upon the stage, while each of us is increasingly glued to our seat. We call the theater the world, forgetting that beyond the doors are the biology and physics, the ecology and chemistry, the leaf and the breeze, that define the real world.

Over the last century or two, we have seemed intent on bringing the forest inside the theater and reducing it to a set piece in the wings. With nearly eight billion of us in the room and perhaps two billion more on the way, we have a decision to make about whether to keep telling the same stories about the theater, or try to remember how to live in right relationship with the living world.

Life will always outlive us, even as we diminish it here and extinguish it there, but the choices we make now will define how livable and lush the Anthropocene will be.

Friends Sharing Gossip, Pierre Aupilardjuk / photo by M.N. Hutchinson

Though I couldn’t have articulated it very clearly as a young man, I had a growing awareness that our recent assemblage of pavement, 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 leaving college for a semester to hike the northern half of the Appalachian Trail. Along the way, I read Robert Frost’s poetry and The Tao of Physics, among other enlightening things, but the highest virtue of the walk was the walk.

If you want to remember how beautiful and vital the real world is, you have to spend real time in it. We otherwise risk remaining glued to our seat in the theater. As evidence, I’ll cite a college acquaintance who, bewildered at my plan to walk in the woods for a few months, immediately 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 of the modern human experiment was its failure to succeed in a rational way. We’ve succeeded, undeniably, as we occupied and explored every habitat on the planet, and as we began to live longer lives than our ancestors. Rationality is one of our traits, particularly in the highest achievements of science. I’d argue too that as we develop civilizational-scale empathy for other humans and other species, we are more rational than ever.

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 that await us.

None of this thinking 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 recall the tribulations that led to the scribbling, only that as a 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.

“Four possible domains of planetary intelligence”

I bring all this up because my little scrap of paper 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 similar 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 stony planet) to Mature Technosphere, in which our civilization profoundly influences yet responsibly regulates Earth and its living community.

Unsurprisingly, the authors place us currently in the Immature Technosphere, in which we are powerful enough to severely impact planetary systems but are unable or unwilling to manage those impacts. We are ourselves immature, “unconstrained by intention,” not yet aware enough of the scale and consequences of our actions.

To their credit, the authors acknowledge that we might not make it to the Mature stage. Uncontrolled technological growth may be our civilizational epitaph. So they posit their hopeful idea that we’ll shift our technological growth by combining it with a planetary-minded emotional intelligence. Put in JFK terms, we have to ask what we can do for the world rather than simply asking what it can do for us.

Planetary boundaries, 2023 update: Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. / Credit: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023

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 survived my four-part-series discussion of the planetary boundaries concept, you can visualize this definition as humans carefully regulating each of those boundaries - bringing each one back down to the “safe operating space” green zone - 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 managerial planetary intelligence the authors are exploring. Certainly there is a lot of great work being done, and many people understand the need to reconnect with life rather than merely abusing it, but we have a long way to go before we qualify for the management position.

The idea of planetary intelligence 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 purposes as well. To put it mildly, that seems like a big ask for the application of human consciousness.

Let’s back up. What is consciousness? It’s a deep rabbit-hole question, and a confounding one too. But there is the simple sense we all share, that consciousness is at least a partial 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 works of Inuit art which frame 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. 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 life participates 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.

Most of us know intuitively that all animals share much of our experience of the world. We know this despite being taught in science classes Descartes’ terrible and ludicrous idea that other creatures were mindless things. Science has largely abandoned this embarrassing perspective (in theory if not in animal-testing practice). 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 again at the Inuit sculptures which grace 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. A new drama can be written.

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 increasingly around our prodigious tool-making capacity, we’re guided more by culture in the theater than by the forest from which the theater was built. We write stories about faith and data and society, and hire messiahs, scientists, and politicians to provide instruction. We're still learning, though perhaps not the right things.

When was the last time you looked at a wild animal and saw the faces of other animals and humans woven through it? Or reflected on your image in the mirror and saw all the threads weaving you to the beauty of life? The fabrics, food, and furniture of your home theater are still tied tightly to the plants, animals, and minerals of the real world.

We are, as the great early 20th century poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (according to family lore, an ancestor of mine) once wrote, “a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” Now there are billions of infants, most of them city-born and trying to make meaning with credit cards and emoticons.

We need the right blocks, and the right kindergarten. And we need time, time we may not have.

One final note in relation to my little scrap of paper and 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. That seems like a lovely and hopeful final shade of meaning for consciousness is organic to leave you with.

May we all continue to grow so that all other life can continue to grow too.

The Enchanted Bear (2013), Jack Nuviyak, Roger Aksadjuak, Leo Napayok and John Kurok / credit: The Matchbox Gallery

Thanks for sticking with me.

In curated Anthropocene news:

From the Guardian, a good follow-up to my piece last week on the stark threats to the environment if Trump were reelected. “Anyone who cares about public health, the environment, science, international relations,” says a former NOAA administrator, “should be scared about another Trump presidency.”

Bryan Pfeiffer

at Chasing Nature, a reminder that the glories of the world often come in tiny packages. To see the universe in a grain of sand or, better yet, in the eyes of a damselfly, buy a small hand lens (a jeweler’s loupe) to magnify the little things that run the world. You'll love what you see. As always, Bryan tells you all you need to know.

From High Country News, the rapid loss of glaciers in the Pacific Northwest and in Alaska may be opening up new new river habitat for salmon, which may be a lifeline for the fish as the world warms and changes. But mining companies are also eyeing those new rivers. Tribes in the region are working to protect the habitat now, as they plan ahead for a new world.

From the Times, the federal Import-Export Bank is an unrepentant funder of fossil fuel projects around the world, despite efforts by the Biden administration to rein it in. Advisors hired by the administration to oversee the bank are beginning to quit in frustration.

From Sam Matey at The Weekly Anthropocene, a long, entertaining, and comprehensive assessment of how big cat species (lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) are faring in this era of increasing extinctions. It's a mix of good and bad news, as conservation efforts push back against the tide of human impacts.

From Indrajit Samarajiva’s blog Indi.ca, “Cats and Human Supremacy,” a funny, brilliant, and acerbic dismantling by a Sri Lankan writer of the notion that humans are any kind of planetary master.

From Reasons to be Cheerful, climate activists, NGOs, and funders are finally paying more attention to the link between reproductive health and climate vulnerability:

The urgency, Hirsch notes, is clear: “We cannot wait. Climate change is coming no matter what and we know it,” she says. “The least we can do is to make people, particularly women and girls in remote rural communities, that are being hit hardest by climate change, more resilient.”