What's Chava Possum Up to Today?: Consciousness

A rebel writer’s daily blog

August 31, 2020

Hello again, decolonized readers and writers!

Last week, I posted the first daily blog of many about my day-to-day writing process. Writing can be an isolating career, lifestyle, and experience in general. I decided to start this journey to combat the solitude, to regain the presence of writing in my daily life, and to exercise an important muscle for writers: talking openly about my writing, even to strangers. As a writer, doesn’t it make sense that writing would offer a path forward?

Yesterday, I finished a brief but illuminating book about consciousness called Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris, a 110-page layman’s approach to what it means to be “conscious”. Propelled by philosophy and backed by scientific research in the areas of neuroscience, biology, and physics, Harris delves fearlessly into the realm of the unknown, seeking to address the full spectrum of curiosity about consciousness. She presents various positions held by those who study consciousness regarding it’s origins, it’s rules, and it’s presence in other beings, which she illuminates with layers of spellbinding stories from fields like ecology that remind us how mysterious life on Earth is, even with the things we think we know well.

Intuition, memory, free will, decision-making, meditation, time, identity, perception, matter— Harris touches on it all. But it’s panpsychism that has captured my attention the most because it allows for a limitless understanding of consciousness.

What’s panpsychism? (Or how do you even say it?)

Let me lay the groundwork here.

How do we know something is conscious? How do we observe consciousness in behavior? To these questions, Harris dedicates the first few chapters of the book. She first addresses some major misconceptions about consciousness, perpetuated by the language we use to describe it. Some people equate consciousness with complex thought or a sense of “self”, but neither of these terms really hit wholly on what consciousness is. Harris shares a stronger definition— one that opens our minds to the possible manifestations of such a mysterious phenomenon.

“An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.”

Simply put: Consciousness is having an experience of being.

Though we might assume that trees, plants, or bacteria aren’t conscious because they don’t “seem” like they are to us, that intuition relies on a lack of knowledge as to how non-human creatures interact with their environment, make decisions, and procreate. By walking us through our assumptions and intuitions, Harris reveals just how many of our commonly held beliefs about life are proven wrong by mother nature herself.

“Consider the types of behavior we usually attribute to conscious life, such as reacting to physical harm or caring for others.”

Harris then leads us through a menagerie conscious experiences arising in trees, plants, and even microscopic organisms. Suzanne Simard’s research into Douglas firs and paper birch trees discovered that trees communicate with one another through carbon in their root systems; mother trees care for their young and neighboring trees collaborate to thrive. Daniel Chamovitz’s research into Venus Fly Traps indicates that plants in fact possess memory, though not in the same way humans do.

“… a Venus Fly Trap needs to have two of the hairs on its leaves touched by a bug in order to shut, so it remembers that the first one has been touched…”

A microscopic parasite by the name of Toxoplasma gondii can infect any warm-blooded animal, but can only sexually reproduce in the intestines of a cat. How does it manage to travel from another animal to a cat? Find an animal that lives in close proximity to cats… AKA rats. But how do you convince a rat to get close enough to a cat for a parasite to transfer between them, when cats are their natural predators?

“By a neurological mechanism that scientists still don’t completely understand, Toxoplasma affects the behavior of the infected rats, causing them to forsake their fear of cats and in many cases walk (or even run) directly toward their enemy.”

All this to say: Our intuitions about which organisms think, feel, remember, or care fall apart once we learn more about how other creatures live. If, upon deeper study, our assumptions about consciousness break down, then the lines between what is and isn’t conscious are blurred to a degree that should give us pause about making definitive statements.

Harris says,

“If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all.”

This leads us again to that word I mentioned earlier (the one I can barely pronounce out loud): panpsychism. Panpsychism is the view that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense.

Let that sink in.

All matter, down to the atoms and particles that make up our universe, is conscious in some way, shape, or form. As incomprehensible as that is, it’s a theory rich with diverse positions.

“Some versions of panpsychism describe consciousness as separate from matter and composed of some other substance, a definition reminiscent of vitalism and traditional religious descriptions of a soul.”

“One branch of modern panpsychism proposes that consciousness is intrinsic to all forms of information processing, even inanimate forms such as technological devices; another goes so far as to suggest that consciousness stands alongside the other fundamental forces and fields that physics has revealed to us— like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.”

No matter what you are inclined to believe, it’s fair to say that our assumptions about consciousness fall drastically short of the potential scope of reality, which, in and of itself, is breath-taking… at least to me.

So why did I read this book? Why does panpsychism interest me?

Consciousness is of interest to me and to my writing because the protagonist of my novel— Ja’el— has a unique relationship to it.

Forgive me, as I navigate sharing details of my story with strangers— again, this is a new muscle for me.

Ja’el lives in a mythologized version of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, where I’m from. Ja’el, along with a majority of the world’s population, has a “legacy”— a relationship with something inhuman that speaks to a distinctly human experience. Similar to myth or legend, a “legacy” manifests in magical ways that seem beyond human capability, but speak to a symbolic, deep-seated, perhaps unspoken experience of what it is to be human.

Why do we find Bible stories so compelling? Why do we look up at the stars and turn them into stories? Why do we even tell stories? These kinds of questions pop to mind when I think about myths and legends and the hold they have on our imaginations, specifically the role that super-human characters play in immortal myths. We like seeing humans wrestle with manifestations of the Divine, of the unknown, or the universe. This, in effect, is what a “legacy” is in my story: a relationship between a human and something else that literalizes an internal and eternal struggle between us and that magnificent unknown.

Ja’el’s legacy is tied to consciousness. Her journey personifies how humans heal by telling stories about the experience of being. But how do I write about Ja’el’s legacy when it involves a force of nature, a phenomenon, a miracle that we barely have a grasp on?

Naturally, I’m reading anything I can get my hands on about it!

The concept of panpsychism lights me up inside because it lays on my platter a blank check: For whatever you want, from the universe. If everything is conscious, that raises a delightful question: What does consciousness look or feel like for a tree, for lichen, for a cell, for a proton? By taking each “thing” that crosses Ja’el’s path and learning what it might be like to be that thing, I experiment with consciousness. Ja’el experiments with consciousness. Imagine possessing such an ability. What does that kind of ability do to your relationships with friends and family? How would people see you? How do you see yourself? Is there even one “self” that you could cling to? How do you determine which way is up when “up” is relative? What does it feel like to love Ja’el? To live with her? To support her? These are the questions I hope to answer by reading about consciousness.

My awe of this subject is apparent to you now, I’m sure.

Phew… this has been hard. I feel so inexperienced sharing details of my story with others; I appreciate the room I have here to exercise the skill and ideally build strength to do it better.

I’d love to hear from you about anything I’ve shared here. Do you know other books about consciousness that I should read? What do you think about consciousness? Do questions about the universe drive your writing?