by Guy Murchie
UNSENSES
If phosphenes are a manifestation of an inner sight that blossoms into being when one's normal outer vision is cut off (by eyelids, injury, drugs, etc.), they are a living testament to the abstract nature of the world, the relativity of its qualities and to the paradox that we must unsense some things in order to sense other things. The fact that only when it is dark can you see the stars is thus reconciled to the fact that only when you lose some senses do you become aware of others. Helen Keller became the classic and eloquent advocate of this principle when she exclaimed "I sense the rush of ethereal rains ... I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold when death sets me free."
Sometimes it is easier to adjust to losing sight, as John Howard Griffin did when blinded by a bomb in World War II, than to the return of sight, which shocked him when his vision unexpectedly came back more than ten years later. The sudden intensity of the light then seemed cruel. When an understanding attendant turned off a lamp, he said, "I felt as though a burden were lifted from me - safe, at home in the dark ... Certainly this adjustment [to vision] is more difficult than the one to blindness ... Then I was alive to all stimuli. Now I am blurred to all of them except sight."
The aspects of relativity may be even more striking in the case of hearing. At least that is suggested by the story of the aging English earl who liked to entertain diplomats and, when he grew hard of hearing, trained his servant to beat a drum in a certain rhythm whenever one of the guests spoke. The earl wasn't really perverse, as you might think, but had made a practical discovery as to how to hear better. The noise of the drum, hardly noticeable to his own half-deaf ears, nonetheless forced the speaker to raise his voice to the earl's hearing amplitude. At the same time, for other listeners, it effectively drowned out what was being said, so the earl could enjoy his most sensitive conversations in exclusive privacy.
A lot more important of course were the deafnesses of such composers as Beethoven, Bruckner and Smetana, whose aural failures may well have helped them and the world by intensifying their concentration on listening and by blocking extraneous sounds. Beethoven is the most dramatic case of all. When his First Symphony was first performed in 1800, young Ludwig, already famous at thirty, was also hard of hearing; two years later when his beautiful Second Symphony was completed, he could barely hear a full orchestra through his ear trumpet. Yet, as his deafness reached totality, that work was surpassed by his Eroica, Moonlight Sonata, Fifth Symphony and, after a quarter century of deafness, his glorious Ninth Symphony. If he hadn't gone deaf, one may presume that he would have continued his brilliant career as a Viennese piano virtuoso, as well as the teaching and social activity that traditionally went with it. But he was an extremely sensitive man and so deeply embarrassed by his deafness that he became a recluse, retiring shamefacedly to the little suburb of Heiligenstadt at the age of thirty-two, largely shutting himself off from the world while moodily, broodily withdrawing inwardly, dreaming, composing and recomposing, hearing music only in his imagination. Indeed without the loss of his hearing, his unequaled profundity of creation might never have flowered. And a paradoxical truth we may conclude from this is that sense in general is not only life's bridge to the world but also its inexorable cloud that veils and distorts reality.
THE MEANING OF SENSE
Surely the world adds up to something greater than just what our senses tell us. But what? And if the real world is not the material one we sense, what is matter for? And is the stuff of Earth and the universe in any way intrinsically base or unworthy as some spiritual leaders seem to imply?
I submit that the essence of matter may be that it is the means (God's means, if you can accept God) of acquainting us with facts during this elementary finite phase of our existence. For, if there were no material world of sense, would not some other kind of world have to replace it, assuming we are to learn anything or grow or evolve? And would not that substitute world have to be sensed in some way also if it were to serve its purpose? And, in doing so, would it not demonstrate that it too must be a material, palpable world - indeed a world just about like the one we live in (and presumably must live in) at this stage of our development?
If this line of reasoning be close to the mark, perhaps the material world is nothing but the stuff of cousciousness, composed of things that can be tuned in on by senses. For even an odorless gas like carbon monoxide can be sensed deductively or indirectly with instruments while, if something cannot be sensed, it hardly can be termed matter. This, then, would make the material universe subjective in essence, something each of us tunes into a part of with his own individual organs of sense, leaving the so-called objective aspect of the world a mere mosaic of the innumerable subjective facets we behold!
What is really heard in a sound? Not merely the pattern of air compression and rarefaction but also the time-space relationship we call pitch in a musical note and, beyond that, the harmony and timbre of multi-notes blended together. And, beyond that, a melody of sequential changes. And beyond that, nothing less than the SPIRIT of the composer!
Thoreau must have understood this intuitively, even as a boy, for years later he wrote, "In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me. This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains ..."
But he became aware also of forces beyond any known senses, profound and mystic forces that whispered to him of the abstract nature of the world. Naturally he wasn't thinking of artificial senses or bionics, a science interrelating animals and machines that hadn't yet been imagined, nor of future sensuous inventions for the handicapped like aural readers that "see" printed words and "utter" them with sound, of audible ink, visible voice prints, electronic muscles, nor of technological sense aids like metal that, when it weakens from fatigue, will scream ultrasonically for help, of chemical diagnoses by body effluents or even of the density waves in galaxies that travel 120 miles a second and may somehow someday be heard as a kind of celestial melody. No, the music of Thoreau's spheres obviously carried beyond the material realm and into what is generally regarded as the divine, of which he wrote in humble simplicity, "I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived ..."
What he perceived must naturally remain partly veiled in mystery, but it is not alone Thoreau's mystery nor that of any man. For it is the mystery of the sculptor of mountains and the molder of seas, of the inspirer of every wind ever seen or heard or breathed or felt. It is the mystery that out of stillness engendered motion and out of silence created sound and out of sound, music. It is the mystery of all the uncounted, unseen worlds that ever await unveiling for the eyes that are capable of beholding them.
Chapter 9
Emergence of Mind
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ONE DOESN'T HEAR much talk about the noosphere these days - not even among astronomers or astronauts despite the fact that the noosphere is a vital layer of any mature planet and so something a person dealing in celestial bodies might expect to come face to face with often.
The noosphere is invisible and intangible. It is not made of matter. It is describable best perhaps as a boundless mental aura surrounding a living planet. It is a concept Teilhard de Chardin introduced in The Phenomenon of Man as the "thinking layer" around Earth, located more or less outside her metallic core, the barysphere, and her rocky crust, the lithosphere, enveloping her watery hydrosphere and airy atmosphere which together comprise the biosphere of life. It is a rather new abstraction in this part of the firmament, one that adds mind to what once seemed a mindless world: that pale globe I see down there rolling ponderously across its counterpane of stars, rolling, as we seem to have presumed, for billions of years, unconscious, blind and deaf to its own existence as a corpuscle of the universe.<
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Whence, one must ask oneself, arises thought from such a body? Could thinking have germinated somehow in Earth's rocks or molten interior, in her shifting magma, which is known to create electromagnetic fields? Such a hypothesis would appear a logical maturation of Niels Bohr's profound surmise that the wave aspect of the atom is the mind aspect of matter (page 408) and that the electron may possess in significant degree a germinal will of its own. Or should one think of mind's emergence as happening at the higher level of the atom where the waves and forces seem to have settled into a more stable and balanced state? The answer, I believe, depends very largely on one's definition of mind although, in general, the more developed any kind of matter is, the more easily we can accept it as including some degree of potential mentality, perhaps even a hint of inherent purpose behind the direction of its evolvement.
When it comes to larger and relatively more complex units of the material world such as molecules, particularly the DNA molecule and certain viruses, evidence of motivation and purpose becomes definitely easier to imagine. In plants it may manifest itself as interaction between bacteria in a root, as consultation among branches (page 62) or possibly of trees in a forest. Darwin seemed convinced that vegetables not only had strong feelings but also a rudimentary power to think. In writing about the radicle, the part of a seed that grows downward and becomes a root, he said: "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle... acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs, and directing the several movements."
THE FIRST MEASURE OF MIND
Probably the earliest well-accepted mind in evolution is that of the simplest of animals, the one-celled ameba, after whom the mind seems to diffuse outward and complexify. But even in this elementary creature one can scarcely fail to notice the evidence of mind, as the following ooze-by-ooze account of an ameba learning by experience will show. At eight o'clock one morning a large ameba surrounded and swallowed a small piece of a medium-sized fellow ameba but did not completely engulf it, leaving it still attached by a protoplasmic thread to the main body of the medium ameba, the thread passing through a tiny opening in the large ameba and by means of which the swallowed piece made strenuous efforts to ream the opening and escape. The large ameba, however, foiled these attempts by outflanking the ameba morsel and finally "biting" off the thread while backing up, which left the now-independent small ameba almost completely enclosed. But the small ameba continued its efforts to get away by flinging appendages out the opening (now in the rear of the retreating large ameba) and, after two minutes of struggle, it managed to break out and get entirely free. At this point the large ameba, presumably hungry and remembering it had just lost a meal out its backside, quickly "reversed its course" until it overtook the quarry again and surrounded and swallowed it, leaving no opening. This time the embattled little ameba, seeming to realize a shift in tactics was called for, contracted into a tight ball and remained quiet, biding its time while stoically resisting all digestive attempts by its captor. It must also have been aware (probably through some sort of pressure sense) of how thick were the walls of protoplasm enclosing it, because when, in the course of the motions of the large ameba, there chanced to be a momentary thin place in the wall next to it, it lost no time in poking its way through and escaping so swiftly the large ameba seemed surprised, confused and discouraged - at least enough so that it made no further attempt at pursuit.
If such responsive behavior by microscopic one-celled animals demonstrates some sort of stream of consciousness, intermittent or continuous, how much more evident is conscious thinking in hydra and jellyfish, which have fixed body polarity and coordinating appendages that deftly pass food from tentacle to tentacle until it is put into a mouth? Do such animals have a real choice as to where to turn or what to grasp? Or are they simply taking nature's orders, following the line of least resistance, obeying the dictates of vim and whim?
These sorts of questions have been pondered by philosophers for thousands of years, as the famous conversation in Chinese between Chuang-tzu and Hui-tzu recorded in the fourth century B.C. suggests. The two men, perhaps brothers, had strolled onto the little bridge over the Hao River when Chuang observed, "Look how the fish are swimming in the water! How happy they are."
"But you aren't a fish," said Hui. "How can you know the fish are happy?"
"And you are not I," retorted Chuang. "How can you know what I know of the fish's happiness?"
"True," said Hui, "I'm not you. So I cannot know what you know of the fish's happiness. But the fact remains that you're not a fish. So, by your own reasoning, you cannot know the fish are happy."
"Ah," said Chuang. "Though I am not a fish, I know how happy the fish must be - by my own happiness when swimming in the water." Today this sort of knowledge is called anthropomorphic intuition, and biologists reject it as unscientific, preferring to study the animal mind by testing, measuring and analyzing animal behavior.
MIND OF THE ANT
The ant, for instance, is known to be guided in most of its activity by instinct, yet in half an hour the average ant can learn its way around a square yard of ground it never saw before and will usually remember it well enough to return to a nest entrance in a direct line from any point. Ants have been tested in mazes too and proved they could not only correct their mistakes but, after a few dozen tries, avoid making them - that is, if they weren't too old. For youthfulness in ants, as in most animals, is more flexible than age and young ants will adjust to being suddenly put into an artificial nest, an experience so traumatic to their elders that few of them survive it. Ants, after all, have only a tiny, simple brain and almost no comprehension of what we call cause and effect. When researchers hang a piece of food just out of reach above them, they make desperate but futile efforts to reach it, never realizing they could easily do so by piling up half an inch of dirt under it, or a few twigs to erect themselves a ladder.
Ants also seem absurdly gullible when it comes to hospitality toward some of the dubious creatures they live with, a matter that inevitably reflects their mental level. For although they will fight to the death to keep an obvious stranger from entering their nest, ants have often been observed taking in, and being taken in by, some of the most thinly disguised villains in the whole creepy, crawly world, who do things like eat ant larvae and eventually wipe out the entire tribe, and among whom entomologists have actually recorded more than three thousand different species of beetles, worms, flies, spiders and other arthropods.
But ants do act with logic in many situations. When an orchardist paints a band of sticky material around a tree trunk to block invaders, ants have been known to carry mud from the ground and use it to build themselves a causeway over the barrier. When table legs are put into buckets of kerosene so ants can't climb up them to get food on the table, the resourceful creatures sometimes go to the ceiling directly overhead and simply drop onto the food. Harvester ants store seeds for food and seem to realize that, when their earthen granaries get wet, the seeds will either rot or sprout and spoil, so they take them one by one out to dry when the weather is sunny or, if it remains wet, they bite out each seed's germ to degerminate it so it won't sprout, thus saving a whole winter's food supply by the only means they know, a means whose evolution seems to have required some degree of thought.
When slave-keeping ants attack a strange ant city seeking more slaves, they usually first send out scouts to reconnoiter and ascertain the exact location of the city approaches, the strength of its garrison, the entrances and how best to reach them. And they seem to study their chances of success with military objectivity, sending for reinforcements when they find they are dangerously outnumbered. Even after launching an attack, if the enemy forces turn out to be stronger than expected and too many of the attackers are getting wounded or killed, a strategic retreat may be called and the assault postponed until more reinforcements arrive or, in extreme ca
ses, the whole plan is summarily canceled and the army marches prudently home.
In some observed cases, on the other hand, a kind of cold war of nerves is waged, featuring provocative skirmishes and menacing gestures around the perimeter of the enemy position, a stratagem that, often as not, wins a bloodless victory. Just how this works and how the ants communicate strategic ideas is not easy to understand but it is known that when an ant city is threatened on one side, its defending citizens commonly move their most precious possessions (eggs, pupae, aphids, etc.) out of their deep chambers and to the upper opposite side, obviously in anticipation of a forced retreat and rapid evacuation should such moves become necessary.
Under more peaceful circumstances, when an ant colony begins to feel dissatisfied with its nest location and is contemplating moving to another place, its citizens may hold something like a referendum to settle the issue: ants in favor of the move picking up their eggs and other possessions and carrying them over to the new place while ants opposed tag along "empty-handed," but, on arrival, repossess the baggage and carry it back the same way they came. Thus appear two parallel columns of ants with baggage moving continuously both ways. At first such a procedure would seem inefficient to the point of absurdity, but, if you reflect on it, you soon realize it is like a dance marathon of the polls and that the "dancing" column with the most endurance and determination (usually the majority) is bound to last longer and win the election. In any event it is a recognized phenomenon in the ant world, a voting system that is both democratic and well suited to social insects.