The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Lights On: Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental Music of Reality

Lights On: Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental Music of Reality

When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world.

Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I refused to perpetrate the same injustice on the hamster. So he became The Hamster.

The way I remember it, one day the anonymous hamster vanished. After conducting an Interpol-level search around our small sublet, we looked at each other bewildered, then turned in unison to the only unexamined area — the open computer my father was assembling from parts in a corner of the living room. And there was The Hamster, tucked behind the motherboard, dead. (I would later learn that rodents seek out snug warm places to die in.) I wished that we could disassemble him and put him back together in working order. But although I had no notion of consciousness, I intuitively understood that a creature was fundamentally different from a computer — that although the computer could do math and The Hamster could not, The Hamster had an experience of hamsterness for which the computer had no analogue; that although both were now inanimate, The Hamster had been and had ceased to be in a way the tenseless computer never would — one a system of feeling in time, the other untouched by time and devoid of any internal felt experience of being a system.

Wassily Kandinsky: Sketch for Several Circles, 1926. (Available as a print.)

And yet the better metaphor for consciousness may have been sitting on the other side of the living room: my mother’s piano — atoms arranged into a certain configuration of matter that has reached a certain degree of complexity to become a piano so that humankind can send Bach into the cosmos and a five-year-old can madden the neighbors with endless renditions of the Moonlight Sonata. You can run the process backwards: Remove an atom from the piano and it remains a piano; keep going long enough, atom by atom, and it will eventually cease being a piano — but no particular atom marks the boundary of its unbecoming.

This is the currently accepted emergence model of consciousness — matter configured to such a degree of complexity that it becomes capable of experiencing itself.

But perhaps our entire model is broken.

Perhaps consciousness is not the instrument assembled atom by atom to play the music of being.

Perhaps it is the music itself.

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)

That possibility — that consciousness is not emergent but fundamental, that it was always there in the universe even before gravity compacted the first atoms into the first star — is what Annaka Harris reckons with in her superb audio documentary Lights On.

Defying both the unsound mysticism and the unimaginative materialism into which most current views of consciousness fall, she invites a new dimension of thought to this Flatland of perspectives, tessellating ideas from cognitive science and quantum physics, string theory and assembly theory, mycorrhizal networks and AI. Drawing on two decades of working with neuroscientists and more than thirty hours of interviews with physicists, she picks up where her 2021 book Conscious left off to explore how our starting assumptions shape the questions we ask, which in turn shape the answers we constellate into reality: We have assumed that consciousness is complex and emergent because we are conscious and our complex brains took eons to evolve, but rather than something arising once non-conscious matter is configured in a particular way, consciousness might turn out to be an intrinsic property of matter that has existed for as long as the universe.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Defining consciousness as “just the pure fact of felt experience,” she reflects in the introduction:

The mystery, as I see it, is why any collection of matter in the universe — even brain processing — would feel like anything at all, why when a certain light wavelength enters the retina and is processed by the brain, an experience of blue materializes. We don’t think that a camera or a computer has an experience of seeing blue, even though they also process lightwaves and can distinguish between blue an other wavelengths of light… without having a felt experience.

The mystery she examines is why some systems of matter have a felt experience of their internal processing — those incommunicables of what it is like to be me and what it is like to be you known as qualia, which cleave open the abyss between us. An epoch before neuroscience, Emily Dickinson — who marveled at “how an atom fell and yet the Heavens held… blue and solid” — grappled with the mystery of qualia:

How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication —
Me — of Me?

Perhaps the hardest concession we have to make is that an abdication of the self is necessary for apprehending the fundamental. The self, after all, is a piano composing experience out of feeling and time — but with one being subjective and the other relative (possibly even emergent rather than fundamental, as half the physicists in the documentary believe time to be), a self is an instrument of interpretation whose readings are continually warped by the interpretation of experience that we call intuition, pocked with the “common pitfalls of common sense” Carl Sagan warned us against. Throughout the history of our species, our creaturely intuitions have repeatedly led us to miss or misperceive entire regions of reality. With an eye to such counterintuitive and disorienting discoveries as the sphericity of the Earth and the germ basis of disease — the ground so flat beneath our feet discovered to be curved, organisms we cannot perceive discovered to be deadly — Annaka looks back on the vector of knowledge to trace it forward toward a new model of reality:

Much of [the endeavor to understand consciousness] requires challenging some of our most innate intuitions about experience and what we call reality. I’ve always been interested in pushing the boundaries of our intuitions, and this is of course what science is largely about — science forces us to challenge the way we typically view the world to take a new perspective, to look out at the universe with fresh eyes. And every time we make a scientific breakthrough, every time we deepen our understanding significantly — especially as it relates to the fundamentals of reality — our intuitions get shaken up or shifted or molded into an entirely new field for the structure of reality.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

In a chapter of the documentary exploring the new science of plant intelligence, Annaka — a longtime meditator and meditation teacher — recalls going for a run up a steep nature trail, entering a type of meditation where “your body can take on the hard work and your mind can just observe the experience.” From this pulsating center of her own felt experience, she observes the locus of other consciousnesses and qualia around her:

As I climbed and turned corners, I noticed the passing faces. It struck me… the simple and profound acknowledgement that everyone around me is having a full, rich, deep conscious experience — unique, private, and all-encompassing for each mind. With every passing person, there exists an inner world as undeniable, textured, and layered as I know mine to be. It’s strange that this obvious fact seems to take effort to recognize and requires a reminder. And then I started to think about just how much conscious activity is surrounding us — there are so many perspectives of the universe — and an image came to mind: something like illuminated dots across a dim glow, like an image of Earth from the Space Station, and then something more like a dark meadow, becoming dense with fireflies, lighting their way in the darkness, all of these beads of light representing conscious experiences flickering in and out of existence.

Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. (Available as a print.)

She looks at the dogs on the trail and wonders about the qualia of creatures living in an olfactory universe. She thinks about the unseen “rabbits and mice and ants and spiders,” each with a different umwelt. At the top of the hill, she contemplates the leaves of the trees with their intricate photoreceptors and root hair cells conferring upon them their own kind of experience of reality.

And the glowing dots densen in the darkness of non-being, leaving her with “a visceral sense that the world is just teeming with felt experience.” (I am reminded of the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd describing her transcendent experience of the mountain as “a glow in the consciousness.”)

These flickers of experience, Annaka argues across the sweep of the documentary, may be all there is.

If the self is a “controlled hallucination,” in the words of one scientist she interviews, and even space is emergent rather than fundamental, as most physicists now agree, perhaps Marie Howe captured the fundamental fundament in her splendid poem “Singularity” — perhaps there is “No I, no We, no one. No was… only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is.”

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

If experience is the ultimate substratum of reality, then we need what Annaka calls “experiential science” to better probe the nature of the universe — scientific theories and tools that would expand the human unwelt to allow us to experience “other systems and forces we don’t naturally perceive.” (Imagine seeing with the tetrachromacy of a hummingbird or navigating with the quantum magnetorception of a warbler.) We may then find ourselves gaining new intuitions about other ways of being and perhaps even find ways of communicating with other systems. (Imagine sensing the needs of a willow or understanding how a mushroom experiences sound.)

At the heart of Lights On — some of the finest listening hours of a lifetime — is a revelation as simple and beautiful as an equation. Annaka reflects:

We’re not just embedded in nature — we are nature.

A century ago, at the dawn of relativity and quantum mechanics, Virginia Woolf arrived at the same elemental truth via a different route — the garden path along which she reckoned with the meaning of life, parting “the cotton wool of daily life” to conclude:

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… We — I mean all human beings — are connected with this… The whole world is a work of art… We are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

BP

Carl Linnaeus’s Flower Clock

“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world.

The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote:

When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself is no matter, it is a fact that all living beings are nonetheless under its rule; we hold for simpleminded, even barbaric, such people as do not know how old they are; when we are in the country, without a watch, under a dull sky and unaware of the time of day so that the evening ensnares us unexpectedly, we find it insufferable.

That teenager was the fifteen-year-old son of the Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeaus (May 23, 1707–10 January 10, 1778), writing his academic thesis on an improbable and inspired invention of his father’s: a flower clock to measure time in bloom.

Modern interpretation of Linnaeaus’s flower clock by artist Anna Fine Foer, 2021.

Born into a world where the same plant was known by a different name in every language and in different regions of the same country, Linnaeus systematized and harmonized the lexicon of the living world with his binomial nomenclature, giving each organism a two-part name composed of Latin grammatical forms. Space had not yet been standardized — the invention of the meter was half a century away — and time was still a local phenomenon, even knowledge itself was a chaos of information in the pre-decimal library, but when the twenty-eight-year-old Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the living world was suddenly ordered and nature was reclaimed as the commons of humanity, an immense and elegant system of which Homo sapiens was just one part.

Although he had been an obsessive list-maker and cataloguer since childhood, Linnaeus considered time the most profound organizing principle of life — so much so that he would later liken his classification system to “placing the pendulum in the clock.”

In his mid-thirties, he was appointed Professor of Medicine at his alma mater, Uppsala University, where he had studied medicine and botany a decade earlier. His post tasked him with overseeing the university’s botanical garden, so he took up residence in a house at the south-eastern corner of the garden with his wife and their newborn son. Linnaeus would rise at before dawn to spend his day obsessively observing and recording the rhythms of plants well into the night. On weekends, he would take his students on Herbationes — nature rambles — to study local plants in their native habitat, noting the changes in them across the longer sweep of seasonal time.

Wedding portrait of the 32-year-old Carl Linnaeaus by J. H. Scheffel, 1739. (Uppsala University Library.)

Immersed in the lives of plants around the clock and across the year, Linnaeaus grew fascinated by the variation in different species’ relationship to time. Just as (we now know) different humans have different chronotypes, which shape when we are most creative and alert, he discovered that different flowers open and close at different parts of the day and night, not at random but following a strict pattern. Nothing was known then of circadian rhythms or of phytochrome and cryptochrome — the photoreceptor proteins that make this photoperiodism possible. Linnaeaus seemed to have found nature’s own clock partway between mystery and mathematics — a glimpse of some deep truth in the mirror of beauty.

After incubating his insight for a decade, Linnaeus presented it under the heading Horologium Florae — “floral clock” — in his 1751 book Philosophia Botanica, listing 46 species of flowering plants whose blossoms open and close at particular times of the day and night: from the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) opening at 4AM and the Alpine poppy (Lieracium helvetica) at 6AM to the common marigold (Calendula officinalis) closing at 3PM and the day-lily (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus) at 10PM.

Over the next century, botanical gardens and lay gardeners around the world began trying to plant living clocks. In Victorian England, the popular ornamental flowering plant Mirabilis jalapa became known as “four o’clock flower.” The eminent French entomologist Félix Édouard Guérin-Méneville devoted a section of his 1836 Pictorial Dictionary of Natural History and Natural Phenomena to this “ingenious idea” of “the illustrious legislator of modern botany,” which inspired him to consider “the very curious subject” of “plant sleep” — a question epochs ahead of the new science of plant intelligence.

Depiction of Linnaeaus’s flower clock from Félix Édouard Guérin-Méneville’s Dictionnaire Pittoresque d’Histoire Naturelle, 1836. (Available as a print.)

At its heart, Linnaeaus’s flower clock was part celebration of human ingenuity in the triumph of timekeeping, part prayerful protest against the mechanization of time that was already auguring the age of industry and our self-expatriation from the rest of nature. Like The Golden Record, it was a poetic gesture rather than a scientific one — a mirror held up to humanity to help us remember who we are: creatures made of time and moved by beauty, governed by the same laws that order particle and pistil, that tune a flower to its star and harmonize the stars into a universe, “the Amen beyond the prayer.”

BP

Walt Whitman on Owning Your Life

Walt Whitman on Owning Your Life

At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of consciousness folded unto itself, our becoming the most private, most significant work we have.

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) made public art of this private work, his poetry so eternal and universal precisely because it came from a place so personal. Animated at once by a profound existential loneliness and a deep feeling of connection to every atom, every person, and every blade of grass, he spent his life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass — the record of his becoming — always addressing the person in the reader, always owning the person in himself.

Walt Whitman circa 1854 (Library of Congress)
Walt Whitman circa 1854 (Library of Congress)

While on the other side of the Atlantic Nietzsche was admonishing that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Whitman was reckoning with the rapids of responsibility for your life. He writes in one of the poems:

No one can acquire for another — not one,
Not one can grow for another — not one.
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him — it cannot fail.

Echoing Hermann Hesse’s insistence that “no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within,” Whitman urges us to heed the singular call of our own becoming bellowing beneath the din of the world:

Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

He distills this first and final truth of life in the closing stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — one of the greatest poems ever written, and one of the most perspectival takes on time. Insisting that you must abide “no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself,” he observes that at the end of life, we all invariably face…

…the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

A generation later, another of the world’s most original poets would come to compose the best manifesto I know for the courage to be yourself.

Complement with Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul and Marion Milner’s superb field guide to self-possession inspired by Woolf, then revisit Whitman on what makes a great person and how to keep criticism from sinking your soul.

BP

On Play

On Play

The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same).

Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of “combinatory play,” that Baudelaire turned to the season of play in his definition of genius as “nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”

Because pure play liberates us from any notion of winning or losing and therefore liberates us from “the prisons we choose to live inside,” those in power have always tried to undermine the value of play. Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, derided play as an irrational and therefore unnecessary activity in which “the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.”

What you lose, of course, is yourself — that is the fundamental experience of flow characteristic of all true play and all creative work — and in so unselfing, you find the moment, you find the universe, you find wonder.

Down the Rabbit Hole
One of Salvador Dalí’s lost illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

In the spring of 1933, partway in time between Bentham and Ackerman, the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga (December 7, 1872–February 1, 1945) took the podium at Leyden University to deliver his annual address as a rector. It startled all in attendance with its central insight nothing less than countercultural in a world still recovering from its first great war and already hurtling toward another: that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”

This would become the backbone of Huizinga’s visionary 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (public library). Animated by questions “hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy,” it went on to inspire everything from board games to mobile architecture to the magic circle concept of virtual worlds, and to influence generations of thinkers as sundry as Eric Berne (who cited Huizinga in his revolutionary 1964 book Games People Play), Richard Powers (who built the cathedral of his excellent novel Playground upon Huizinga’s foundation), and Thomas Merton (who underlined passages on nearly every page of his copy).

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

While his Austrian contemporary Otto Rank was pleading for “the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life,” Huizinga considers play — “a well-defined quality of action which is different from ‘ordinary’ life” — as evidence that our lives are animated by something beyond mind and beyond matter:

The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.

Art by Remi Charlip from My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat by Sandol Stoddard

This may be why evolutionary theory — which is an explanatory framework based on reason: adaptation as cause and effect — has so far failed to explain why nature gave us play, as unnecessary and as hallowing as any act of grace:

In this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun.

[…]

Play presents itself to us… as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives. As a regularly recurring relaxation, however, it becomes the accompaniment, the complement, in fact an integral part of life in general. It adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual — as a life function — and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.

Art from Kenny’s Window — Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical first children’s book

Play is so compelling in part because it “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly,” free from the binaries of right and wrong that bind our ordinary lives. This is Huizinga’s most daring axiom: While the traditional view holds that moral development — the annealing of our rights and wrongs — is how societies advance, he argues that play is the true sculptor of civilization:

Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up by John Miller

And yet for all this theorizing, Huizinga concedes that the role and riddle of play is a “question that eludes and deludes us to the end, in a lasting silence.” Nearly a century after him, Diane Ackerman turned that silence into song with her lyrical defense of “deep play” as that vital “combination of clarity, wild enthusiasm, saturation in the moment, and wonder” that makes life more alive.

BP

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