For everything that lives is holy.
(Blake)
When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the ‘I’ whose predicate can be ‘love’ or ‘fear’ or ‘want’, and whose object can be ‘someone’ or ‘nothing’ and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around ‘I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. (John Ames in Marilynne Robinson ‘Gilead’)
Species and genera are useful notions for scientists wanting to make generalisations about all frogs or all amphibians, for example, but they do not describe the real world with any precision. Locke, I think, posited a language in which every single thing would have its own name, an admirably determined quest in the cause of truth, even if (as he recognized) it would be wildly impractical, the dictionary being larger than the universe itself. But his quixotic notion highlights the imprecision of all words. We can and must describe things to communicate, but always remembering that imprecision. As Braque warns, ‘To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself’.
Even if one conditionally accepts the notion of species, there is no hierarchy. A lion is not existentially superior to a gnu because it catches and eats it (any more than the gnu is superior if it escapes). A bacterium is not superior to a lion because it eats it. As Ilkley Moor reminds us, we all end up eating each other eventually. There is no great chain of being. Creatures are just their own haecceities, doing their own thing. (And, in reality, species do not exist. Darwin himself admitted that species were ‘artificial combinations made for convenience.’) [Footnote: in a nature documentary I watched recently, an esteemed naturalist told us that leatherback turtles ‘can trace their ancestry back 250 million years.’ But if we were to travel back all that time to meet the first ur-leatherback turtle, I am quite sure we would find that, like us, it had a mummy and a daddy, that it was not, in fact, created ex nihilo. Perhaps the taxonomists have decided that mummy and daddy were not strictly ‘leatherback turtles’, that they somehow failed to meet the entirely arbitrary criteria we have attributed to ‘leatherback-turtleness’, but this is merely a freak of the scientists’ fancy neo-Linnean filing-system, an office-based administrative initiative with absolutely no pertinence to the physical and lived reality. ‘Leatherback turtle’ is just a title like a dukedom or baronetcy – the family existed long before our gracious nomenclators ennobled it; indeed, it traces its ancestry back 4 billion years to the first living cell. We all do.]
The uniqueness of each created thing makes everything fundamentally equal. We humans still like to imagine ourselves as superior to other creatures, on account of our self-awareness and intelligence, but picking out one’s own salient characteristic and claiming that it is the most important attribute in the universe is a rather disingenuous exercise. Perhaps the flea regards leaping as the highest possible achievement, maybe the giraffe looks down on other beasts as hopelessly neckless. In any case it seems clear that the self-consciousness we possess is a ramification from the consciousness which evolved long ago and is shared by most creatures. [Footnote: far from being the universal aspiration of all living things, consciousness has, it seems, even been ‘rejected’ by a few organisms. There are creatures called rhizocephalans who live in the guts of certain crabs. These apparently once possessed a rudimentary consciousness but, enjoying a cushy life as a parasite, gave it up as too energy-sapping and not worth the candle.] The vexed issue of how these rich subjective experiences and thoughts can emerge from the objective matter of our physical bodies (the so-called ‘hard problem’) has apparently been solved, or at least by-passed. ‘The guiding issue is no longer the contrived one of whether a subjectivist concept of consciousness can be derived from an objectivist concept of the body. Rather, the guiding issue is to understand the emergence of living subjectivity from living being, where living being is understood as already possessed of an interiority that escapes the objectivist picture of nature… According to this view, the roots of ontological subjectivity go far back in evolution, to the point when living things first emerged from non-living matter. And therefore, even a living thing with no nervous system at all, like a bacterium, possesses emergent features that are ontologically specific to that individual life.’ [Footnote: although this does not aspire to be a learned book, I have occasionally read a specialist text such as this one, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness by Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt, a deep, dense work, which also includes the immortal mind-freezing sentence: ‘Especially informative is the postinfundibular neuropile of the amphioxus hypothalamus.’] All of which is what you would expect since nature produces individuals rather than job-lots of identical creatures in batches called ‘species’, and since each creature is unfolded from its ancestors.
AN UNEXPECTED DIGRESSION ON ‘EMERGENT FEATURES’
Not the best magician in the world could produce a rabbit out of a hat, if there wasn’t already a rabbit in the hat. (Boris Lermontov in ‘The Red Shoes’)
Mimosa pudica – the Sensitive Plant – folds up its leaves when touched or exposed to some shock. It had always been assumed that this is simply a mechanical reflex. But experiments by an ecologist, Monica Gagliano, suggest another possibility. She constructed an apparatus which held the plants in pots and suddenly dropped them. The plants initially responded to the shock by folding their leaves, but after the experiment was repeated several times they stopped. They were not damaged – they still reacted when touched – but they had become habituated to this particular ‘threat’. If these findings are true, [Footnote: and of course I have not verified her experiments with my own, any more than I have verified Darwinian evolution or the heliocentric solar system myself. I take these theories on trust because everyone but self-evident loonies seems to accept them. It is not only religion that has ignorant and acquiescent adherents.] Mimosa pudica appears to have some form of intelligent memory, and if this obviously brain-less plant (like the Patagonian vine we met earlier) can be said to demonstrate pre-cerebral (or, at any rate, non-cerebral) intelligence, all living creatures may perhaps be said to possess at least some emergent features like consciousness and intelligence. The presence or absence of a specific organ for intelligence is irrelevant – it is just one, but not the only, possible mechanism and, where present, it refines rather than creates the ability which is already inherent.
Once upon a time, amoebae were the most complex creatures on the planet (and ‘they’, if we for a moment allow the species, are still around). They move, they eat without a mouth, they breathe without lungs, they see without eyes, they reproduce without any of the tackle that adorns us. They perform all these actions within a single cell. Is this not a perfection of elegance that would make Givenchy despair? We do not see because we have eyes; we have eyes because we can see. Sight long pre-dated the specialised organs of sight. In a machine, processes are determined by the machine’s structure, but in living bodies like ours, the structure is determined by the processes. The form follows the function. Because amoebae do not have a brain we, with staggering illogic, commonly assume they cannot think or feel, but perhaps thought, as the example of the Sensitive Plant may hint, pre-dated the organ of thought and the development of the brain is following (who knows how far behind?) the tasks demanded. [Footnote: does this suggest that life may have preceded living beings? Perhaps the first living cell was just the physicalisation of already existing non-physical life, as the eye is the refined physicalisation of the already existing ability to see. This might bring us somewhere near Erigena’s claim that ‘all creation [is] the unfolding of God’s nature; it is part of a divine process by which God, through Creation, reveals himself to himself.’ This is a material world and any quality must be physicalized to be fully expressed.
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life.’ Life, in other words, has existed from the beginning, even before the first living cell, and the story of the universe is the manifestation of that life in infinite new revelations. Is that it? Who knows?]
nei – a Tibetan word meaning (approximately) ‘the embodiment of the sacred’
The ability is not wholly dependent on the mechanism but itself determines the mechanism which, in turn, refines the ability. We are now, after so many millions of generations, at a point where, for example, our ability to see is, like a machine in this instance, dependent wholly on one vital component – that wonderful refinement of technology, our eyes – but this has not been the case at all stages of evolution, nor in other attributes than sight may it be the case for us now.
Anglers say that a hooked fish feels no pain because it has no nerve-endings in its lip; vivisectors claim that the lab rat’s squealing and flinching are simple reflexes and not reactions to pain because they have already neutralised the parts of its brain they have decided are its ‘pain receptors’. But both fish and rat may be at a stage of evolution where, though having both a brain and nerves, their feelings are not exclusively processed by them. Surely, knowing the slow incremental process of evolution, we would not expect a creature (with or without feelings or intelligence) suddenly in one generation to develop a brand-new organ or network capable of processing feelings. On the contrary, the capability preceded the material organ. [Footnote: this should cast doubt on our current obsession with anything ‘neuro’- as gospel evidence. It is fun to see the lights go on and off on brain scans, but it would be rather irresponsible to claim that they accurately reflect all the feelings and thoughts that are going on in the body, whether in the brain or elsewhere. It is our excitable yearning to know (and to claim knowledge) that leads us into such gullibility: a light goes on and we think ‘Yes!’, no light shows and we think ‘No!’ – there is no reason to think nature so quantifiable let alone so simplistic and binary.
Has our search for intelligence been anthropocentric all along? We believe that our own intelligence is dependent on our brains (though there seems to be increasing evidence that our guts are pretty canny too), and therefore seek the same mechanism in other life-forms, even though we know they have evolved differently over the millions of years since we shared a common ancestor. In laboratories we experiment with crows and rats, congratulating them on their intelligence when they behave the way we decide a human would, when, in most cases, they perform an action that brings them a reward. Clever crow! It maximises its material income by performing bizarre tasks in a wholly unnatural environment. It could get a job in the City. What an incontrovertible proof of its intelligence! What an incontrovertible proof of the fatuous anthropocentricity of the researchers!]
If, as seems to be the case then, we have to admit that we cannot rely purely on perceptible causes to explain effects, we are in thrillingly uncharted territory. In fact, the world we live in is, to some extent, unchartable territory (though no less wondrous and beautiful for that). Maps will only be useful if they are candid about this vast Terra incognita (which is not confined to the edges of the world. We are ourselves incogniti.) We can perhaps draw the conclusion that the presence of material evidence signifies something, but we cannot extrapolate anything from the absence of material evidence. (And every piece of material evidence we have is surrounded by an absence of material evidence which may, who knows? be a presence of immaterial evidence, or certainly of undetectable material evidence, and quite as eloquent could we understand it.)
Unless I am much mistaken (which, perhaps, is not impossible) it seems as though our growing understanding of evolution and, in particular, our acknowledgement of ‘emergence’ as a feature of this constantly dynamic system, has given us fairly decisive evidence of the inadequacy of empiricism.
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