“My friend!”
Shaine squealed as she threw another orange and black caterpillar skyward. These poor little creatures, who resembled tiny little tiger kittens, were cute and even a bit cuddly. But en masse, seen as a carpet invading from the forest, across our lawn, onto the concrete deck and up the walls of our house, they lost what little individuality they might possess. Shaine, age 5, felt free to pick up one after another, throw each up, and watch it fly. Why she espoused her friendship to each has remained a family mystery all these years.
They are a plague, which infest Northwest forests in rolling random patterns. We had our turn about 20 years ago. Researching the creatures, I found an article from the Seattle Times four years ago, by Lynda V. Mapes. She succinctly sums it all up with in a few well chosen words:
“Waves of caterpillars wash up the sides of the house; conga lines of caterpillars cha-cha on the porch furniture, their little bodies twitching with eagerness to latch onto the next surface … No kidding: We walk our dogs in the woods and realize that sound of rain is actually a deluge of tiny caterpillar scat pelting shredded leaves. A weird nuclear-winter look afflicts the alders — strafed, stripped, bare, even as summer bursts out all around.”
(At last! Documentation that I wasn’t crazy, that spring, when I went outside to investigate the light rain patter sound I heard in our back yard – not rain at all, but the sound of Plague. Some said it was the little guys chewing, some said it was them falling out of trees, others voted for zillions of tiny feet. Lynda goes for the gross.)
These fuzzy little pests seem to have two jobs: chew leaves, and climb things to find leaves to chew. Move forward in a straight line until you get to a vertical object, then go straight up and hope it’s a tree. It’s all quite fascinating, but today, I’m only thinking of one thing – are they thinking?
I’ve finished a book on one of my favorite subjects: consciousness. “I Am A Strange Loop”, but Douglas Hofstader (2007, Basic Books). Along with the mysterious growth of money, and the all powerful force of gravity, consciousness is one of my favorite zen koans. In 1979, Hofstader, Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Indiana University, wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning “Godel, Escher, and Bach”, an excursion in recursion.
At the time, he was an assistant professor of computer science at IU. As a teen, he had became fascinated by mathematical esoterica, specifically, the ideas of Kurt Godel, an Austrian mathematician. Godel apparently discovered a way to create self referential statements in Bertrand Russell’s system of logic, “Principia Mathematica”, which was specifically constructed to EXCLUDE all forms of self reference, attempting to found all of mathematics on a few basic, immutable principles.
I have no illusion that I actually understand the previous sentence; I’m just taking Hofstader’s word for it. But it doesn’t really matter. Apparently, Prof. Hofstader became obsessed with the concept of self reference, especially in the context of how the mind works. He has pondered the nature of consciousness ever since.
For the non-mathematically inclined, the inclusion of Escher was a great boon. You remember those paintings of stairways that go endlessly up, yet seem to connect back to themselves at the start? And two hands, each rising from a sheet of paper, clutching a pencil, drawing the other? Well, that’s the idea of self reference, or recursion. Hofstader observes that consciousness is just such a recursion. That which observes, can also observe itself – and within that short phrase, lies a conundrum for the ages.
In this more recent book, Hofstader spirals in on a major philosphical/religious question: is the soul (or mind) separate from the body, or is it an integral outgrowth of that body, differing from, say, hair, or nails, only in that it is aware – of itself, and everything else? Being a scientist, he poses the questions this way: “Either we believe that our consciousness is something other than an outcome of physical law, or we believe it is an outcome of physical law – but making either choice leads us to disturbing, perhaps even unacceptable consequences.”
How can something which seems to not have a physical presence – our awareness – have effects in the physical world? And vice versa – how the the animate world create this phenomenon of internal self-awareness? And my favorite question – is it even possible for that phenomenon to be able to explain itself? Should we even TRY to understand consciousness?
Werner Heisenberg, an Austrian working in Neils Bohr’s physics institute in Copenhagen in the 1920’s, developed a structure for thinking about and studying the unimaginably small world of sub-atomic particles. Again, the exact nature of his work is terribly technical, and I don’t understand a bit of it, but those who do claim that he showed it is not possible to accurately measure all aspects of these phenomena – the very act of measurement would negate the phenomenon being measured (if you want more, go to Wikipedia!). Thus, the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”.
The same concept applies, in spades, to any attempt to study consciousness from a scientific perspective. All attempts, I suspect, are fruitless when the phenomenon being studied equates to the phenomenon doing the studying.
And, the study of consciousness, nowadays, suffers from the brain-centric focus of many in academia. Few learned people are willing, or able to get past the idea that thinking and brains (the literal, physical brain) are all that are required to learn about something, or that have any value in the act of learning and being in the world. I believe, as UC Berkeley Philosopher Alva Noe has http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/index.html said, “Consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. And to really understand it, you’d have to study it that way.”
In other words a single brain, or even a single person, is insufficient to study human consciousness. You need to get to another level, to get the proper perspective to study and measure the phenomenon. We’re going to have to wait until we learn how to harness a collective consciousness (if it exists), in order to understand the phenomenon of individual self-awareness.
Until then, I will just have to be satisfied with BEING, rather than UNDERSTANDING. Just as, I’ll never UNDERSTAND why Shaine said “My friend!” when she three each tent caterpillar over her head. But I sure did enjoy it, as one of the signs of her growing 5 year-old self-awareness.