On Becoming a Being

Or the beginning of consciousness

What is it like to be a bat?

That’s the title of a paper published by Thomas Nagel when a young professor at Princeton. It is not as batty as it sounds. He was rhetorical to get philosophers to a new debate on consciousness that continues 40 years later. A bat swooping inside his house prompted thinking about other minds. He could equally have chosen a dog, cat, parrot, or even a human fetus.

I risk looking a fool writing about a subject that experts call THE hard problem. Is there anything more ineffable in the cosmos? I didn’t graduate in philosophy, or at least not that kind of degree. You wouldn’t find Hegel bookmarked at my bedside. Heck no, although he might help me get to sleep!

Deep thinkers have not settled the mystery of our awareness of self and the external world in over two thousand years. Even Aristotle and Plato couldn’t agree on its nature. While philosophy generates plenty of creative speculation, there is hope that a convergence of psychology and neuroscience will crack the venerable problem. Until the rise of biochemistry, vitalism was a widely held explanation of how living cells are animated. Hopes of reducing the mysterious mind to physics and chemistry are encouraged by the defeat of metaphysical vitalism.

But the nub of Dr. Nagel’s paper challenges faith in a purely physical account of consciousness. He draws a line between two kinds of stuff in the universe.

There’s the physical kind perceived with our five senses and can be measured objectively using scientific tools. We detect electrical activity and blood flow in the living brain. Functional domains of neuroanatomy are scaled down to the cellular level for recording electrical impulses and finding key molecules. Reductionism is the main highway to understand the brain as a mechanism, but is the mind just another cog in a machine?

Mental stuff cannot be atomized, neither can it be probed (directly) like the physical kind. It is the awareness of ourselves, the ground of internal knowledge, and intimations of the external world. In a word, it is subjective. Hence, the signature phrase: “What it is like …”

My consciousness assures me I am alive. If it shut down completely, I shrink to a vegetative shell, no more a person than a lettuce. I am almost stumped for an analogy of something familiar yet subtle to express, but perhaps Dark Matter will do the trick. Physicists can’t see it but are sure it exists because it has measurable effects on gravitational fields. Likewise, I can’t read your mind but would know its presence in a two-way conversation.

René Descartes’ maxim I think therefore I am laid a foundation for modern philosophy. Everything flows from “knowing thyself.” My mind is a torrent of thoughts, ideas, emotions, worries, and the fountainhead of self-awareness. To be conscious is to feel awe at a red sunset, satisfaction from reaching a goal, tasting chocolate, and the stabbing pain of toothache. A surgeon who inserts electrodes in my brain can detect electrical activity but can’t enter my private thoughts and I doubt if brainwaves will ever be translated into intelligible words (thank goodness). Neither, of course, can anyone know the mind of a bat. I am glad telepathy only exists in science fiction and the magical reality of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, in which enthralling reading allows us to safely enter forbidden territories.

Do you feel like a ghost in a body machine? That is the mind-body dualism of Descartes and some spiritual traditions, but feelings are not entirely trustworthy. Dualism is out of favor as an explanation for natural phenomena. Aristotle never liked it. Dr. Nagel appears to agree by holding the holistic belief that the mind and body are harnessed instead of independent realms. The Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle ridiculed dualism as a confusion of categories, which I will illustrate.

Imagine a schoolboy on an educational visit to Washington D.C. After sightseeing at the White House, House and Senate, Supreme Court, and other departments, he felt the trip was incomplete, so he asked the guide, “Why didn’t you show me the government?” He thought it should have its own building and didn’t realize the government is the whole shebang. But the logical end of exchanging dualism for holism is that when the time comes for the body to die, the mind expires with it. Where does that leave traditional Western belief in an eternal soul or the Eastern atma? Sorry! However, instead of bowing to the unacceptable conclusion, there’s always another philosopher or theologian to follow more comforting theories.

Birthing the Mind

You are right to wonder if musing about consciousness has anything to do with my Substack theme. I assure you it has absolutely everything to do with human development and yet practically nothing of worth.

My first memory is locking myself in the bathroom to escape from my scary grandmother at three years old, and I couldn’t turn the key back to get out. I count that as my first realization of being a being. At introspective moments afterward, I always have an unwavering impression of a constant self in conscious hours that hasn’t changed down the years except in knowledge and experience, whereas my physicality is utterly different. Infantile amnesia prevents me from knowing if I was a person earlier in infancy or before birth. I often pondered about the ontogeny of the mind when I became the expectant father of a child.

The Chicago University law school dispatched a survey to over 5,000 American biologists to ask when life begins. A consensus of 95% agreed on fertilization. I don’t think they meant to endorse the fundamentalist belief in ensoulment when an egg meets a sperm, like the electric moment depicted on the Sistine Chapel wall of Jove extending fingers to Adam. The biologists stated the fact that zygotes are living cells, like other nucleated cells. Belief in original ensoulment makes a distinction that carries the grave implication that to destroy “life” at the zygote stage or afterward is tantamount to murder. That is held by some church denominations and ever since Pope Pius IX’s 1869 proclamation, but the other two Abrahamic religions and Eastern spiritual traditions picked a later date for ensoulment to my knowledge.

When life begins is not the right question for the vexed matter of when embryos or fetuses should be protected by law. David Hume would call it an is-ought fallacy. You cannot draw an ethical conclusion from a purely factual statement. To say something “is” expresses a description without a compelling prescription for how it “ought” to be treated or morally judged. The zygote is a cell type, but that fact doesn’t bind us to treat it the same as a postnatal human being.  

Religious and rationalist views conflict because they are based on different premises. The words “soul” and “consciousness” are not synonymous, although their meanings overlap. The first is founded on faith and/ or edict while the second takes its authority from objective truths, and both are sincere efforts to resolve the immensely important moral value of different stages of human life. If pressed for an answer, I would say a fetus ought to have the same rights as me when it becomes a person. Personhood depends on consciousness (actual and latent), but to be conscious is a normative characteristic of being a person. When rather nebulous words spin around, it is time to turn to biology.

Consciousness is an emergent property of a complex brain. Surely, everyone agrees. Brain activity monitored with EEGs and fetal brain mapping with MRI changes from the state of wakefulness to sleep or anesthetized or comatose. Undoubtedly, they reflect the presence or absence of thoughts and dreams, even admitting that correlation doesn’t prove causation. The first inklings of activity in the nervous system were recorded as long ago as the 1950s by inserting electrodes into the brains of six-week-old ectopic embryos (not fetuses, by convention until eight weeks post-conception). Their bodies were pea-sized with a brain vesicle and dots for primordial eyes. However, the firing of a few nondescript nerves doesn’t equate to sentience any more than a bunch of twitching cardiac muscle cells on a scanner at that time stands for a beating heart.

EEG recordings of fetal lambs in utero showed slow waves and high frequency/ low amplitude waves with spindles, resembling deep sleep and REM sleep. It’s impossible to imagine what they dreamt about. They were constantly sedated with a neurosteroid and prostaglandin from the placental villi, as well as low oxygen in umbilical cord blood. They began to wake up when the umbilicus was clamped to block the hormones with oxygen supplied externally. A preterm human baby at 26 weeks of gestation can respond to sound with event-related potentials, but that’s the earliest time they can be tested.

Nerve fibers radiate at this stage from the thalamus to cortical regions. They convey sensory information to visual, auditory, and olfactory centers, as well as pain signals. The absence of a cerebrum in anencephalic neonates makes them insensate. These developments, sometimes regarded at the threshold of consciousness, coincide with the earliest time a premature baby can be saved in a neonatal intensive care unit. Some psychologists think babies are not conscious until full term, while others delay the date for another year or even three years. Human brain development matures more slowly than in any other altricial species and the myelinization of nerves and elimination of redundant synapses continues until after adolescence.

Impeccable logic can easily get you into hot water in this subject. When a famous bioethicist gave a lecture on personhood, he said that since consciousness is required, newborn babies are not yet persons. They don’t have wants and desires for the future like us. The implication so outraged his students that they called for his dismissal from the university, although he never meant to justify infanticide.

Our humanity sometimes requires us to suspend reason or observe “natural laws” that contradict our sense of morality and justice. We reject the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest as a model for society because we despise the injustices of Social Darwinism. Polygamy promotes genetic fitness in lions and deer, but it is anathema for other reasons. Put it this way: our emotional right brain sometimes overrules the rational left brain. For example, when I cradled my newborn son fresh from another world, I boasted to a nurse that he had expressive and intelligent eyes like Yoda (without the ears). I suspended facts known to me about neonatal consciousness and eyesight. As he was precious, I regarded him as a new person, as I had done since he first kicked his mother’s womb.

Gradualism

We draw lines to make the world seem simpler than it really is. Dualisms are rigidly observed from familiarity that makes them seem absolute: Good v. Evil, Alive v. Dead, Right v. Wrong, Religion v. Atheism, and Black v. White. It is easier to live with unexamined certainty than honest uncertainty. However, the grayscale is truer to nature. There are no sharp edges between seasons of the year or colors on the spectrum. Human development is a continuum after gastrulation during pregnancy to birth to puberty to old age. Organic complexity develops gradually, and the mind probably emerges slowly too. Aristotle had a notion of gradual ensoulment: from a nutritive or plant soul in early embryos to a sensitive or animal soul, and a rational soul finally emerges before birth. As in development, so too in evolution. The history of life is a progression of advancing body form and mentality. The cosmos is still waking up to a deeper awareness of complexity, beauty, and possibilities.

Mind the Animals

Descartes thought animals were automatons with only rudimentary sentience, if any. A creature that can’t suffer feels nothing, and where there’s no suffering, pain can be inflicted with a clear conscience. Fortunately, the tide has changed, but not far enough.

When I told an old farmer we had dogs living indoors as family members, he sneered because his dogs were ratters left in the yard. “They’re just dogs!” He never had a close relationship with any animal, doggone it. I easily fall into sentimental anthropomorphism about my pets or even wild animals I know. It’s almost shameful for a biologist, but if they project a personality, I admit they have some degree of personhood.

Animals are not machines. Lawmakers have been slow to protect them against the drag of a long history of treatment as private property. Recently, authorities closed an appalling facility in Virginia breeding thousands of Beagles for medical research, but campaigns to render human embryos the maximum protection of the law get more publicity. Would it be right to enact stricter penalties for harming an insentient zygote or a blastocyst than a sentient dog or a horse?

We underestimate creatures that don’t look like us or share a common language, and not only domesticated species. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey raised public sensibility from intimate observations of wild animals. It is easier, of course, to appreciate the mind of a Great Ape, but we shouldn’t underrate other creatures, particularly any mammals, birds, and big-brained cephalopod mollusks. I heard a story of octopuses in an aquarium behaving differently to viewers on the other side of the glass wall depending on whether they had seen them before. It’s hard to imagine the mind of a mollusk, but it’s something to think about when waiters serve tables with deep-fried calamari or grilled octopus tentacles. Besides, I have yet to hear about any closely observed species that new research has found to be less smart than we previously thought. It’s always the other way round, except in certain cases of Homo sapiens! Linnaeus complimented our species by giving us that name, meaning “thinking man.” It set us above close cousins like the extinct Neanderthals who were later labeled Homo stupidus (since revised). Differences between us shrink the closer we look at our hominid relatives and ancestors. It’s time to gather them all into the same family that I would call Homo esse, translated as “human being.”

Hundreds of biologists, psychologists, and philosophers recently signed the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. It states that “While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged [about animal consciousness].” If this stimulates research, I wonder what revelations will unfold and whether it will win more respect for animals. Dr. Nagel might be interested to know the mind of a bat is deeper than we thought, even though we will never plumb it. A recent study of Egyptian fruit bats found they are capable of complex decision-making when searching for food and selecting the best quality.

Not Knowing

I am sorry to disappoint readers who hope to read flashes of inspiration. How I could I pretend to make progress on matters that perplexed thinkers throughout history? Today, a Panglossian optimism in science expects to open the veiled minds of humans and animals by reducing mystery to atoms, molecules, and electromagnetic radiation. This is only an expression of faith. It boasts that all mysteries will be uncovered, every superstitious belief canceled, and obscure corners in Nature penetrated.

Is it defeatist to say some things are beyond the reach of knowing? Peter Medawar’s book The Limits of Science (1988) expresses that doubt which sounds unorthodox for a man whose career in biomedical research was crowned with a Nobel Prize. He declares some questions “transcendent” when they are better understood through metaphysics and mythology. He is in good company with the quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, the embryologist Conrad Waddington, and others who confess that consciousness is not accountable in purely physical terms. I am glad if some things remain ineffable because a world purged of mystery is barren and not one I want to live in.

Image created by generative AI

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