Where do you all think the ability to experience comes from? Are there any organisms you think don’t experience - plants, bacteria? What about rocks, galaxies, or computers?
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Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) reminded people of Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) – claiming that consciousness in humans is a lot more recent than we think it is – consciousness as a result of the integration between the left and right hemispheres of our brain – before that time, “thoughts” passing across the corpus callosum where perceived as being the voices of the gods …
I have no idea where the ability comes from, honestly. That would also answer the question of why we are here. It’s too difficult to wrap my head around. It’s more about ‘Once I’m here let me make that as agreeable as possible’ and ‘I’m here, who else is?’ Some bacteria are part of us, it’s hard to say where ‘I’ end and my ‘microbiome’ begins - so is just the ‘I’ part conscious and intelligent, or the ‘bacteria’ part as well? Do these parts of me communicate with each other; could we even have a conscious communication with our microbiomes?
Currently I have more questions than answers as well. During Covid my whole life hit a dead end, and sorting through the rubble I had to admit I had always been an Animist of sorts, it was just kind of ‘far too out there’ to be open and honest about it.
I have a horse and she has been with me for 18 years. One day I came to visit her in the pasture when I was really sad and she just walked over, laid down next to me and invited me to sit next to her. She didn’t just understand that I was sad, she came to offer her comfort - and did it despite me never making as much of an effort to understand her emotional state. Riding her whenever I wanted, selling her foals, lending her to the riding school … of course I had tried to treat her as well as I could, but nothing like what she was showing me on that miserably sad day, not that depth of understanding she showed me now.
It really hammered in that we are just one species of many intelligent beings out of there, and not always the kindest one.
Something a little more far out there, right in the realm of psychosis, is what I started to experience when I asked ‘my’ landscape what it wanted, and it sort of answered back.
This ‘talking’ to non-human beings feels a bit like tuning into a radio frequency and listening to one’s thoughts passing. The difference in quality of thought when close to a non-human other is what you could call communication. It’s like when you ‘get a vibe’ from another person.
Well I’m afraid as an answer to your question this is rather useless, but it explains why I opened this community. A rock told me to do it. ;-)
is what I started to experience when I asked ‘my’ landscape what it wanted, and it sort of answered back
this has also been a well documented side effect of anyone dealing with psilocybin …
If you want to reduce it to that, feel free. It’s bit more than that from my perspective. Eating/smoking something (someone) is a form of communication. I also communicate with rice, tomato, wheat, yeast, mint … and they all alter my consciousness in some way - it’s only that parts of our society consider a select few of these non-human allies as ‘too spicy’ for our brainscape and make them illegal and cause people to get all worked up about them. The question I guess is whether I dismiss the non-human induced ideas in these altered states as ‘just tripping’ or if I engage with it as valuable information. At one point I decided to just see what happens if I pretend everything is alive and act accordingly. As a result I felt more aligned with reality. It came with undoing a lot of unreflected Western superiority, colonialism, Eurocentrism and Scientism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against science, I just don’t like the sort of science that dismisses any other system of knowledge as primitive without even trying to understand its intricacies, especially when it comes to living in a landscape (what we would call managing a landscape because we humans always want to be in charge).
