CONSCIOUSNESS, THEORY OF MIND, AND EMPATHY

Tuxie, a formal cat with a soul patch.

Observing these nearly-grown kittens who bounce around me, I see that they are conscious, able to form a purpose and pursue it, even if I try to discourage them.  How many times did I have to throw Tuxie off my keyboard so far — I don’t mean how many occasions, I mean one after another after another.  25 in a row, so far.  But she has no interest in my opinion of her actions, just which ones might hurt her.  Or be good to eat.  Nor does she wonder why I don’t want her on my keyboard.  Or what a keyboard is anyway.  She does have a passing interest in the little cursor arrow, thinking it’s a bug, but no interest in the "mouse" whatsoever.  It’s just a lump to her.  She doesn't do metaphor.

So that’s consciousness, but not self-consciousness.  She doesn’t ponder what sort of kitten she is or where she came from, she simply performs her life as she has evolved to do.  It happens to be quite a successful strategy for survival, since part of that evolution is to be cute, but that’s only as an individual cat.  Taken on the whole, cat mortality is high.  Their strategy for group survival is to make lots more kittens.

This is a town loaded with cats: pets, ferals (entirely wild but in town), satellites (come and go around households), mousers, field cats — all opportunists, just taking the path of least resistance.

The people in most places are pretty much like that as well, but they watch each other, and most wonder what the other guy is doing.  It can be competitive, or it can be meant to help.  They spend a lot of time trying to figure out what each other are doing and why and whether it will really work or not.  If results are good, they might try the same thing.  In terms of cats, today they discovered how to get on the roof by climbing a tree.

A cat tries to figure out what a mouse will do, both in the sense of hot pursuit and in the sense of lying in wait at likely places.  I watch them play and realize they take their toys into the bathroom because the room is small and there’s not much to hide behind.  When I move big pieces of furniture, there are often little caches of toys just beyond the reach of the cat, because cats don’t think of using a stick to knock it out of there.  A monkey would.  But they have a constant itch to go behind, to tip over, to knock stuff off heights, to pounce on any lump of cloth — like my slippers.  Also built in is the thing about the leopard dragging off a dead gazelle, except that it’s a washrag.

One of the early consciousness “raising” events decades ago was a male and female biology team that went out with clipboards to observe herds in Africa.  They watched and noted every small meme performed by the ungulates.  At the end of the day, the woman’s notes were all about protecting babies, nursing, calves getting lost, and other domestic acts.  The man’s notes were all about sparring, scanning the horizon, making bluff attacks on possible predators.  They weren’t ASSIGNED this difference in gender roles — it’s just what they noticed, what got into their consciousness.

I don’t know whether the team went back and consciously tried to note the actions of the animals that were opposite their own gender.  The tendency in experiments now is not to be so free-form, to set up events that will show what the animals are thinking as demonstrated by their behavior, and then to videotape them so they can be observed and analyzed repeatedly by different people with different interests.

A recent experiment showed the usual suspects (university undergrads) a little vid about eating.  Then they were asked to complete this word:  SO_P.  The students supplied:  “soup.”  Then they did the same thing but with a vid about showering. They asked SO_P and they got soap.  That’s sort of trivial but it shows how much context and mind-set control what we think.

When I first moved to Valier in 1999, one of my best Browning Blackfeet friends stopped by.  My neighbor immediately rushed over, using the pretext of bringing me some garden truck: two potatoes and a turnip.  She believed she was protecting me from a home invasion.  My visitor was Darrell Kipp, an internationally valued educator with a Harvard degree, a person I’d known since he was in high school in 1961.  He knew what my neighbor was thinking: she was demonstrating it.  She thought she knew what Darrell was thinking, but she had no idea.  She didn’t even have a concept of what a Harvard education was.

The theory of mind is the superficial noting of how an individual acts and how one interprets it.  A cat has a theory of mind about a mouse: it will run along a wall, it will dodge under spaces too small for a cat, double back, flatten out or narrow up to get through small apertures.  And the cat develops a repertoire of responses and predictions that help it catch that mouse.  Mammals and reptiles have brains that grasp a theory of mind.  It’s an open question whether bugs do, but they seem to know when and how to jump on prey.  Under a microscope one can see the microbes “eat” each other —the big ones just en-glob the little ones — but more than that it sure looks as though the big ones know how to chase and the little ones know how to evade, so is that mind?

Humans — at least SOME humans have the capacity to empathize.  This is not the same thing as sympathize, which means sharing the pathos of what has befallen others.  A little kid who sees you crying will come and put his arms around you, try to comfort you, but they probably won’t feel or even grasp what a grieving person knows and feels.  Even more dismaying, if a little kid is crying, people snap at them, “Stop crying!” instead of asking to be told all about it, enough to feel it in their own bodies, to share the burden of the feeling.

Many think that empathy is what makes humans able to work together, to share values, even to love each other.  This is a key to art and civilization.  But now, in a time when not so many people can even “feel” each other, some thinkers are trying to understand what is beyond empathy — a Spockian shared minds sort of thing, maybe.  Our insistence on rationality and logic may have gone as far as it can go.  Maybe it’s causing us to miss a lot of useful phenomena that would make life better for us all.  We need to throw aside a lot of old tired assumptions, like the idea that those who are different are a threat.  Maybe they’re a salvation.

THE OTHERNESS WITHIN US

“Brown” people have come to be a kind of category of people indicated by their general skin color, which might not be technically so brown.  Roughly they tend to be indigenous people, from America, Asia, or maybe Australia -- free from the white Euro pattern, particularly that for men.  Their relationship to women, in particular, tends to be different from that of white men.  But not like the African black man.  (This is all fanciful and not particularly related to any surveys, statistics, or whatever -- kind of literary.)  I’ll let this part go until later.

Iain Glen

For now I’ll set up a new category:  “ginger” men from the redhead countries: Ireland, Scotland, the Nordics.  Oh, there are “ginger” women, too.  And a whole new set of relationships based on the runaway man, often one who goes to sea.  So in terms of gender roles, women must “stay put,” maybe under hardship conditions like a stone croft dependent on oats or potatoes or small domestic animals like chickens or goats -- high labor necessary for survival -- often using the herbal crafts and the nature-weaving of trees and standing stones, the stories of storm and sea.

But in terms of gingermen, they must be a hardy lot capable of aggression and drive, charismatic enough to secure the faithfulness of resourceful women and protective enough to return to her and her children.  They are sometimes impossible men -- going against the larger society for reasons of their own and resorting to physical violence when trapped, though hopefully not violent with their intimates.  And oh so vulnerable to alcohol, the dreaming, the dissociation of it, the narcotic temporary relief of pain.

This is the material of song and story -- usually with a tragic end.  Added to a seafarer’s personality (I have sea captains on both sides of my genealogy) is the 18^th century revolution of the Ulster men that reinforced stubbornness, resistance to imperiums and authorities, bands of acid-based men ready for revolution, rationalism and enlightenment, idealism, subterfuge -- their backs against the wall.

I’m not talking about a cookie.  Not “inclusivegenderman” who combines the binaries, but the kind of person supposedly portrayed by John Wayne in “The Quiet Man,” which was directed by John Ford with echoes of John Huston. (They were fierce Johns.) This is the post-WWII man, a man who can’t “stand down,” not just because of himself but also because of the society.  I’m saying that elements of society push ginger men into behavior and attitudes possibly described as PTSD.  The kind of man it’s pretty tough to stay married to.  And yet that’s what some of us want:  to become beloved by an impossible genius fighting injustice.  Then maybe it becomes a relief that they are often away.   Maybe such a woman is herself culturally more male than mama.

Lately there has arisen a new explanation for this “type”.  It appeals to us because it fits into old ideas of how people fall into tribes and tropes that are convenient for our prejudices and labels that justify what we wanted to do anyway — like stigmatize the Other, even criminalize them to give ourselves an edge in the great competition of life.  We don’t admit this, of course, which means it interferes with ever being dealt with.

I’m talking about the discovery that Neandertals intermarried with “us” and left their imprint as surely as Genghis Khan did.  No question about it, in a tough world that depends on strength it’s the guys with the muscles and the bonded buddies who get the chance to make babies and also the fulfilled obligation to protect them to adulthood.  It’s so strange to look at the world through genetic implications — and they ARE only implications, not facts or even dependable images or fossils.  No one has ever seen a Neandertal or even the entire skeleton of one.  Except for things made of stone, their material culture is unknown, decomposed from hides, wood, and plants.

Ron Mueck's small scale lovers

When artists of the hyper-real began to create works like this by Ron Mueck, they made possible scary-real creations like this above.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2514500/Are-life-like-sculptures-produced-Artist-creates-hyper-realistic-models-humans.html  These are not idealized figures, but actual worried, stressed, emotional people — it’s not just their realism, but their emotional content that impresses us.  Mueck plays with scale, so that some figures are huge and others are just parts.

So now it's possible to bring Neandertals "alive" as lovers, whatever form marriage took in those days.

Neandertal simulations  Maybe by Kennis and Kennis brothers.

Hyper realistic baby dolls are produced by named artists, just like anything made of marble or bronze, both because of the technical skills of artists and because our culture allows us to look at such things publicly, seeing ourselves. Valuing.

These baby dolls are so real they almost displace our own imagination.  They are used in therapy to help people deal with fantasies about babies.  And then there are ginger girls.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Laurence+Ruet&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2lfymmPXLAhXJLmMKHavvAAAQ_AUIBygB&biw=1416&bih=957#imgrc=lkBzUUjAiosmWM%3A
Ruet specializes in red-headed children, who arouse the same sort of ambivalent bond as images of the Neandertal or the nude — that is, they allow scrutiny that would be impolite or impossible in the ordinary world.  Genes for red-hair are connected to a change in the function in chromatin and have arisen at least twice from different mutations, but the genes for only one variation were found in the neandertal genome.

The other intriguing gene find is that for FOXP2, which has something to do with language, but no one knows quite what or how.  It just implies that these people might be speaking with more than their eyes.

All of this is part of our efforts to come to terms with what it is to be human.  Clearly, it has to do with the emotional content of the body, which arose from its evolved heritage as primates, but is now human and most clearly expressed in our faces, especially eyes which almost seem to be projecting beams of sight, something that can be felt even if you don’t really know anyone is looking at you.  

In fact, we can “read” each other emotionally even without talk or seeing eyes, simply by seeing posture and movement.  We are an expressive animal that can create bonds with others, maybe not even other humans, but maybe dogs or horses.  But even wild animals — very occasionally a shared moment with a bear or a stag.  That’s part of what taxidermy is about, the illusion of relationship, NOT trophies, NOT domination, NOT owning.

Science gives us only clues for the possible variations a genome can create.  It takes art to create something realistically ginger, convincingly Other in some way.  But I like to watch episodes of “Jack Taylor” or “Game of Thrones” because Iain Glen is a Gingerman who looks like my brother Paul.  I mean, it's not an Otherness, it's a similarity, incomplete.

SAVE THE PIECES

When I was in college in the late Fifties, the schemata for a human being’s mind was stimulus -- blackbox -- response.   No one had much of an idea what was in that black box metaphor for a mind, symbolic of a transformation recognizable only by “before” and “after.”  It wasn’t wrong.  It was very incomplete and not very helpful.  Most of the research was inflicted on rats: making them push down levers for rewards and shocking their feet when they did something wrong. 

Raising kids at our house was along the same lines.  Not much insight into the mediating black box.  In my case it fermented resentment.  I despised the punishment and eschewed the rewards.  I was that party toy where you push the button on the black box, a lid opens, a hand comes out and shuts off the box.  But in that tiny “room” I had a stack of books and was reading.  Nowadays, of course, I have a computer internet connection. Today’s understanding of how a human being becomes a self-conscious identity is far more complex.  There’s a lot of writing on the walls of the box.  It becomes more of a glass box.

Here’s my current diagram of all the stuff that goes into a body to lift it into being a person, so it can move, speak, digest and excrete, and make molecules.  

First, this is a list of what can be perceived by the body either through the skin or other specialized organs mostly on the head: nose, ears, eyes, mouth.  Anything else can NOT be perceived, though some people will claim direct contact with the universe somehow.  I won’t contradict them -- just ignore them.  Kindly, no offense.

PHENOMENA IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD

LIGHT WAVES

SOUND WAVES

HEAT WAVES

SMELL MOLECULES

TASTE MOLECULES

PRESSURE

WETNESS

(EACH FILTERED BY A NEURONAL HUB)

What follows is a feature of belonging to a group: the sorting, cooperating, studying that make us humans in society.

CONSCIOUS, SHARED, CATEGORIZED THINKING

 INCLUDES BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO THESE:

ENVIRONMENT

CULTURE

MACHINES/TOOLS

PERSONS

ANIMALS

PATTERNS

EDGES

SHELTER

CLOTHING

But the real bulk of the individual identity as a body happens in the whole body under the management of the brain, which is the dashboard.

UNCONSCIOUS THINKING

SECRETLY CONTROLS CONSCIOUS THOUGHTS

CONCEPTS

ASSUMPTIONS

DENIALS

DECISIONS

HOPES

REFLECTION

WORDS

EMPATHY

AMONG THESE UNCONSCIOUS FUNCTIONS ARE:

CORE LOOPS

HEART BEAT

BREATHING

DIGESTION

BODY POSITION

TENSION

BLOOD CHEMISTRY

HUNGER

THIRST

SALT & SUGAR

ACID/ALKALI

BODY TEMPERATURE

CORE LOOPS WORK ON MOLECULAR HORMONES, THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM, AND ELECTRICAL WAVES TO KEEP THE BODY INSIDE THE PARAMETERS NECESSARY FOR HEALTH.  THEY OPERATE LIKE A HEATING THERMOSTAT IN A HOUSE.  TOO MUCH ONE WAY, YOU DIE.  TOO MUCH THE OTHER WAY, YOU DIE.  

Most thinking is subconscious, for instance, the molecular and neuronal functions of the intestines which are so active that some researchers call it “a second brain.”  (WE call it, “ a gut feeling” or “butterflies” or a “tummy ache.”  The actual material of brains is a development of the primal gut cells.  

Much of this is good, because we don’t want to have to remember to beat our hearts.  Breathing can go back and forth between conscious and unconscious.  Actually, a yogi adept can affect heart beat and so can other people to some extent, along with blood pressure. If you can do these things, you can fool a lie detector test which uses technology to “see” these internal phenomena.

The list below is of things that go in and out of consciousness and are largely a reaction to thought and sensory input.  The main homeostasis goes between what is familiar and safe versus what is strange and therefore challenging, stimulating, or dangerous.  Fight, Flight, Freeze, Flop or Fuck.  These are whole body responses, intensely felt and clearly visible.

EMOTION

Arousal

Relaxation

Sex

Attachment

Rage

Fear

Despair

Hope

Courage

Managing all this is the job of the control board in the skull, but the whole complex of interacting forces called "thinking" occupies the whole body, everything inside the skin.  The control board works by developing whole-brain networks, variably connected hubs, small specialized organelles, even cells with special abilities like detecting edges.  Besides the usual brain waves we are used to seeing in depictions of hospital patients (beep, beep, beep), there is a “master wave” that waxes and wanes in a gradual constant way and seems to have the purpose of unifying and recording what is happening in the more volatile wave, chemical and neuronal activity.

People vary within the limits of what will sustain life.  Some functions can be lost and worked around through other brain cells or even organs: sound or feel instead of sight, for instance, like braille reading.  Keeping a schema like this one above -- and altering it to keep up with the ongoing research -- seems a helpful thing to do.

The point of life -- in Darwinian terms -- is to survive, first as an individual and second as part of a group.  In an ideal world, these two intermesh and support each other.  Assuming these two driving forces do not contradict each other, we should ask, “what kind of person is likely to survive in the circumstances” and “what kind of group is likely to survive.”  The changing demands of the second of these lists will be the most immediate that come to mind, but there is another set of forces that can overwhelm them: the universe, always changing.  If the climate shifts, if an asteroid hits, if volcanoes erupt or river deltas flood in hurricanes, then that overwhelms every defense and arrangement of civilization.  Besides, waves of social movement come and go, new ideas sweep the culture.

In fact, the more a good environment for a certain kind of person or group  (college professors, soldiers) has been built rather than formed naturally, and therefore requires maintenance, the more susceptible it is to social disorder and neglect.  Those people will suffer.  That applies to the Internet, power grids, our monetary system, the highways and bridges, and so on.  In one way, being an adept on the computer is a wonderful skill that means high achievement and rewards.  But it also means vulnerability to power outages, changing technology, solar flares, and the health hazards of sitting in a chair staring at a screen all day.  Driving a car, which has become an expensive advantage (or pleasure) makes one dependent on gas prices, availability, and highway maintenance. 

Our arrangements of compensation for the young, the old, the weak, the damaged, turn out to be easily disrupted when ideology turns against them.  Alliances with others and sharing resources would seem like a good strategy for survival, but not when factions among those alliances war against each other.  Being from the wrong group at the wrong time becomes lethal. 

All that apart, there are good rules for survival that will work for most human beings.  They are generally summed up in rules defined as moral and religious:  do unto others as you would do unto yourself; live for the day; save for the morrow, stay loyal, and so on.  But there has to be a certain amount of wiggle room for special circumstances.  Still, a civilization with too much wiggle in it will collapse.  A person who wiggles all the time will lose track of their center.

So you have to go to specifics and ask what this person must do to survive.  Then ask what this group must do to survive.  But you’re not finished there.  Ask how the group can change in ways that make your survival more likely and ask how the larger society can change -- perhaps MUST change in order for you and your group to survive.  Now we’re talking homeless people in the streets, pandemic diseases, schools in collapse, war around the world, displaced people starving everywhere.

What’s even scarier is that we are realizing that we, here in a privileged country, may NOT have prepared our own children, the children we think we love and protect, for survival as individuals and -- in fact -- those children as adults may not be able or willing to provide survival for the whole group.  Survival may shift to those we have thought of as unworthy, damaged, and excluded.  Could YOUR kid survive on the street?  Can your kid survive YOU?  We just gotta ask . . .  for all our sakes.