Out of My Head

They used to make me pitch when I played Little League. I’m a lefty and lefties are a valuable commodity in baseball. I was never any good at it. Throwing the ball towards another child always scared me, although it’s unlikely even my hardest heat would have done much damage. I hated it. The one piece of advice I remember from those days was, “Don’t think. Throw.”

I’ve been trying, and failing, to heed that advice ever since. My thoughts feel like actual physical objects, an ever-growing pile of wet paper towels slopping around my head.

Does everybody feel their own brain? I do. I feel it like a limb, and no matter what I do, I can’t shake the annoying sense of heaviness residing in my skull.

It’s strange to think about the brain and all of its works. Our entire lived experience is filtered through a three-pound tangle of gelatinous mush. Everything. Every physical sensation, every imagining, every desire.

(We also have a so-called “second brain,” the enteric nervous system, which regulates gut health, but the only time I’m aware of that is when I’m having problems with my tum-tum, such as my recent case of leaky butt.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about consciousness, and I’m stuck on the same question philosophers and scientists have been wrestling with since forever: are we our brains?

In other words, does our sense of self arise from our brains, or is there something extrinsic about consciousness? Does the mind emerge from the brain or does the brain act as a “receiver” for a larger consciousness that permeates everything, the same way modems drag Wi-Fi signals into our computers?

I took this photograph of my brain.

Further, is there something unique about human consciousness? We flatter ourselves into believing it to be the case, but I’m not sure. Last Friday, a group of researchers released a statement called “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which makes the obvious (to me and to anybody else who has ever watched a video of a playful cat or dolphin or crow) point that “there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and birds.”

The declaration follows another from 2012, entitled “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness,” which concluded that “the weight of evidence suggests that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”

Human consciousness may be more highly developed, in the sense that we can articulate our own inner lives, but can consciousness be said to be “greater” or “lesser”? Is a cow less conscious than a pig? Is a ladybug less conscious than a grizzly bear? How do we measure such a thing? Perhaps consciousness is binary – it either is or it isn’t.

Is all life conscious? Increasingly, it looks like that might be the case. The problem with such a supposition, however, is that, increasingly scientists aren’t even sure how to define life. Carl Zimmer, the author and New York Times science reporter said in 2023 that “No one has been able to define life and some people will tell you it’s impossible.”

(I once interviewed Carl for my episode 91 of my podcast How To Be Amazing, which you can listen to here.)

The line between life and non-life is blurry at best. We talk about our cells “being alive.” If that’s the case, are they, on some level, conscious? What would it mean to say that we are constructed of trillions of self-directed conscious agents?

What it say about our own, individual consciousness; we believe ourselves to be discrete, singular entities but maybe that’s wrong. Maybe, instead, what we think of as “ourselves” is actually more like a collective consciousness that arises from the molecular or even sub-molecular level of more fundamental consciousness systems.

Does that imply that we, too, form a collective consciousness that includes all conscious creatures? Why not? We don’t know how consciousness begins, which suggests that we also don’t know where it ends or how far it extends. Which gives rise to the notion that the planet itself is also a conscious organism.

Which suggests that the universe itself might be, in some sense we don’t really understand, conscious. The theory of a conscious universe, called panpsychism, goes all the way back to Plato. Neuroscientists like David Chalmers and Christof Koch suggest that consciousness may be “substrate independent,” which (if I understand this correctly) means it exists beyond the physical.

Is that possible?

A fascinating book I recently read, entitled “A New Science of Heaven” by the professor Robert Temple posits that certain types of plasma known as “dusty plasma” may be conscious. Plasma makes up over 99% of the universe, which would bolster the notion of universal consciousness. It also suggests the sun and other stars are conscious.

WTF?

A “plasma-based consciousness” that infuses all things has important implications for every aspect of existence and non-existence - in other words, life after death.

What are we? What does it even mean to discuss “we”? If consciousness is universal, then it’s probably fair to say that there is no “we” at all. Is every conscious entity nothing more than a waving tentacle attached to some kind of universal sea anemone? If that’s the case – and I’m saying it might literally be the case – then how do we justify all the shittiness we inflict on each other?

“If you truly loved yourself, you could never hurt another,” said the Buddha.

“That they all may be one: as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee.” John 17:21.

Sri Chimnoy said, “In the heart of oneness there is no superiority or inferiority; there is not even equality. There is only oneness-joy. It is not a competition-game, but a oneness-game.”

And on and on and on.

The questions pile one atop the other like that same sopping pile of wet paper towels. None of it solves the larger problem: how do I get out of my own head long enough to throw a baseball? The answer is in the advice I have yet to take: Don’t think. Throw.