 
GOLDMAN'S BULLDOG PRESENTS

NOBODY KNOWS

CONSCIOUSNESS!

DEMYSTIFYING

LIFE'S GREATEST MYSTERY

Written by:

NOBODY!

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR NOBODY KNOWS CONSCIOUSNESS!

"Let's have Nobodies review the book before we publish it. That'll give us a jump on the critics!" Nobody!

"Nobody! is the Rube Goldberg of popular science!" Nobody at The New Yorker

"You mean Nobody! is a rube!" Nobody at Rube Goldberg Productions

"'Give 'em the old hocus pocus; bead and feather 'em. How can they see with sequins in their eyes?'" Nobody in Chicago, the Musical

"Sequins in the eye of consciousness!" Nobody at Beads, Feathers and Boas

"A pie in the face of consciousness!" Nobody at Soupy Sales

"Soupy Sales meets Mr. Wizard!" Nobody at Harry Potter's Pea Soup ("Make sure you eat it before it eats you!")

"Funny serious, not seriously funny!" Nobody at Serious Fun Anonymous

"Nobody! is completely organic. He makes lemons out of lemonade!" Nobody at the Organic Citrus Growers of America

"Twinkies for madeleines! Nobody! is the Proust of popular science!" Nobody at 21st Century Twinkies

"Pasties for peasants! Nobody! is the Shakespeare of popular science!" Nobody at Pasty Central

"We're absolutely certain that popular science doesn't need a Salvador Dali!" Nobody at the Broadway opening of Hello, Dali!

"Popular science as literature? We think Nobody! is a quack! Let's send him a Duck Commander." Nobody at Duck Commander

"A hybrid mix of Jonathan Swift and evolutionary science? We always suspected that Nobody! was a science Yahoo!" Nobody at Yahoo! Science

"There's 'Trouble in River City!' A Nobody! book is the Cliffs Notes' version." Nobody at Cliffs Notes

"Reads too much, thinks too much, drinks too much, writes too much--Nobody! doesn't know how to stop!" Nobody at the National Motorists Association

"'Dust never sleeps!' 'Rust Never Sleeps!' What'd we pay this guy?" Nobody at Rust-Oleum Paint and Dusting Cloths

"'The scientist as psychopath?' 'Science is Macbeth?' 'Vlad the Executioner!' We hear that the scientists have put a contract out on Nobody!" Nobody at the Red Onion State Prison "Super-Prison Literary Society"

"Loneliness is all there is. Loneliness before me. Loneliness is consciousness. Loneliness is boring." Nobody listening to Janis Joplin singing "All is Loneliness"

"Nobody! doesn't need a consciousness! Nobody! is 'A Legend in his Own Mind.'" Nobody listening to Gil Scott-Heron

"We thought that Nobody! was going to explain consciousness--not whack it!" Nobody at Folsom Prison

"Makes you embarrassed to even have a consciousness!" Nobody at Consciousness Anonymous

"Perhaps, we should make consciousness illegal." Nobody in Washington D.C.

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GOLDMAN'S BULLDOG PRESENTS

NOBODY KNOWS

CONSCIOUSNESS!

DEMYSTIFYING

LIFE'S GREATEST MYSTERY

Written by:

NOBODY!

 www.goldmansbulldog.com

Published by Smashwords, Inc.

Copyright 2014 by Author

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SMASHWORDS EDITION, LICENSE NOTES

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

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For Me, Myself and I

For You Too

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE

THE CONSCIOUSNESS STORY

Chapter 1: Big Mind and Little Mind

Chapter 2: Butch and Sundance

Chapter 3: The Super Posse

Chapter 4: Desperate Times Require Desperate Measures

Chapter 5: The Slime-Mold Draft

Chapter 6: The Three Faces of Eve

Chapter 7: Storage Wars

Chapter 8: The Sick Parrot

PART TWO

THE LANGUAGE STORY

Chapter 9: I Serve Two Masters

Chapter 10: How Laziness Got Legs

Chapter 11: An Excuse is Born

Chapter 12: The Halle Berry Neuron

Chapter 13: Why We Tell Stories

PART THREE

ANIMAL STORIES

Chapter 14: Mother Abraham, Mouse Isaac and Lady MacBeth

Chapter 15: When Wolves Fight

Chapter 16: The Robber Bear

Chapter 17: The Lion King

Chapter 18: Madagascar

Chapter 19: The Legal Ape

PART FOUR

JUST SAY NO!

Chapter 20: Trouble in River City

Chapter 21: The Extraordinary Intelligence of the Madness of Crowds

Chapter 22: The Thing That Changes into What You Think It Is

Chapter 23: The Trainer that Thinks It's the Fighter

Chapter 24: Blink-of-an-Eye Free Will

Chapter 25: Three Lights and You're Out

PART FIVE

THE I-STORY

Chapter 26: A One-Third Whole-Brain Phenomenon

Chapter 27: The Scientist as Psychopath

Chapter 28: Bring in the Clones

Chapter 29: The Act of Creation

Chapter 30: The Fear Factor

Chapter 31: Smoking Hot

Chapter 32: The Sexiest Woman in the World

Chapter 33: The Eternal Youth of Consciousness

Chapter 34: The Brotherhood of All Life

APPENDIX

Chapter 35: The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

Will I survive death? I think I must.

I know that I shall have, at least,

The consciousness of dust,

And dust, like rust, never sleeps.

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We never find ourselves

because we can't stop looking.

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PART ONE

THE CONSCIOUSNESS STORY

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CHAPTER 1: BIG MIND AND LITTLE MIND

"You can't get there from here; you have to go someplace else first." Dennis Charles Sherck

Scientists want to find consciousness inside the human brain. While there's little doubt that "it's in there," finding it in there is a bit like finding quarks inside of atoms. The fact that an atom is made up of quarks is "interesting information," but this information tells us absolutely nothing about the physical properties of atoms. If you want to know about the properties of atoms, you have to study them; you need the Periodic Table of Elements not the Standard Model. In much the same way, it would seem that if you want to understand human consciousness that you ought to study it instead of trying to find it in the neurons in the human brain. In trying to find the "quarks of consciousness," scientists have have been conspicuous in their failure.

Actually, this is something of a surprise to everyone involved. The reason for this is simple; scientists have been able to find just about everything imaginable inside the human brain. Using various forms of stimulation to map the brain, they have found the centers of vision, language, math, long and short-term memory, intuition, sexuality, decision-making and aggression. They have even discovered the location of out-of-body experiences, a sense of the unity of all things, God, enlightenment and inner peace. There's only one thing that scientists haven't been able to find inside the human brain. No matter where they probe or prod, they have never discovered "I." They have not stimulated a reaction along the lines of "Oh, yes, that's me; that's where 'I' am. I knew I was in there somewhere."

Because neuroscientists cannot find "I" inside the brain like everything else, they have decided that consciousness must be an "emergent whole-brain phenomenon." Unfortunately, that does not mean that when you stimulate the whole brain that "I" emerges. What it means is that "I" never emerges, but that scientists are still certain that "it's in there." If consciousness is not somewhere, then it must be everywhere. This is a logical assumption for which no evidence is presented. In that sense, it's not even a scientific hypothesis as there seems to be no way to test it or falsify it. In a sense, it's a way for scientists to stop thinking about their failure to find consciousness by rotely intoning "it's an emergent whole-brain phenomenon" as if they were saying something scientific that is supported by evidence.

Some scientists consider consciousness and mind to be to be the same thing. The reason for this is quite simple; consciousness thinks that it's mind even though it isn't. Since consciousness is a part of mind, this description has an "element of truth" to it so we are inclined to believe it. We will soon learn that believing in things that contain an element of truth is a survival instinct. While many scientists believe that consciousness is the mysterious part of mind, in reality, mind is the mysterious part of consciousness.

Almost as if she set out to verify the idea that "no non-poetic account of reality can be complete," the poet and author Maya Angelou reminisced in an interview* about the way that she thought about creativity when she was a child. She remembered making a distinction between Big Mind and Little Mind. "Big Mind," she said, "thought deep thoughts. Little Mind occupied you by playing solitaire or doing crossword puzzles." There you have it--human consciousness in a nutshell! I-consciousness is Little Mind. Big Mind is creative thought that occurs below the level of consciousness thought.

In all living things except human beings, Big Mind is consciousness (pattern recognition with primitive vocabulary and language) while Little Mind (pattern recognition with complex language) does not exist. In human beings, Big Mind is mostly unconscious. Big Mind communicates in monosyllables and simple sentences or as inspiration ("Eureka!"), while Little Mind (I-consciousness) dominates the internal conversation and thinks it is Big Mind. It's as simple as that. Human consciousness is animal consciousness with complex human language added as a layer of complication; and once you have one complication--as any storyteller will tell you--more "complications ensue."

The key to understanding consciousness in animals is quite simple. Consciousness is not a tool for self-reflection; consciousness is a survival tool. Self-reflection in words is a side effect of human language and not a fundamental aspect of consciousness. How a survival tool became a tool for self-reflection is the story of this book.

Since consciousness is a survival tool, then it must go "all the way down" in the living world. Scientists admit that when a bacterium "recoils from danger" that this may be a primitive form of consciousness, but they do not make the same assumption that they would make for any other primitive form of a more sophisticated mechanism. When scientists discovered a simple light-sensing mechanism in a bacterium, they assumed that this mechanism evolved, slowly but surely, over billions of years, into an eye. But when they noticed that a bacterium's "recoil from danger" function is the "primitive light-sensing mechanism of consciousness," they did not assume that this is what evolved over billions of years into consciousness. Go figure, no?

Animal consciousness has an evolutionary history that goes back hundreds of millions of years while human consciousness is dependent on complex human language and is only about ten thousand years old. Still, human consciousness must explain the behavior of our deep-set animal nature. It's a big burden for such a recent ability so we shouldn't be surprised that it's still trying to get the hang of things.

* "Maya Angelou: How I Write," Noah Charney, The Daily Beast, April 10, 2013

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CHAPTER 2: BUTCH AND SUNDANCE

Enter our hero, William Goldman, stage left.

The story of consciousness was told in novelist and screenwriter William Goldman's most famous movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a way that most people still remember to this day. Some think that Goldman invented the modern buddy-movie genre with his comedic take on the classic western, but the buddy-movie genre is really nothing more than the story of consciousness. The I-story is always--ironically perhaps--the story of two.

Butch is the I-character in our story; Butch is Little Mind. Butch "talks all the time" and "thinks too much." Butch is a planner. He plans the robberies and the escape routes. He learns from past robberies (re-living them in his mind over and over again) and plans for future robberies (imagining them in his mind over and over again). This is what I-consciousness does; it worries about the past and it worries about the future. The execution of the robberies is left to the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. During the robbery, Butch continues to talk; it's what Butch does. He's present, but he's not much of a train robber; he blows up a railroad car by mistake losing most of the money in the process. Later in the movie when his life depends on him killing someone in a gunfight, Butch has to confess that he's "never killed anyone." Butch is a thinker not an actor.

The Sundance Kid is our dark, mysterious inner being; he even dresses the part--in black. Sundance is Big Mind. He is, literally, our animal nature without human language (but with primitive animal language). Our inner being acts in the present moment; it is instinctive. To shoot, Sundance "has to move." He's a panther in motion, not a "standstill Hollywood gunfighter." The Sundance Kid--note the obvious reference to an "instinctive child" in his name--is a man of few words, although he obviously likes to listen to Butch talk, but not always. He knows, but Butch doesn't, that Butch just needs to shut up sometimes.

The reason that our inner being only speaks in single words and simple sentences is because it has vocabulary at an animal level. It reasons like a child before it reaches the "age of reason." Anyone who has ever engaged in verbal combat with the addictive part of their own nature has undoubtedly noticed that our addictions reason like small children ("I just want one!") and that you both know that it's a lie even as you give in (it says, "Bet you can't eat just one!" right there on the package). The Sundance Kid's vocabulary is probably just a bit more extensive than a really smart Border Collie or Alex the talking parrot. Our inner being can also manage the simple syntax of language--simple sentences--just like some animals. Think of the Sundance Kid as a really smart hominid--like the one in the movie 2001 who realized that an ox's thigh bone could be used as a weapon.

Because the Sundance Kid is the one who acts in the present moment, he is also the one who must act when faced with an immediate danger like the sudden appearance of a rattlesnake. But sometimes the danger is imminent but not immediate. That gives Butch a chance to open his mouth.

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CHAPTER 3: THE SUPER POSSE

The second time that we see Butch and the Gang rob the same train (consistency--animal laziness--is their downfall), the door to a railroad car crashes open, and six men emerge at full gallop on horseback. You just gotta say, "Wow!"

Enter the Super Posse.

The Super Posse is composed of the best lawmen and trackers from all over the country. Butch and Sundance take off on horses with the Super Posse in hot pursuit. They aren't worried; they've been chased before. This is how they survive; they know what to do. Over what seems like an interminable twenty-five minutes of screen time, Butch and Sundance try all of their "posse evasion tricks" but to no avail. Like the Energizer Bunny, the Super Posse just "keeps on coming." Finally, Butch and Sundance find themselves scaling a tall hill on foot. When they get to the top of the hill, they discover a cliff with a sheer drop. The Super Posse is coming up the hill after them, and there is no way out. They're trapped!

They have two choices. They can fight but will surely get killed; the members of the Super Posse have rifles, are excellent marksmen, and outnumber them three to one. Or they can surrender, but the reward is "dead or alive" so they have no reason to think that they will survive this scenario either. Then, Butch gets an inspiration (a third choice): "We can jump!" There's a tiny river down below. They might be able to land in it; they might survive the fall. Butch is doing what he does--thinking and planning--but he does not decide. Sundance must decide because Sundance is the one who acts in the present moment.

No matter how you analyze these three choices they are first, all bad; and second, all lead to death. If you think about it, they have absolute free will. Given three bad choices that all lead to death, they are not only free to choose; they are compelled to choose. Not choosing, in this case, is a choice and gets them killed.

As anyone who has seen the movie knows, Sundance decides to jump, and they are lucky enough to survive, although this only slows down the Super Posse, which still "keeps on coming." Fortunately, our heroes catch a break before they have to deal with them again.

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CHAPTER 4: DESPERATE TIMES REQUIRE DESPERATE MEASURES

Now imagine that, instead of Butch and Sundance, we have a colony of bacteria that has encountered a life-threatening problem--its very own Super Posse. The life-threatening problem concentrates the colony's attention in the present moment as it tries out solutions that it has used in the past in similar situations but to no avail. Finally, the bacteria have exhausted all known possibilities and seem doomed to die. In a moment of absolute desperation, one bacterium tries a solution that no bacterium (in that colony at least) has ever thought to try before. The creative instinct to "try anything" in the face of life-or-death desperation goes all the way down in the world of living things. This solution almost always fails, but it turns out that "almost always fails" works perfectly well at the bacteria level. "Almost always fails" also means "sometimes, very rarely, succeeds." The rare bacterium that succeeds reproduces the whole colony in short order, and the new colony has learned one more "trick" for future danger situations.

In desperate situations, bacteria can manipulate their own DNA (they have a wide variety of techniques for doing this), share bits of DNA with each other, or borrow DNA from some other creature. This is like Darwinian evolution, but it is far more powerful because "learned" information is passed on to the next generation as the one who "learns" is the one who reproduces the colony while the others die. At least at the level of bacteria, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck got it right--learned information can be passed on to the next generation; it is passed on genetically. And bacteria, of course, form the extensive root system for the entire Tree of Life. Lamarck was correct "in the beginning," which was the most critical phase of life's evolution. For two billion years, all life was single-celled life.

Creative inspiration to solve novel problems plus trial and error is the way of all successful life. That's how a dog learns to open a door or a monkey learns to pick a cage lock, isn't it? Life creates new ideas to solve new problems; circumstance edits. Life forms that don't "try anything" in desperate situations were eliminated by natural selection a long time ago.

"Try anything" is the inspiration app for all living things; "try anything" is creativity incarnate. In a sophisticated animal like a human being, "try anything" can achieve inspired creative solutions to complex problems with a high degree of accuracy. But the inspiration app also works in the bacteria world because bacteria can attempt thousands of solutions while humans might only manage a very few. At the bacteria level, the inspiration app might seem like a mechanical device. Many solutions are mechanically tried and one is "naturally selected" because it works, but this fails to account for the app itself. The app creates an inspiration--an act that cannot be defined as "mechanical" because the individual bacterium does not know what it will do until it acts. Will Sundance jump?

An analogous survival app exists in the human immune system where white blood cells that have never seen a specific invader are able to "create" an antibody to combat that invader--seemingly out of thin air. The physical process is well understood, but the process itself is a creative solution to a seemingly intractable problem--how to fight invaders that possess unique weapons that you've never seen before. Single-celled creatures (white blood cells) working as a group have figured this out. We might want to call this "intelligence," but it really is "pattern recognition plus inspiration plus trial and error." You knew that; it happens to you all the time.

Since pattern recognition is, by definition, a form of inspiration (you see a pattern in something that doesn't exist until you imagine it), then "extra inspiration" in a dangerous situation makes sense, no? There's nothing supernatural going on here, but a living creature is absolutely necessary for this process to work. We haven't discovered pattern recognition anywhere in the inanimate world, but it exists everywhere we look in the living world. All of evolution is evidence of the ability of all life to recognize patterns and adapt to changing circumstances. Pattern recognition is and isn't a random process. We will randomly seek out patterns when desperate, but the process itself isn't random--it's a survival process that is activated by need.

Pattern recognition is what we cannot teach computers, even quantum computers. The ability to collect information is of no value without the ability to recognize new, never-before-seen patterns in that information. All living creatures see new patterns in the world to help them survive change. Computers will only become "life-like" when they can recognize new patterns in old information and test those patterns to determine their utility. Since survival and sex (the two primary instincts of all living things) have no significance for computers, we can assume that even if they can recognize new patterns in old information that their definition of "utility" would be unlike any living creature's definiton. Until we know what instincts drive computers (someone will have to program them in, of course), we cannot know how computers will "evolve" when they can finally recognize new patterns.

Pattern recognition\--creative inspiration--is the secret of all life.

The fact that most bacteria inspirations fail does not make them any less inspired. In our immune system, most efforts to construct the correct antibody also fail; there's actually a competition to succeed. The white blood cell that succeeds at solving the puzzle gets to "be fruitful and multiply" (as a metaphor, "the hero gets the girl"). There's one final irony in the immune system story. The successful white blood cell (the one that creates the correct antibody) is a "suicide bomber" that seeks its own death--and the deaths of its children--by "binding" to the invader and then inviting other white blood cells to "eat" them both. It does this to protect the "greater whole of which it is a part" (but of which it has no knowledge) from danger. This makes for an Armageddon-style ending for all white-blood-cell stories. Cue the Bruce Willis lookalike cell; Smug-Smiling Baldie "bites the big one" ("gets bitten" actually).

Creative inspiration in the face of disaster is an app that functions in the world of bacteria and performs the same task that it performs in the world of white blood cells--survival of the greater whole. The consciousness app concentrates attention in the present moment whenever the potential for danger or a problem is encountered. Consciousness remains on red alert until the danger has been avoided, has passed, or the consequences of the danger have been endured. If pushed to the wall, consciousness will get creative.

Desperate times require desperate measures.

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CHAPTER 5: THE SLIME-MOLD DRAFT

Since you probably have a lot of resistance to the idea that bacteria and other single-celled creatures are capable of creative solutions to complex problems, I'll tell you the story of slime mold. There are certain kinds of "intelligence" (pattern recognition that leads to successful action) necessary for bacteria and other single-celled creatures to survive. Since bacteria double in number every few hours or so, and then double again and again and again ad infinitum, they would quickly exhaust any food source--or engulf the entire earth if food were abundant enough. Obviously, bacteria must be able to regulate the growth of the colony in some way. Since local food supplies will inevitably run out (that runaway growth again), bacteria must be able to find more food when it does or learn to eat something else. As it turns out, bacteria do "all of the above." In addition, they can go into "hibernation" as spores if they can't solve a problem any other way. These spores are so hardy that scientists think that they might be able to survive interplanetary space travel inside asteroids or comets.

Slime mold is a form of single-cell life that feeds on bacteria. As long as food is plentiful, slime molds like to spend their time with family and friends and generally avoid the colony. In reality, the "colony" doesn't even exist; it's more of a "neighborhood" really. They're like a bunch of individual "ants" out "doing their own thing." There is no "anthill." I bet you think that this is because they are primitive.

Things get interesting for slime molds when there's a shortage of food. Slime molds take a food shortage very seriously; they treat it like an act of war. They send out chemical signals that serve as the "slime-mold draft." These signals reach all the slime molds in the area, which then report to central recruiting. At the central recruiting station, an amazing thing happens. All of the individual slime mold cells organize themselves into a multi-cellular creature that resembles a slug. This slug then "climbs" to scale any obstacle that it encounters until it reaches open air where it "grows" a long fruiting stalk that extends "high, reaching for the pie in the sky." When the fruiting stalk detects the chemical signature of the food it's seeking, it explodes casting spores in all directions to be carried by the wind or by passing insects and animals. The rest of the slug is left behind while the youngsters carry the family genes of a new generation.

For those who think that humans are more intelligent than bacteria, you might take notice that in the slime-mold world, the parents die from the food shortage while their children survive. In human societies, we sacrifice our future--our children--to save the old folks in time of war. Humans are the only animals that surround their herd with their young to protect the adults. No matter how warlike chimpanzees might be, they would never mount a "Chimp Children's Crusade." If adult humans had to go to war, you can be certain that there would be a lot less of them (wars, not adults). They'd avoid the first (wars) to avoid the second (less adults). If humans were as intelligent as the rest of life, we would avoid all but the most necessary wars by sending the oldsters to fight them.

Of course, we're way too smart for that.

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CHAPTER 6: THE THREE FACES OF EVE

"Everyone's crazy. Everyone's crazy in their own way, but everyone's crazy." Apocryphal

When I first heard the slime-mold story, I was amazed that the most primitive life forms on earth could function like an anthill or a beehive or a termite mound. It seems clear that individual living beings, even individual cells, can self-organize in an intelligent way. The means may remain murky, but one conclusion is hard to avoid. Our bodies and brains are made up of self-organized colonies of individual cells (heart, lung, liver, nerve, etc.). Bacteria, functioning as a colony, resemble a brain where the "neurons" are individual bacteria, and the connections are made by chemical signaling instead of hardwiring--just like an anthill. The human heart is a group of heart cells functioning as individual "neurons" in a heart-pump machine--just like slime mold really.

Now that we understand slime mold, we can understand the three layers of consciousness that exist in all living things--even bacteria. The first layer is the individual level where "I" (Butch) must converse with myself (Sundance) to decide between different possible courses of action. Historically, this has been referred to as the "dialectic" and was illustrated in Plato's Dialogues as a debate between two individuals whose goal is to arrive at the "truth." In consciousness, the dialectic is a debate within an individual to decide between different possible courses of action.

An individual bacterium might be able to go left or right when it confronts an obstacle. "Choosing a direction" is a function of consciousness--concentrated attention in the present moment when danger or a problem is present. You might want to call this an instinct, but choosing between instincts can't be an instinct because the choice is always dependent on the details of the present circumstance. Animals have to choose between conflicting instincts--freeze or fight or flight. Consciousness (Butch) is involved in the "choosing process" although it does not choose; inner being (Sundance) decides.

The second layer of consciousness is the group level where "I" am acting as a member of the group. The group has very different expectations for "me" than "I" have for myself. Any teenager or slime mold that ever answered the draft learns this quickly. When functioning in a group, the individual must become a "neuron" in the "herd" consciousness. You have to "follow orders," "watch each others' backs," and "be all that you can be" (whatever that means, although you'll "give it your best shot" even if you don't know). Herds like slogans and camaraderie; it's their bread and butter. I hope the reason is obvious; slogans are primitive language--that's why they work so well on our inner being as well as in stimulating our herd instincts. To say that Madison Avenue understands how susceptible herd consciousness is to slogans is to understate the obvious ("Plop, plop, gin fizz, oh, what a relief it is!"). Marching music works well too: "There she comes just a walkin' down the street singing, 'Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.'" Repetitive, primitive language--even nonsense language--and group music are herd staples. They bind while they hypnotize.

The third layer of consciousness results from having the first two layers. The individual I/me combo must negotiate with the group I/me combo to decide who has priority in any given situation. Imagine some slime molds that receive the call of the slime-mold draft, but they just happen to be in a place where food is still abundant. It's easy to see that they might feel a strong counter-instinct to the draft--"food is abundant; stay." This would be the slime-mold equivalent of "You're sleepy; stay in bed; you can call in sick." They know that they should go for the good of the group, but the instinct to go is in conflict with the instinct to stay and eat abundant food. The conflicts that arise when what I want does not fit harmoniously with what the group wants are a big reason that complex self-reflective human consciousness exists. They create choices that require a lot of brooding.

So, I'm a part of me, and I'm a part of a herd. This is true of all living things, even bacteria. Seen this way, consciousness invokes extra attention to danger and problems that inspires creative present-moment solutions when all other known, or imagined, solutions are inadequate. It does this at the individual level and at the herd level. This is why consciousness is a many-headed hydra. It must stimulate a creative solution to a complex problem ("All answers lead to death!")--and it must do so in the blink of an eye. Animals, even bacteria, feel this pull in various directions because it's the process that pulls. It's not an internal pull; it's an external pull driven by circumstance.

No one is immune.

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CHAPTER 7: STORAGE WARS

"It's not worthwhile knowing that we're always learning something." Richard Feynman, the Citizen-Scientist*

Sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? Why isn't it worthwhile knowing that we're always learning something? Learning something is a good thing, isn't it? Always learning something would be even better, no? What's the problem?

I think Feynman means that if you're always learning something that you are not discovering patterns in the things that you learn. Without those patterns, your learned knowledge is of little value. Just as random patterns of words cannot transmit information, random patterns of new information (always learning) cannot transmit information either.

All living things are compelled by circumstance to find some sort of order in the chaos around them. Even in a completely random pattern of words, real phrases will occasionally pop up: "The grass is red." A living creature will find that pattern and attempt to discern its meaning--even if it has none. Psychologists have shown that when individuals are in a situation where they lack control that they will see patterns even if they do not exist. They will even identify patterns in "white video noise" that is completely pattern free. Now you understand why. When you are in a life-threatening situation (the greatest lack of control possible), you need to "try anything." Seeing a pattern gives you a possible course of action; Sundance jumps. Those who don't see these patterns in dangerous situations do nothing and get killed by the Super Posse. Seeing patterns that do not exist in a desperate situation is a survival instinct honed by billions of years of evolution.

The reason that we forget things that we have learned but not found patterns in is because that knowledge is of very low usefulness to us--and we certainly can't remember everything. People with photographic memories (who do remember everything) find it something of a curse because it is too much information to make sense of. We remember the things that we find patterns in because we are pattern-analyzing creatures; it's how we survive. If a pattern is life-threatening, then it's almost impossible to forget.

All living things are skilled at pattern analysis. Pattern analysis is intelligence in the living world. Pattern (data) analysis plus inspiration (hypothesis) plus trial and error (experiment) is the scientific method as well as the way of all life. Pattern analysis is the foundation of human language, reason and mathematics--the fundamental building blocks of civilization. So many traits that we consider uniquely human can be seen to go all the way down in the living world when we look at them this way.

A good way to see this in action is to watch one of those TV programs where people buy abandoned storage lockers at auction. A group of people gets a few minutes to look inside the locker, but they cannot enter or touch anything. They must engage in a very fast analysis of what they can see to determine what they feel is a reasonable value of what they can't see. Everybody sees different patterns in the same locker because they are all individuals with different needs and different histories. When those different needs overlap, a bidding war can ensue. The price of any locker is determined by the individual (who bids the most) and by the group (which can drive up the price of the bid). Here we can easily see how individual consciousness and group consciousness work together (but by no means "in perfect harmony") to produce a result that neither would produce on their own (the third face of Eve).

Once the auction has ended, the person who bought the locker gets to see whether or not their pattern analysis was correct. This is the trial and error part of the process. If they discover that they regularly bid more money than they can recuperate, then over time they will adjust their bidding strategies. If they regularly make a profit from the units that they buy, then they are reinforcing their bidding strategy and pattern-recognition ability--and are, quite literally, "building their egos." They will probably get more aggressive once they get used to winning, until their new-found aggressiveness leads to failure.

Then, the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction.

* The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, Richard Feynman, Perseus Books, 1998, p. 113 (Earlier in this book, Feynman gave his classic analysis of parenthood: "You can teach your children exactly what you want; what they learn will be something else entirely.")

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CHAPTER 8: THE SICK PARROT

If you think about the amount of data that our bodies must process to keep all of our systems functioning in harmony together, you can intuitively sense that it must be an awful lot. In contrast, attempts to determine how much "processing power" is necessary for human consciousness have led to extremely low numbers. On the average, human consciousness only processes about 10-15 bits per second with a maximum speed for concentrated attention of about 70-80 bits per second. While that may be five times faster than low-speed consciousness, these are still abacus-level speeds when compared to the rest of our brain/body system, which processes over ten million bits per second. To add insult to injury (the math is too complex to include here), scientists have determined that singing "A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall" from "one hundred bottles of beer on the wall" all the way down to "no more bottles of beer on the wall," only requires, on the average, about 2-3 bits per second.

Let's face it; in a pinch who would you want: "Butch thinking" or "Sundance moving?" It's important to understand that "Butch thinking" happens in animals as well as humans. "Butch thinking" goes all the way down in the natural world. Let's look at how "Butch thinks" in the world of parrots.

In the wild, parrots live together in flocks. When one parrot gets sick, the flock tends to act like a Center for Disease Control. The flock seems to be afraid that the contagion will spread (of course, the flock knows nothing about germs; they "know" all that they know from pattern analysis tested by trial and error). Anyway, the flock feels the need to quarantine the sick parrot until the illness has passed. Unfortunately, parrots don't have a quarantine ward for sick parrots. Instead, they use the tools at hand and "banish" the sick parrot from the flock by attacking it until it leaves. They do this, without knowing it, "for the greater good of the flock." The sick parrot must then survive on its own without the protection of the flock. This isn't a story with a happy ending.

All of this seems fairly mechanical, no? Everything can be programmed into instincts--no conscious thought necessary. Parrots have an instinct to attack sick parrots; they don't have to think about it. While this may be true of the flock, it is not true of the sick parrot. The sick parrot has an instinct to survive as an individual that is much stronger than its instinct to attack a sick parrot--the flock be damned! Parrots that get sick are "smart" enough or "conscious" enough to hide their symptoms so that they will not be banished from the flock. They're like people who go to work when they are sick but hide the fact because they know that they will be sent home (and reprimanded for exposing others) if their illness is discovered.

A sick parrot hiding its symptoms is "Butch thinking," isn't it? This is obviously not an instinct or something that parrots teach their children as that would contradict the instinct to shun a sick parrot. It's only when the sick parrot realizes that the flock is going to attack it because it is sick that the sick parrot feels a danger that stimulates a creative action. For the sick bird, "faking it" is a creative solution to a life-threatening problem. It's Sundance jumping--hoping to survive. Even a sick parrot wants to "control the narrative," by saying "I'm not sick!"

"Control of the narrative" can occur without words--another one of life's pesky contradictions.

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PART TWO

THE LANGUAGE STORY

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CHAPTER 9: I SERVE TWO MASTERS

"Consciousness is language; language consciousness,"--that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats' riff on Descartes' "I think, therefore, I am."

In the "Gospel According to Luke," we are told that "no servant can serve two masters." Unfortunately, all living creatures must. The individual animal must serve it own best interests in its efforts to survive and procreate while simultaneously serving the interests of the herd in its efforts to survive and procreate. As a result there are two "I's" (personal and social) and two "me's" (personal and social). I am in conflict with my own instincts at times; I am in conflict with my herd's instincts at times. For all animals but man, this does not lead to inner conflict--the conflict is external; rams butt heads. Individual instincts and herd instincts flow one into the other and back again more-or-less (remember the sick parrot) seamlessly. There is little inner conflict in animals--except for human animals. The reason that there is inner conflict in humans can be stated in one word: language.

The link between consciousness and language seems so obvious to me that I find it hard to understand why language is rarely invoked in our efforts to understand consciousness. Isn't some sort of relationship intuitively obvious? When I realized that language was the key to understanding consciousness, I looked up references to language in books on consciousness. For some reason, language does not seem to be an important component of consciousness for most thinkers on the subject. Thinking that consciousness is language seems to be outside-the-box-thinking although I am baffled to understand why.

We think in words; it is the complexity of our language that allows us to idolize consciousness as the source of our great river of ideas (it isn't). The division of "I" into "I" and "me" requires the syntax of a sophisticated language. My ability to say to myself "You idiot!" as if I am not me requires a sophisticated, and clever, use of language. In meditation, language is the one thing that cannot be turned off--and what else is always on when we're awake? Consciousness! Are any other senses always on when we're awake? I can close my eyes and plug my ears and suspend my body in the warm water of an isolation tank, but consciousness and language still drone on. The rest of the brain keeps working when we sleep--at the same rate that it works when we are awake; it's just doing different things--but language and consciousness take a coffee break. Why don't we connect-the-dots? Shouldn't we at least suspect an affair?

Why does consciousness disappear when we sleep or dream? I would say that it goes away because it is not needed. It cannot react to problems or danger because we are asleep. Also, the rest of our brain might need a break from its constant yapping. Consciousness can be an irritating nudge, as the Sundance Kid knows perfectly well.

Sleep and dreams have other purposes. We dream for the same reason that animals dream--to sort out the answers to (personal, social, herd) problems that face us. We dream about what happened to us and what we think might happen in the future as a result. Dreams are an animal's way of trying out various scenarios without committing to action in the real world. Dreams seem surreal to us because dreams employ animal imagery and animal-level language. Humans dream in child-level language not reasoned adult language. Dreams are problem-solving simulations. To understand a dream, you would need to know what problem the person or animal is working on subconsciously and, for the most part, wordlessly. When we wake up, our inner being has some sense of what to do--unless our consciousness gets distracted by trying to interpret what the dream means. Dreams don't mean anything. They are the means that our inner being uses to work out possible solutions to various problems. Sometimes they provide good inspiration; sometimes they get things wrong. We must use trial and error to figure out which is which--just like other animals.

Since my premise is that human consciousness evolved from animal consciousness, and that animal consciousness evolved from microbe consciousness, then for animals and microbes to have consciousness they must also have language. And they do! All living creatures, including bacteria, have language. Bacteria communicate using chemical signals; they are living enzyme computers (as are all individual cells, including all of the cells in your body). Animals use a wide variety of means to communicate.

Being a member of a group inevitably involves the division of "I" into "I" (the individual) and "me" (a member of my group)--even for a bacteria. This is the way that communication with ourselves begins--to work out the conflicts that inevitably arise when we try to serve two masters--our selves and our society. Freud called this division the id (inner me), ego (I), and superego (the group). Others have called it the child (inner me), adult (I), and parent (the group). I might call it Sundance (inner me), Butch (I), and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang (the group). Then, of course, there's the classic "me (the group), myself (inner me) and I (I)." It's really just a matter of symantics; they're different ways of saying the same thing.

Consciousness is starting to make more sense now, isn't it? There is a private "I" and a public "I"; there is a private "me" and a public "me"--and they're all inside me (or is that I?) trying to sort things out as best they can. Is it any wonder that when they all get talking amongst themselves that we can get confused? Most of the confusing aspects of consciousness can be laid at language's door. The reason that animal consciousness is not as confused is because animals don't have human language.

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CHAPTER 10: HOW LAZINESS GOT LEGS

Because humans had animal consciousness before they possessed language and human consciousness, it seems clear that there must have been a period of transition from one to the other--a fairly long period, actually. Even as language developed, humans must have remained aware in the way that animals are aware for a very long time until language developed to the point that it could generate more complex thought. Syntax (grammar) made "ideas" possible, and ideas were language's crowning achievement. With ideas, we could plan for the future as well as live in the present. With ideas we could imagine...anything! Ideas are the verbalization of creative inspiration.

The question I would like to address now is: "Why did human language emerge?" If you think about it, no one ever asks that question about animal language--I think because the answer is obvious for animal language. Animal language emerged to stimulate instinctive responses to group problems. A certain call or posture might alert all the prairie dogs in the area to the presence of a predator. The alert would, in turn, stimulate an instinctive response--either to "freeze in place" (for a hawk) or "run for your burrow" (for a fox) depending on the exact nature of the danger and the specific call. Animal language selects from a number of possible instinctive responses and stimulates one over the others based on the present circumstance.

So, why did human language emerge? My answer would be that it emerged to perform the exact same function that animal language performed before human language emerged, only human language, as it turned out, could do the job so much better that it totally transformed the human landscape. Once humans possessed language, they became capable of mediating their own instincts in ways that no other animal could--ways that led them to become what we have come to call "civilized" and "intelligent" and "human." For the first time ever in the history of the known universe, ideas could mediate instincts. Ideas had never even existed before except as present-moment inspirations to novel action in desperate situations. Now, human language gave ideas a job--the same job that animal language had before ideas existed (to mediate between competing instincts). If you lock an animal in a cage, you will soon discover that it understands the "idea of freedom" even though it lacks either a concept or a word for that idea. Language made "freedom" a concept that we could all share--that we could all fight for!

Which brings us to the "first word." I would argue that the first word was some version of the word "No!" As any parent or pet owner knows, "No!" is the ultimate instinct mediator. "No!" stops instincts in their tracks. After humans invented "No!" the rest was easy. They just had to come up with the nouns and verbs that "No!" applied to--"Bork no eat food!"--and they had literal language (language without metaphors). Language saved steps, as the clan leader did not have to get up and club Bork on the side of his head when he was about to grab a choice morsel from the communal pig.

Once you understand that "No!" was the first word, you only need to understand that all animals are "lazy" by nature. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, laziness is a survival instinct that follows Occam's razor--that which requires the least effort is best. Overly industrious animals (except humans) all died off a long time ago. Laziness is efficiency in the animal kingdom. It benefits survival. One of the most powerful predators on earth--the male African lion--sleeps up to twenty hours a day because the lionesses do all the hunting. The male African lion is laziness personified, or as L'Oreal would remind us, "He's worth it!" Dogs and cats--the most successful animals on earth after humans--both spend the majority of their lives sleeping.

There's an interesting paradox at work here. Language gave human laziness legs, but it also led directly to human ambition (planning for the future in words). Laziness, fueled by boredom, created ambition; go figure. If we humans manage to damage the planet irreparably with our overly industrious ways, we will have learned about the "fruits of ambition" (the poster child of "hubris") the hard way.

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CHAPTER 11: AN EXCUSE IS BORN

A male monkey that is not the leader of his group still has an instinctive need for sex. A male monkey will sometimes sneak off to mate with a female monkey even though the dominant monkey would attack him if he caught them. Sex is a powerful lure as any teenager will tell you. As a result, sometimes a male monkey will be caught by the dominant monkey when the male monkey has a hard-on. The male monkey will cover this in the hopes that the dominant monkey won't see it because if he does see it he will attack because he knows exactly what it means. Now, imagine that these monkeys are creating language for the first time, and they are using language to mediate instincts before fighting to reduce stress in the group. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's a good thing. Since the dominant monkey has language (and wants to be a good leader), when he sees the hard-on he says the word "Why?"

He's giving the male monkey an opportunity to talk himself out of a beating. It's easy to see "why" this is a good thing. Language is already showing its utility by encouraging better solutions than fighting to resolve group conflicts. The problem that this opportunity poses is that now the male monkey has to explain his behavior. Of course, he can't tell the dominant monkey that he has a hard-on because he hopes to have sex with a female since that just leads to a beating. He can't say "I don't know" because the dominant monkey "does know" and will beat him anyway. There is only one way out. He needs a reasonable excuse that fits the facts; he needs a good story. "I always get a hard-on before I have to pee, and I have to go pee right now." Hopefully, the dominant male will buy it. He may even know that it isn't true, but there are social reasons to "let it go." If he has a sense of humor, he might just pee on him instead of beat him.

We all like to complain about people who make excuses, but we all do it because it is one of our most basic group survival instincts. Excuses are a social lubricant that may have began life as a sexual lubricant.

First, it was laziness. Then, it was excuses. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Do children come to mind--the Sundance Kid, perhaps? As a child, there was one thing that I always hated--the need to explain myself. The reason I hated it was simple. I often didn't know why I did things; I just did them. Sundance knows that he "has to move" to shoot, but he doesn't know why he has to move. Do you? But for some reason, only exasperated parents are allowed to tell the one true truth about human behavior: "Just because!" Cavemen who tried to use "Just because!" to explain their behavior got wupped. Only the dominant member of a society (like the clan chief or the king) was allowed to say it.

Storytelling meant "social survival" around the caveman campfire.

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CHAPTER 12: THE HALLE BERRY NEURON

If I am to be reincarnated as a single-celled creature (undoubtedly, because of something "petty" or "small" that I've done in my life), I would like to come back as the Halle Berry neuron. Scientists believe that brain neuron (nerve cell) complexity is the source of all animal intelligence. Brains are, after all, a complex system of interconnected neurons that can think. Inherent in this perspective is the idea that brains are "smart" but that neurons are not; neurons must be networked into a brain to be intelligent. While it is true that brains are smart; it is false that neurons are not.

The neurons in your brain are the same as the neurons in fruit flies. A neuron is a neuron is a neuron. In a significant sense, Francis Crick was right when he said that "we're nothing but a pack of neurons!" We are a pack of neurons, but neurons are incredibly intelligent things. The vast bulk of "intelligence" in the living world is the result of the intelligence of single cells (like neurons) both as individuals and in linked groups that are only occasionally brains.

So let's look at just one nerve cell--one neuron. A neuron can respond to a single photon of light, making it one of the most sensitive detectors in the universe (I don't draw any inference from this, but this also makes a neuron a quantum device). A single neuron can do math--add and subtract. Most remarkably, a single neuron can unfailingly recognize Halle Berry. It's been dubbed the "Halle Berry neuron"* although it can be trained to recognize any celebrity--male or female. It is so sensitive that it can even recognize Halle Berry when she is dressed as Catwoman. It will fire when images of Halle Berry in her Catwoman costume and mask are flashed on a screen, and it will not fire when images of other women wearing the same costume are flashed. We may be nothing but a pack of neurons, but we need to show neurons a little of Aretha Franklin's "R-E-S-P-E-C-T."

Most books on consciousness reference modern studies done with computer simulations called "neural nets" that are said to mimic human intelligence. "Neural nets" are understood by scientists to help explain how the human brain functions. A neural net is a simplified computer simulation of a few dozen nerve cells connected to a few dozen other nerve cells. Since neurons typically connect to hundreds or thousands of other neurons even the simplest neuron system is too complex for a computer to simulate. Instead, computer scientists work with extremely simplified neuron systems that do not represent the level of complexity that real neurons exhibit--and are by no means representative of anything as complex as a brain.**

Because those who devised computer neural nets were working on artificial intelligence, these nets have always been thought of within the scientific community as telling us something about how the human brain works (what artifical intelligence is trying to mimic). This is a gross overstatement in my opinion. What neural nets do tell us is how the simplest neural systems can function intelligently.

Even a single neuron can alert the papparazzi, "Halle's here! She's wearing her Catwoman costume! It's time to take pictures!"

I gotta go.

* Alam Boyle, "How My Brain Got Fried," Cosmic Log on nbcnews.com, September 28, 2010

** Carl Zimmer, "Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits." The New York Times, September 21, 2010

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CHAPTER 13: WHY WE TELL STORIES

We are reading the story of our lives,

as though we were in it,

as though we had written it.

Mark Strand*

Now for the most interesting piece to the puzzle of human consciousness: An inevitable side effect of pattern analysis with words (human consciousness) is the need to explain pattern analysis without words (our animal consciousness) to ourselves and others as best it can. It's not that human consciousness understands our animal consciousness; it's that it must explain it whether or not it understands it. As Christopher Booker put it in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories: "The difference between men and animals is that men tell stories."** The reason that they tell stories is to explain themselves and others to themselves and others. We all must tell stories. That's why story is one of the first things that our children learn. Long before they learn the complexities of language, children learn stories from picture books, bedtime stories, and cartoons. A child might never learn to read or write, but a child always learns to talk and tell stories.

Human language creates past and future from the perpetual present\--the moment in which consciousness concentrates attention and our inner being acts. Once the future was created by language, human beings could begin to plan both as individuals and as groups. Another of the major benefits of language are ideas--which are ethereal things that only existed before language as inspired present moment responses to novel problems. Now ideas can directly affect our instincts. Ideas can be used to train our instincts to give us some degree of control over them--the way biofeedback can give us temporary control over our heartbeat. Instincts can be trained because neurons can be reprogrammed by repetition, but it takes an effort. To see how powerful ideas can be, just read a romance novel; words printed on paper can move a human being to ecstasy and tears. Scientists experience ecstasy or tears when their theories (ideas) are confirmed or falsified.

Our I-consciousness and our inner being have very different attitudes towards ideas. Our inner being is suspicious of ideas. Ideas are always its "second choice." Our inner being is an action figure; it acts in the present moment. All action figures hate to stop for analysis. Does John Wayne ever want to "pause for reflection?" He may have to, but he never wants to.

Our I-consciousness, on the other hand, favors ideas over action. I-consciousness thinks that our instincts (our animal nature) are unreliable. I-consciousness likes to think that it is in charge so it favors ideas, which are a product of its domain, over action that is more instinctive. This preference sometimes works out well and other times not so well. Butch thinks that he's smarter than Sundance, but Sundance knows that Butch would have died a long time ago if it weren't for him.

Once one understands how language affects instinct mediation, no new structures are necessary to understand consciousness, and one is one not faced with the distasteful task of explaining that the central reality of human life is an illusion. Consciousness is self-deceived into thinking that it is charge, but that does not make it an illusion. It's a delusion--and a very useful one at that--not an illusion. Consciousness has a major influence on human behavior even if it is not in charge. Is Butch an illusion? Consciousness can be understood in a totally naturalistic manner that follows Occam's razor--that the simplest possible explanation of a phenomenon is probably true. Consciousness was created by language in our inner being as it verbalized the ongoing internal process of instinct mediation using language as a tool to the best of its ability.

Human consciousness is a creative artist. In its effort to understand its own actions, it became a storyteller. Its function is to provide extra data in the present moment to help solve problems. Inspiration is its greatest output; inspiration that (paradoxically) comes from our inner being. The first stories were not at all conscious. The first story was probably about something that the leader did, probably in the context of an important activity like the hunt or a competition for dominance or sex.

Consciousness began as the storyteller of our lives as part of a process that attempts to explain individual and group behavior. Only back then, it wasn't what we think of as I-conscious (no pronouns yet). That would come later. Back then, it was something else, something transitional; it was human language becoming human consciousness.

* This remarkable poem, "The Story of our Lives" by the poet Mark Strand, is about the paradoxes of consciousness.

** Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Continuum Books, 2004, p. 543

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PART THREE

ANIMAL STORIES

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CHAPTER 14: MOTHER ABRAHAM, MOUSE ISAAC AND LADY MACBETH

Science has had an interesting history with the concept that animals are conscious feeling beings. Science is by no means "scientifically neutral" on this subject nor is its (self) interest where it normally is--in the scientific "truth." In the beginning, Descartes insisted that animals did not feel pain because they were mere automatons ("meat machines"). In spite of the fact that animals screamed out in pain exactly like human beings, scientists believed this for decades. After all, scientists are human, and if you happen to be cutting up screaming animals, it must be easier to sleep at night thinking that they don't really feel pain. Today we understand this phenomenon as cognitive dissonance; it's when you ignore inconvenient truths to avoid internal stress. Apparently, it not only applies to individual scientists, but to the entire enterprise of biology as well. In torturing animals, scientists are merely following science's lead.

By the nineteenth century, their sleight-of-hand had been so thoroughly exposed that scientists no longer believed it. They knew that animals felt pain and that they were causing it! They even understood that it was morally wrong to inflict pain on an animal (don't we all teach our children this). In the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote:

...Everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorst to the last hour of his life.

The truth is that, with cognitive dissonance, he probably didn't feel remorse. Nor did Darwin seem to feel any remorse whatsoever for his own views on vivisection. Because of his great prominence, if he had opposed vivisecton it might have been banned in England. In spite of his insight, his humanity, and his innate sense of morality, Darwin actively supported vivisection--and came to its public defence when it was in danger of being banned by the bleeding heart anti-vivisectionist liberals of his day. His position was that it may be cruel; it may be immoral; but it is necessary for the progress of science. Darwin did what scientists have done since the beginning without wanting to admit the truth; he defended the immoral aspects of the scientific enterprise because he felt that science could not function without them. Sacrificing animals was like sacrificing our children in war. Nobody wants to do it, but we must!

The problem is that few people equate science with war. Animal experiments are important to our survival in the long term--not to our survival today. Animal experiments don't save anybody today. Satisfying vague long-term goals (hopes, no?) with immoral means is...well...immoral, isn't it? It's like torturing prisoners in the hopes of getting useful information from them. The fact that torture may work does not make it moral--it makes it successful. Darwin knew this, but Darwin wanted to replace God with science, and this was God's rule, wasn't it?

In the story of Abraham and Isaac, God needs to impress on Abraham that God's demands are more important than anything else. To accomplish this, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to God as he might normally sacrifice a lamb. Abraham resists, but his faith is on the line. Only when he agrees to commit what he knows to be an immoral act, does God relent and let him off the hook. Isaac lives, but Abraham now understands clearly that God stands above human morality.

Science takes this exact position regarding animal torture to this day. Science stands above human morality. A mouse would have to graduate from Harvard before scientists would consider not using them in animal experiments.* Mice are important to science; more important than mice! More important than morality! Sometimes you just have to face reality. You gotta man up!

As it turns out, no surprise here, this is an instinct. In the natural world, parents sometimes have to kill their children. Scientists think that when parents kill their children that the reason is that they know that they cannot raise them to maturity for some reason (bad weather, lack of food, drought), and it would be a waste of valuable resources (laziness as survival again) to try. Duck genocide is similar to a historic form of human genocide because a mother duck will peck at a baby duck until it can't keep up with the other ducklings so that it is, essentially, abandonded to die rather than killed outright. Sometimes, all the ducklings are treated this way--one by pitiful one.

Mouse genocide is another matter altogether. Unlike Darwin, mouse moms are moral cowards; they just can't man up no matter how hard they try. Mouse mom's maternal instincts are so strong that it would cause her extreme distress to kill her own children so she just won't do it (watch Sophie's Choice to understand the feelings that mouse mom has).

Nature has solved the problem of what to do when baby mice need to be killed in a rather Shakespearean way. Since Mother Abraham won't kill Mouse Isaac when it's necessary to do so, her sister must act as her surrogate. Lady MacBeth lives in the burrow next door; and when mom is out foraging for food, sis will sneek into her burrow and "Macbeth" the whole family. Imagine poor Lady MacBeth, cursed with the gift of language, trying to explain to Mother Abraham why she did what she did. Now, that would be a story!

So, while we may not agree with science's justification for torturing animals, we can certainly see which instincts dominate scientists when they do it. Science is Macbeth\--willing to do whatever is necessary to accomplish its goals.

You didn't think that science was God, did you?

* Even "The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness" (see the Appendix) does not suggest that mice should not be used in animal experiments although the moral implication is clear. The moral implication isn't even considered because the logical end point of both science and government (and all large herds--including the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts) is that "we may have to sacrifice a few to save the organization."

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CHAPTER 15: WHEN WOLVES FIGHT

When two wolves fight, either wolf can easily kill the other. As both wolves are useful members of the pack, this result is highly undesirable. Since they can't "talk out their problems," Mother Nature has come to the rescue by programming a "get-out-of-getting-killed" instinct into every wolf that involves flopping onto its back to expose its belly to its opponent. The victorious wolf is now forced--more forcefully than by any human law--to instantly stop the attack. The one thing that this instinct does not involve is choice--for either wolf. If it did, it wouldn't work. One wolf only knows that it has lost the fight when it flops on its back in surrender; the other wolf only knows that it has won as it stands over its helpless opponent wondering (if wolves could wonder), "Why the hell don't I kill it?" If it had to explain itself in words, it might puff itself up with pride and give a lecture on morality, "You can't kill a good wolf when it's down! What are we, animals?"

The majority of animal instincts are social instincts, not survival instincts, and the animal is faced with choices. How does an animal decide amongst competing choices? What mediates amongst competing instincts when choices have to be made? One answer is that circumstance decides (chooses), which is to say that circumstance mediates instincts. I want to be very clear by what I mean by circumstance. I define circumstance as the ever-shifting present moment in time that can never be known completely (not even close).

Let's look at what circumstance means for an individual animal. When a male deer is in rut, social instincts are involved. The males get together and compete amongst themselves for an opportunity to mate with the available females. To do so, they must assume a fairly high level of risk. Those who compete engage in a fierce "butting of heads" that sometimes leads to locked horns and a slow death for both participants. Their brains send messages to their bodies to pump hormones to convince the deer that the risk is worth taking (human teenagers understand what it is like to be in the grip of such hormones), but at some animal-level risk assessment must take place.

Being a higher mammal, male deer have a degree of animal awareness that is based on the sum total of their life experience up to that moment in time. Each male must decide if the risks are worth it--not all choose to participate. A small male might evaluate his chances and refuse to engage a larger male. Still, the small male's instincts might be to engage other small males, even if he might later have to fight larger males, which he will choose not to fight. Clearly, there's "a whole lot of circumstance going on."

Once a fight has begun, a number of decisions need to be made based on how things are going (the ever-changing present circumstance). A male might decide after two or three "butts" that he just isn't up to the task. It might back out at any moment, but its decision is based on its own inner-being evaluation of the current ever-changing present circumstance based on the sum total of its life experience (which includes its awareness, personality and intelligence) and the raging hormones that are driving it beyond all (deer) reason. The decision is driven by instincts and circumstance and is made unconsciously in its inner being.

Perhaps, this is easier to see in a survival-instinct circumstance. Why does an individual animal decide to fight or run in response to a threat? Imagine a small predator confronted by a larger predator. It flees because of its size disadvantage (a circumstance). It runs into a dead end (a new circumstance) so, in spite of its size disadvantage, it turns to fight as it has no choice (bad circumstance). As the fight progresses and the small predator is taking a beating (worse circumstance), it notices some sunlight amongst the rocks (a hopeful circumstance). It dives for the sunlight and slithers through a hole that is too small for the larger predator to follow through (good circumstance). The small predator escapes (the best of all possible circumstances from its point of view), and--should it possess language--it would surely tell its peers the wonders of its adventures; adventures in which all of the circumstances that it encountered would be explained as significant decisions that it had made. These decisions were all driven by circumstance--and the concentrated creative desire to survive.

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CHAPTER 16: THE ROBBER BEAR

When an animal hears a call identifying a life-threatening situation, an instinct set is activated. This instinct set involves the complicated interrelated biological functions (controlled by neuron-level activity) necessary for an animal to, say, freeze in place or run for its life. Different hormones are manufactured by the body to stimulate different functions, and blood flows are redirected to get oxygen to the necessary organs depending on the course of action specified by the call. That is why there must be a different call, or a variant, for each function. There is even a call that tells bird chicks to shut up in the presence of a predator. How this call evolved is difficult to say, but it's necessity for survival is obvious. What human parent wouldn't sell their soul for such a call at times?

Animal instincts function in incredibly complex ways. At some level, they are "hardwired," but the hardwiring is not permanent; it constantly adapts to changing circumstances as competing instincts must be mediated. Since ever-changing present circumstance is involved, there is nothing deterministic about the results. No one can predict the future. Animals are not machines; ever-changing circumstance penalizes those that don't adapt to changes.

Scientists commonly deny animals certain characteristics that are thought of as uniquely human. An animal could not be capable of deception, for instance. How could it? "To deceive" requires human intelligence. Actually, we know the moment when humans first practiced deception in their stories (Greek humans, at least). They did it at the end of the Iliad when Odysseus suggested that they build the Trojan Horse and then hide inside it to infiltrate the enemy. Odysseus went on to hone deception to a fine art in the Odyssey. The idea that deception is a human invention created by clever humans has a long history.

I was watching a nature show on television that showed a group of bears feasting on a salmon run. There were a limited number of good spots on the river to catch the leaping salmon, and these spots went to the dominant bears in the group. As each bear caught its fish, it went off to eat it, leaving its spot to the next bear in line. While there was an overabundance of fish, the social structure kept the weaker bears from getting to the front of the line because dominant bears kept returning for more fish. The weaker bears had to devise different strategies.

One such strategy was employed by a bear that the makers of the documentary referred to as "the robber bear." The robber bear was a scraggly misfit that would position itself next to a dominant bear who was closely guarding its fishing spot. When a salmon leaped into the air, the robber bear would growl aggressively and lunge towards the dominant bear as if it were attacking it. In most cases, the dominant bear would instinctively growl and lunge back, giving the robber bear the opportunity to catch the fish in mid-air and scamper off with it. Sometimes the fish was lost for both bears, but it became the prize of the robber bear often enough to make the strategy worthwhile.

The documentary makers showed one such encounter where the robber bear tried its trick on a dominant bear that simply ignored it and caught the fish in spite of the fact that, for all instinctive purposes, it was being attacked. One might suppose that this bear had lost fish to the robber bear in the past and had learned to control itself so as not to lose its lunch. Or it might have watched the robber bear playing its trick on other bears and learned not to be fooled. Or, perhaps, it was simply too dominant in the group to be bothered by such a scraggly misfit no matter what it was doing. Would a Roman soldier react to a child with a wooden spear?

There are many more examples of animal deception; they have almost become a cottage industry amongst biologists. A number of cases were reported by Natalie Antier in the The New York Times on December 23, 2008 ("A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit"). "A young baboon being chased by its enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an alert that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders."* When a young chimpanzee is caught courting a female by the alpha male, he will cover his erection with his hands, as if thinking, "out of sight, out of mind." Rhesus monkeys will take food from a box that has bells without clappers in preference to a box with bells with clappers--apparently thinking, "If I can hear it, they can hear it." A female dolphin that had been trained to clean her pool of trash by rewarding her with a fish whenever she brought in a haul learned to hide trash under a rock and bring it up in small pieces. Even Flipper is a scam artist.

Innate characteristics and instincts can also be deceptive. "Harmless Viceroy butterflies mimic toxic Monarch butterflies to avoid being eaten; parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing; Angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms."

The most interesting example in the article was about chimpanzees and orangutans in zoos who lure human strangers to their enclosures by grinning while holding out a piece of straw as an enticement. If the humans strayed too close, the animals would grab them by the ankle and bite them--their editorial commentary on life behind bars.

* This is a trick much beloved--and practiced--by our politicians who, apparently, learned it from a young baboon.

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CHAPTER 17: THE LION KING

Imagine a young male lion roaming the African plain seeking his fortune. He spots a pride of lions and decides that the leader is old and vulnerable. He senses that he can defeat him in tooth-and-claw combat. He challenges the old lion; they fight; the young lion wins; and the old lion is banished to almost certain death as a male lion alone without a pride ("it's a jungle out there"). Flush with success, the first thing that the young lion does is kill all the cubs in the pride so that the lionesses will go into heat, and he can have children of his own genes (this is a story much beloved by evolutionary psychologists).

Now, imagine that the new lion king possesses the gift of language, and you were to ask him why he killed the cubs. Of course, he would not know anything about genes or provoking heat in the lionesses. He killed the cubs because he had an instinct to kill them. Dozens of psychological tests performed on humans have shown that what a human being would do in the lion's place (and what I am postulating that the lion would do)--as opposed to telling the truth such as "I don't know!" or "Because I felt like it!"--is to make up a story that best fits the circumstances and then say that the story is the reason that he did what he did. "The damned cubs were yapping all the time, and it pissed me off, so I killed them!"

When some young upstart notices later that the yapping of his own cubs doesn't provoke him to such murderous violence and asks him why, the lion king might say, "I don't understand it, but their yapping sounds almost like the singing of a nightingale to my ears." And who would disagree with the lion who is leader of the pride? "Yes, of course, it's music to my ears too!" In each case, what the lions are doing is rationalizing their behavior with stories to maintain a social equilibrium. As long as these rationalizations more or less match the circumstances, they sound more or less true. The lion king knows that his cubs' yapping doesn't sound like a nightingale, but he has a social image to maintain. The "reality" of the situation is a secondary concern. The truth can be a terrible social lubricant. From a social perspective, the answer to the question "Do I look fat in these pants?" can never be "Do you really want to know?"

Since the lion king is incapable of understanding the instincts that drive him, the best he can do is to make up stories about his own behavior--stories that aren't true (except by luck or coincidence) but that closely match the circumstances. The closer that they match the circumstances, the better the stories are. This is the "link to the real world" that gives the stories the feel of "reality." We all tend to believe in a good story that makes sense because we have an instinct to believe it.

The reality that we each inhabit is one in which we believe that our own stories are true. After all, they're our stories; we lived them; how can they not be true?

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CHAPTER 18: MADAGASCAR

The movie Madagascar tells a story about domesticated wild animals--zoo inmates (human beings are also domesticated wild animals so this story hits close to home). The zoo animals of the story are accidentally crated up and shipped off to the island of Madagascar. Because humans provide the zoo animals with food, animals that would normally be natural enemies--like the lion and zebra of our story--can be friends. The lion and the zebra arrive on the island with several other animals, but the others are all herbivores who dine on the lush vegetation while the lion wonders where the "steaks" are? He has no idea what the source of "steaks" might be--but we do.

The next day, the lion finally realizes "where the steaks are." He comes to this realization when he discovers his mouth attached to the rump of his good friend the zebra which arouses understandable consternation amongst all the herbivores, but especially for his friend the zebra (talk about delicious plotting). By the third day, of course, friendship has fallen by the wayside, and the lion is 100% in the throes of his hunger instinct. He needs steak! He's going to eat his best friend! Animation just doesn't get any better than this! I'm surprised they let children watch this stuff.

Madagascar is a classic study in instinct mediation. It is such an entertaining example because it contrasts what we think of as our "civilized being" (our I-consciousness) with our "instinctive being" (our inner being), and our civilized being loses handily (although only after having worn down our better nature over three days without food). Of course, the plot of the movie resolves everything tidily with no one getting eaten, but the adults in the audience know that this just isn't realistic. We accept it because the alternative is just too horrible. The movie ending--that I-consciousness (our civilized being) will triumph over our inner being (our instinctive being)--is, of course, one of the enduring myths that we have about ourselves (which is why the story's resolution works for us even though we know it isn't true). It's the ego delusion--that the ego is in charge. Magical thinking at its best!

Madagascar is also the story of most diets. The first day, you're hungry. The second day, you obsess about food. The third day...well...the third day, you eat the damn zebra! Isn't that how it feels when you restrain yourself in something until you reach the point where it just bursts out? You promise yourself not to lose your temper with your boss, so you go home and lose your temper with your wife or your kids or the dog instead.

Isn't this all just instinct mediation gone wrong?

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CHAPTER 19: THE LEGAL APE

Most mammals are instinctively moral--except for us. We were moral once. We evolved from a moral hominid, but we replaced morality with the law a long time ago. We've become the legal ape. Humanity has long hated to be reminded of our animal past, but as we've already learned, even mice have more morality than Darwin. Still, in the United States at least, Darwin gets the last laugh. He has the law on his side.

If you think that the law has a direct relationship to morality, just watch a few episodes of the TV program Law and Order. They clarify that particular point with an almost irritating regularity. Morality has to be built into the law, and it isn't always. In reality, it isn't easy to do. That may be why religion evolved originally--as the purveyor of moral laws that are difficult to legislate. Religion eliminated the need for the legal in moral law. The moral was the legal; they were exactly the same thing. It was an inspired innovation when viewed from that perspective.

Athiests don't get it. Religion is about morality. Religion is the politics of morality--the "pomp and circumstance" that goes with morality. Think of those British judges in black robes and white wigs that represent the "pomp and circumstance" of British law or the long black robes of the United States Supreme Court. Without religion, there is no politics of morality. While society has mourned the "death of God," we continue to believe that we live in a moral world even though it is almost impossible to present evidence that this is the case. The reality is that we are moral beings trapped in a legal world. We have replaced morality with law (and, more recently, economics), and this stresses us out morally. We should mourn the "death of morality," but the simple reality is that we cannot admit to ourselves that it is true. How could we? Deep down inside we are moral beings. Our instincts run deep and don't go away.

As a result, humanity still finds itself in an age that is defined by "the moral vacuum of existentialism." We exist, but the scientific world of existence does not have meaning (it's all just "matter in motion"), and the religious view of morality based on God has been undermined by science. Scientists do not seem to be able to resist ridiculing religion as antiquated superstition at every opportunity. Politics has as many flaws as religion, perhaps more, but scientists don't rail against the failings of politicians--who are the source of their funding. Even over issues as important as global warming, scientists have not "gone on the attack" to save the planet like those "irresponsible eco-hippie environmental terrorists," but they have no problem at all going on the attack to save us from religion.

The lesson of existentialism is that without meaning there is no compelling case to be made for morality. Why not live a life of "wine, women and song" or "drugs, sex and rock and roll?" Each individual has to find meaning--and morality--in their own lives. There can be no public morality in this scenario (only laws). The immoral can triumph legally, financially and politically in our world; and we admire them for doing it and getting away with it (the movie The Godfather turned this reality into a perverse kind of poetry). God didn't die with the birth of modern science during the Renaissance (God had to wait for Nietzsche), but morality did. Science became more important than morality. Animal torture, and anything else science needed to do to succeed, became institutionalized. Science and immorality got into bed together and have been there ever since. Build an atomic bomb and blow up a couple of cities? Sure, no problem.*

Obviously, this state of affairs will not last forever. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back in the direction of morality--somehow--because we are genetically programmed for it. We will realize that we can have science and morality, only science will have to make a few changes to accomplish this worthy goal. Like any world superpower, science won't like being told that it needs to change. It'll be interesting to see how the Scientific Reformation finally works out. If a new pope can bring some humility to the historically narcissistic Catholic Church, then perhaps some visionary scientist will one day bring some humility and morality to science. Richard Feynman may have been the last world-famous scientist to point out that science has limitations and flaws and can only inform us about certain things--not everything. Feynman made it clear that science could not inform us about morality. He pointed out that that was religion's job.**

* In all fairness to some of the scientists involved, they did agonize over the decision; but after agonizing, they built it anyway. Herd instincts run deep.

** The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, Richard Feynman, Perseus Books, 1998, p. 61-122 ("The Unscientific Age")

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PART FOUR

JUST SAY NO!

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CHAPTER 20: TROUBLE IN RIVER CITY

Consciousness is an effective planning tool, and planning can be a survival tool, but all the planning in the world may not prepare you for the unexpected (like the Super Posse or the sudden appearance of a rattlesnake). When we are in danger, consciousness seems as likely to get us killed as it is to save us--maybe more likely if we allow it to engage. Consciousness is the "don't look down" part of our fear of heights--because if you do look down, you'll think about falling; and if you think about falling, there's a good chance that you'll fall.

In the story of evolution, things that help get us killed aren't supposed to evolve. There must be an explanation, no? Here's how it works, and why it doesn't always work. Consciousness is like an advisor who provides data to the President so that the President can decide what to do. Consciousness is not the President. When consciousness tries to be the President, it can lead to "Trouble--with a capital 'T'--in River City."

Gavin de Becker begins his remarkable book The Gift of Fear with a story about a woman who allows a strange man that she doesn't trust to carry her groceries, enter her home, and rape her. The story of how he gets in and how she ultimately saves her own life is a story about the failings of our conscious mind and the triumphs of our inner being.

She knows, even before anything happens, that something is up (note the irony; she is obsessed with her personal safety). There are signs:

...That afternoon, in an effort to get all her shopping done in one trip, Kelly had overestimated what she could comfortably carry home. Justifying her decision as she struggled with the heavy bags, she reminded herself that making two trips would have meant walking around after dark, and she was too careful about her safety for that. As she climbed the few steps to the apartment building door, she saw that it had been left unlatched (again). Her neighbors just don't get it, she thought, and though their lax security annoyed her, this time she was glad to be saved the trouble of getting out the key.

...Next came the four flights of stairs, which she had wanted to do in one trip. Near the top of the third landing, one of the bags gave way, tearing open and dispensing cans of cat food. They rolled down the stairs almost playfully, as if they were trying to get away from her. The can in the lead paused in the second floor landing, and Kelly watched as it literally turned the corner, gained some speed, and began its seemingly mindful hop down the next flight of stairs and out of sight.

"Got it, I'll bring it up," someone called out. Kelly didn't like that voice. Right from the start something just sounded wrong to her, but then this friendly-looking young guy came bounding up the steps collecting cans along the way.

She didn't want to let him carry her bag. She said "No," but he didn't listen to her. He talked her into letting him carry her bag, and when they got to her front door, he talked her into letting him come in to put the bag down. At every step of the transaction, she knew deep down inside what was really going on, but each time that she thought "No," she did "Yes." The rapist's lulling words--and good-natured pushiness--overcame her very real sense of danger. One might think that her conscious mind was hypnotized by those words. It was.

Three hours later after he had raped her repeatedly, he was ready to go. He closed the window and motioned to her with his gun.

..."Don't you move or do anything. I'm going to the kitchen to get something to drink, and then I'll leave. I promise. But you stay right where you are." He had little reason to be concerned that Kelly might disobey his instructions because she had been, from the moment she had let go of that bag until this moment, completely under his control. "You know I won't move," she assured him.

But the instant he stepped from the room, Kelly stood up and walked after him, pulling the sheet off the bed with her. "I was literally right behind him, like a ghost, and he didn't know I was there. We walked down the hall together. At one point he stopped, and so did I. He was looking at my stereo, which was playing some music, and he reached out and made it louder. When he moved on toward the kitchen, I turned and walked through the living room."

She walked out of her apartment and into the apartment of her neighbor across the hall--saving her own life in process. She had known--although not in her conscious mind--that he was going to kill her. He couldn't use his gun; it would be too loud. That was why he had closed the bedroom window before going to the kitchen--and why he had turned up the stereo. When he said that he was going to the kitchen, she knew that he was going for a knife. The non-conscious part of her mind (her inner being) knew what was going on even though her conscious mind did not. Her inner being was rational; it was intelligent; it needed to act; it knew what to do (say "No") but couldn't do it because her conscious mind had relinquished control to another person.

Then, when all was apparently lost, her inner being took over and saved her life. Her conscious mind could only watch in awe at what she was truly capable of--when she finally stopped thinking and acted "like a ghost." Subconsciously, she used the sheet to hide. This is animal-level magical thinking, no?

And it worked!

* The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker, Delta Books, 1997, pp. 1-6

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CHAPTER 21: THE EXTRAORDINARY INTELLIGENCE

OF THE MADNESS OF CROWDS

Let's dig a little bit deeper into the idea that we can be "hypnotized" into doing things against our will--an idea that has been studied by scientists for over two centuries. Hypnosis is a state where consciousness seems to disappear and where a person cedes control of their own behavior to another person. Not only do they lose control, their very memory of what occurs under hypnosis can be banished. While scientists remained baffled by hypnosis, if you think about herd consciousness, a great deal of the mystery goes away.

An individual herd animal has its own personal consciousness, but in situations with a potential for danger that animal must "damp down" its own consciousness so that it can function as a neuron in the herd consciousness. Think of what happens to slime-mold consciousness when it becomes part of a slime-mold slug. It has to give up its "individuality," doesn't it? This process requires absolutely no thought or decision-making on the creature's part. It is a natural--an instinctive--response to group danger signals. There are times when you need to trust your own instincts, and there are times when you need to trust the group and play your part in it. When danger lurks nearby, these times are more clearly defined.

In a threatening situation, it's critical that this state of herd consciousness is instantly turned on; waiting for even a second could be disastrous. Isn't this a key feature of hypnosis--its "snap-your-fingers" quickness? In human society, we go to night clubs to experience a somewhat perverse form of this herd consciousness phenomenon--people, unaware, strutting and clucking like chickens at the mere prompting of a stage hypnotist. It's no wonder that nobody thinks that this is survival behavior. You'd have to be crazy to think so. But it is. Aren't scientists fond of telling us that when the facts of the world contradict our opinions, that the facts ought to take precedence?

Think about it. A key feature of any living thing is that it must be incredibly flexible because it must adapt to whatever life throws at it, and life can throw a lot of unexpected stuff your way--no matter what you are. There is absolutely no way to know in advance how to save oneself in a situation that you have never encountered before. This is a time when positive thinking--magical thinking even--and outside-the-box thinking is absolutely necessary for survival. People are gullible; they get crazy ideas to solve intractable problems; they are impulsive--these are all survival traits for both individuals and groups. The unknown requires specialized tools.

The ability to arrive at "a solution that works" is the ultimate survival tool both at the individual level and the herd level. Results count; means are secondary. In most cases, there is more than one solution to any given problem. The ability to select a viable solution from the available options is the key to survival.

Another interesting element to the consciousness puzzle is that you have to be certain that your solution is correct even when it isn't. You can't know that a solution is incorrect until it fails. Until then, you have to have blind faith in your decisions, which are made by your inner being but your consciousness takes credit for them. This is how successful survival instincts create ego--"I know what to do!"--even though "I" isn't the doer. And the rest of the herd is thrilled because they don't know what to do--and because they survived, of course. Out of this, heroes and leaders are born. Even in the microbe world, the hero--the one who survives the enemy attack--is the one that "gets the girl" (gets to reproduce). Just like in the movies!

From the perspective of herd consciousness, the so-called "madness of crowds" makes perfect sense. You might think of it as the "extraordinary sanity of herds." Human beings instinctively form herds and act together in inspired ways that sometimes work and sometimes don't. A lynch mob is a herd formed to enact quick justice. There were undoubtedly times when this response to injustice was appropriate and times when it wasn't; and there were times when it was both--the French Revolution comes to mind.

Actually, the madness of crowds usually refers to a circumstance where things worked out well for a time--and then they suddenly didn't. Events like Tulip-Mania (where the price of one tulip exceeded the price of a house) and the Great Depression (where rampant financial speculation led to financial collapse) are merely reflections of the reality that herd consciousness can get things spectacularly wrong as well as spectacularly right. In this sense, the Russians launching Sputnik or the United States sending a man to the moon or the construction of the International Space Station might all be thought of as "Tulip-Mania gone right."

Herd consciousness does make the same mistakes repeatedly, but it also gets things right repeatedly--and more often than it makes mistakes. The fact that many of us live in relatively peaceful societies is evidence that herd consciousness generally works to our advantage even though it often fails--and costs--us dramatically.

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CHAPTER 22: THE THING THAT CHANGES

INTO WHAT YOU THINK IT IS

In his book The Illusion of Conscious Will,* Harvard Professor Daniel Wegner points out a remarkable feature of hypnosis--that it has the ability to conform to whatever theory is proposed to explain it. Wegner claims that hypnosis is "the thing that changes into what you think it is." Into whatever you think it is! You need to stop for a moment and take notice. Life is about to reveal a profound secret.

Remember in old movies when hypnosis was mentioned in relationship to some crime, and the hypnosis expert always said that nobody could be hypnotized into doing something against their will? They could not be hypnotized into committing a bank robbery or a murder, for example (the point being, I suppose, to show that hypnosis could not be used for immoral purposes). Tests were conducted, and the results confirmed the hypothesis. People would not "kill" under hypnosis.

As is the way of men, contrarians came along who thought, "And why not?" They figured that, under the right circumstances, a person under hypnosis could be convinced to do something that they would not normally do. They designed experiments to test this hypothesis, and--to the amazement of all--it proved remarkably easy to convince someone to "kill" by simply creating a scenario in the subject's mind in which "killing" was the best thing to do under the circumstance. "You're going to save the life of a child if you shoot this person because he's about to kill the child." Faster than the Beatles can sing, "bang, bang, shoot, shoot," the hypnotized subject pulls the trigger.

Over the years, scientists created many theories to explain hypnosis, and, one-by-one, they were all confirmed. Even theories that claim that there is no such thing as hypnosis (called faking theories) were confirmed! Faking theories that contradicted each other were both confirmed! Apparently, in the scientific world of hypnosis, there is no such thing as falsification. All theories are true! The fact that the new theory often contradicted the old theory didn't change the fact that both were confirmed by test. Needless to say, scientists are a bit confused by all this.

But if you think of hypnosis as herd consciousness activating a "group survival-in-the-moment state of mind," then all the mysteries are resolved, no? Human herd consciousness can adapt to almost anything--even contradictory things! It makes sense that we would relinquish our individual consciousness to the group consciousness because our chances of survival are much better if we do. Don't we do this in time of war when survival is at stake much more readily than we do in times of peace? Under peaceful circumstances, would we ever have allowed our government to put the Japanese into concentration camps (their official name--"war relocation camps"--reminds us of the marvelous power of naming things)? Even when they were cleaning our clocks in the world of technology manufacture and buying our real estate at record rates (in all fairness, they don't have much of their own), we didn't consider locking the Japanese up. But when we were frightened for our group safety, the idea that we had to lock them up to protect ourselves hypnotized us into doing the unthinkable.

Would we ever have approved of torture--"enhanced interrogation techniques" (the marvelous power of naming things again)--if not for the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center? Fear breaks down our individual inhibitions to group decisions. This is a group survival instinct that has been well understood by politicians throughout history. Aren't these perfect examples of the inspired creative use of language that we all know is not true, but we ignore the fact that we know it is not true because we are in herd-consciousness mode. "Of course, we have to torture terrorists that would fly airplanes into buildings! Duh!"

Another key feature of herd consciousness is that all the members of the herd do not have to "agree." Once the herd "decides," reluctant members have no choice but to go along with the decision. The only other alternative would be to "leave the herd," which isn't a practical option.

It also makes sense that our sense of individual consciousness disappears (or gets "damped down") when we are afraid so that our instinctive being can take charge. It would only confuse matters if it didn't; it does confuse matters when it doesn't. Go back and re-visit the chapter "Trouble in River City." Because Kelly's I-consciousness didn't disappear sooner, her assailant was able to enter her apartment and rape her. It was her I-consciousness that failed her, not her instincts--which were spot on. Thinking was not a survival tool in her case. Thinking was the problem!

Goldman captured this conflict between thought and instinct perfectly in the rattlesnake scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There is a point when the Super Posse is no longer chasing them, and they feel that they have finally escaped. They keep looking for the Super Posse, but they do not seem to be following their trail for the first time since the chase began. They have succeeded in losing them!

Butch and Sundance are looking down the hill watching for the Super Posse when Sundance hears the hiss and rattle of a snake about to strike. In a flash, Sundance turns and fires killing the snake. This was a purely instinctive act over which he had absolutely no control. Unfortunately. His shot gave away their position to the Super Posse. Ironically, if Sundance's instincts hadn't been so finely tuned, and he had turned and looked before he shot as any normal person (like Butch) would have had to, he would have seen that the snake was several yards away and posed no immediate threat to them.

Sometimes Sundance needs Butch as much as Butch needs Sundance.

* The Illusion of Conscious Will, Daniel M. Wegner, Bradford Books, 2002, pp. 297-300

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CHAPTER 23: THE TRAINER THAT THINKS IT'S THE FIGHTER

Why do we hold our breath when we concentrate on something? This may be nothing more than a commonplace effect that stems from the reality that we can't think and act at the same time. Concentrated thinking can cause us to stop breathing (acting in the present moment). This is especially true when we use our ability to concentrate in the present moment to learn something new. You have to focus attention in the present (what consciousness does) to learn something, but once that thing has been learned, the act of doing it becomes largely--if not completely--unconscious. I type without thinking about typing; I even correct mistakes without thinking (my fingers know what to do somehow). To this day, I remember the breathless torture of learning to type.

The conscious mind learns; our inner being acts. All activities are hard to do while learning and easy to do (more or less) once learned. Consciousness concentrates attention on the new and novel. Its nature is to "learn how to learn" in any new situation. It pays extra attention until we have learned, and then it leaves the stage as soon as the new becomes ordinary. Our inner being then acts out whatever consciousness has learned--as it sees fit.

In his book My View of the World,* the physicist/philosopher Erwin Schrodinger included a chapter titled "On Becoming Consciousness" that makes exactly this point. Here is an excerpt:

To give ourselves an image of this, we might say that consciousness is the instructor supervising the education of the living tissue, who is called on for help whenever new problems crop up but leaves the pupils to themselves to deal with those in which he knows they have had sufficient practice.

So, we can see that a relationship exists between our consciousness that learns and our inner being that acts. As it turns out, it can be an uneasy relationship. At critical moments, it may be difficult to know who to trust. Sometimes, our consciousness ("I") gets in the way of our inner being, and we pay a price for "looking down" from a height. Sometimes, our inner being ("me") gets in the way of our consciousness, and we get into a fight that we knew we should have avoided (and get beat up or go to jail).

This conflict is easier to understand if you think of consciousness as a trainer and our inner being as the fighter. A trainer reminds us of past mistakes ("Don't drop your left!") and urges us on to future successes ("Go for the gut!"). Our inner being uses consciousness the same way that a fighter uses a trainer. Consciousness (the trainer) is a necessary element for a successful fighter, but consciousness is not the fighter although it believes that it is. I would imagine that many trainers come to believe that their protege's success is their success. The important point is that a trainer is an important character even if it does not act; it encourages and discourages--it has influence--and that is enough. That is what it does. All fighters need trainers.

Once again William Goldman's genius shines through as he has carefully illustrated the complexities of the trainer-fighter dynamic with Butch and Sundance. Remember that I-consciousness (Butch) is the trainer; our inner being (Sundance) is the fighter. Butch and Sundance must learn Spanish so that they can rob banks in South America. They don't want to do it, but it has to be done. Butch works with Sundance with written lists of phrases Etta has prepared for them to learn ("Esto es un robo."). Sundance ignores him. Sundance would rather dally with Etta than study with Butch (his "inner kid" is showing). The result is that Sundance has not learned his lessons in time for the next robbery.

The audience, of course, expects Butch to know the Spanish phrases by now. He studied the lists; he drilled with Sundance; he's been present during every step of the learning process--and he's a lot smarter than Sundance (from his point of view). By this point, Butch must know the Spanish bank-robbery phrases. We all learn during the next robbery, however, that Butch can't speak Spanish any better than Sundance. Of course, "complications ensue," only now you know why Butch couldn't speak Spanish. Butch doesn't act in the present moment so whatever he has learned disappears during the robbery (exactly as it does in the movie). Even when Butch tries to read from his written list of phrases, he gets it wrong! Why? Because Sundance acts in the present moment, and Sundance didn't learn Spanish.

Once our inner being engages, we are no longer "Captain of our Ship" or "Master of our Fate," which is why fighters must be physically separated by others once a fight has started. It is immediately before the fight that a fighter has a brief conscious "window of opportunity." And it's a short one!

* My View of the World, Erwin Schrodinger, Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 48

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CHAPTER 24: BLINK-OF-AN-EYE FREE WILL

In his book Mind Time,* Benjamin Libet (Professor of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco) detailed the odd way that consciousness operates in real time as opposed to the way that consciousness perceives that it operates. When you decide to do something (say, lift your index finger), the message is sensed by your conscious mind after your inner being (brain) has already sent the message to your index finger to move (and inhibiting messages to your other fingers to not move). Your conscious mind thinks that it sent the message before the message was sent, but this is a delusion. The truth is that your conscious mind didn't send the message at all, but it knew about it just after it was sent (half a second after actually). The illusion that your conscious mind sent the message is necessary because without it you would think that effect preceded cause, which would be confusing. Your mind's "I" orders the events correctly in much the same way that your mind's "eye" eliminates the black spot that appears in all of our visual images of the world (because a bundle of nerves is in the way) as it would be confusing, and potentially dangerous, if it didn't. Your mind "paints" over the spot as if it weren't there.

If you hold your hand in front of your face and snap your fingers, the sound and the act will seem simultaneous. You will think that you hear the "snap" at the same moment that you see it. This is not what happens. Because of the way our brains work, sound is processed much faster than sight. You hear the "snap" before you see your fingers move. Your mind reorders these events to present them as it "thinks they should be" and not as they are really experienced. Again, it would be disorienting if you heard the reality--the sound before the action. Our minds process incoming information and create a view of reality. Our mind is not an objective reporter of information. Not at any level. Our mind creates a view of reality from the incoming stimulus that it receives.

Libet then asks the question: If consciousness is not the instigator of our actions, is there anything that consciousness actually does do? What he means is: Does consciousness control any brain function at all? He conducted experiments to find out and claims that the answer is "Yes." There is one thing that consciousness can do. When our inner being is about to do something that our consciousness thinks is a bad idea--steal a candy bar, get into a fight, jump onto that gasoline-powered pogo stick (the Hop Rod!)--consciousness has an extremely brief window of opportunity to "Just Say No!" before we are committed. Consciousness can stop an act that has been initiated by our inner being after the message has been sent by our brain but before it has been completely acted upon by our body--but it has less than a fifth of a second to do so. We all know what it feels like to "catch ourselves" when we are about to do something that we know we should not do--a hand raised to strike but held back by your better instincts, no? That is what consciousness can do. In this sense at least, consciousness aids in human survival by preventing us from doing something stupid. Sometimes the Sundance Kid needs to be restrained.

I find it interesting that this data closely matches religious ideas about free will and sin that form the basis of most western societies. Religions claim that people have free will, but that sin is inevitable. This never made sense to me; if sin is inevitable, in what sense do we have free will? Science comes to the rescue with an answer that makes complete sense. A fifth of a second is an extremely short time frame to "do the right thing." It's no wonder that we screw up regularly. Free will exists for a fifth of a second which makes sin, at times, inevitable. Nobody can always hit that mark.

You may be good, but nobody is that good.

* Benjamin Libet, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2004

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CHAPTER 25: THREE LIGHTS AND YOU'RE OUT

The superstition that one should never light "three on a match" is thought to have originated during the First World War. It was first used in print in the United States a year after the war ended. Some think that a Swedish match magnate made it up during the roaring twenties as an advertising slogan to sell more matches (a clear-cut case of convergent evolution). If it had been up to me, I would've skipped the whole "three on a match" thing because it just doesn't capture the idea that well. I would've proposed a simple baseball metaphor instead: "Three lights and you're out!"

During the First World War, smoking was really common; nonsmokers often started smoking after they enlisted. Smoking helps relieve stress, and war is stress. Smoking is also a social activity. Troops spent endless hours in the trenches where smoking was the only form of entertainment available--and highly addictive so that it would resist any efforts to control it. In any event, there was a whole lot of smoking going on. At night, this proved problematic.

When the soldiers shared cigarettes and lit them on a common match, by the time they got to the third person, that person was sometimes shot by enemy fire. Since getting shot attracts a lot of group attention in a very negative way, every soldier started to work subconsciously on a solution to this puzzle. Subconsciously, they all knew the same thing--the first and second person usually didn't get shot, which is the key to solving the problem. This thought does not have to become conscious for them to solve the puzzle.

One day, a soldier was about to light a cigarette for himself and his companions when another soldier said, "Wham! Bam! Thank you, mam!" His mates looked at him like he was crazy and said, "What?" He replied, "'Wham!' 'Bam!' Then, it's like in the joke, women don't want to be, 'Thank you, mam!'" They looked at him completely baffled. He continued, "It's got to be 'Wham!' 'Wham!' 'Wham!' 'Wham!' 'Wham!'" From his enthusiasm, all they could imagine was vigorous sex. He was lucky they didn't shoot him!

In the end, he figured out a better way to explain it to them. "Think of it like, 'Ready, aim, fire!' On the first cigarette, they know where you are; they get ready! On the second cigarette, they take aim! On the third cigarette, it's time to fire!" Once they understood his analysis, the answer was obvious. Cigarettes should be lit one at a time (Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!) and never in close proximity. After that, instead of clusters of light inviting enemy fire, a new discipline would make the trenches light up as if they were filled with fireflies. One light would pop in and out of existence in one place, then another far away, and then another and then another. Since no two lights would ever be close to each other, they could light thousands of cigarettes, and no enemy shots would ever be fired as a result--problem solved with extra matches!

"Wham! Bam! Thank you, mam!" was the soldier's inspiration. "Ready, aim, fire," was his explanation\--he had to explain his inspiration in words that other people could understand so that they would act on his words. Actually, even his common-sense interpretation might not be true. Perhaps, the first cigarette gave the soldier the range; and the second cigarette gave him time to assess the wind direction and speed; and on the third cigarette, he was ready to shoot accurately. The interesting part is that the correct details make absolutely no difference (scientists hate this part; they're sticklers for correct details). What is important is that the inference is correct. Correct inspiration leads to survival. Any species that exists today is an expert at correct inspiration. We know from history that correct inspirations often do not lead to correct explanations. Now we understand that they don't need to for survival. Theory is bunk. Results matter. "Booty is truth; truth booty." Therein lies the enduring value of inspired solutions.

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PART FIVE

THE I-STORY

'Cause I need to know, I need to know.

Tell me, baby girl, 'cause I need to know.

I need to know, I need to know.

Tell me, baby girl, 'cause I need to know.

Marc Anthony ("I Need to Know")

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CHAPTER 26: A ONE-THIRD WHOLE-BRAIN PHENOMENON

Scientists often refer to the brain as grey matter, but the truth is that only the outer layer of the brain (the cortex, which is about a tenth of an inch thick) is grey; the large inner mass of axions is white. Ninety-five percent of the oxygen that goes to the brain goes to the cortex, which is a good indicator of its importance. Scientists believe that the neocortex--the cerebral cortex--is where "intelligence is coordinated." The neocortex covers both brain hemispheres and is a unifying mechanism that receives data from the entire cerebrum. You could think of it as the "whole-brain" part of the brain; it's where data from other parts of the cerebrum and the two brain hemispheres are integrated. Scientists have long suspected that the neocortex might be the location of consciousness.

Giulio Tononi is a Professor of Psychiatry who is the head of the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Since one of the most notable features of consciousness is the fact that it disappears when we sleep, Professor Tononi and his team have tried to locate brain activity that is present when we are awake but not when we are asleep. Using a non-invasive technique of magnetic brain stimulation--a mild magnetic impulse stimulates a specific part of the brain--they have located what may be the function of consciousness in the grey matter of the neocortex.

What they discovered is that a mild magnetic stimulation to the neocortex of a waking patient, which only lasts for a tiny fraction of a second, quickly spreads to engulf fully one-third of the cerebral cortex for a total of one-third of a second. The same stimulation in a sleeping patient only lasts for the small fraction of a second that the stimulation is received--without spreading--and then, when it is turned off, nothing. This rapidly spreading signal accesses data from various parts of the brain to get as much information as possible to consciousness as quickly as possible to help it solve whatever pressing issue has stimulated it.

We all know the feeling. You're walking down a dark street late at night, and you're a bit nervous. Then, suddenly, you hear footsteps behind you. You can almost feel the stimulation of "footsteps behind you on a dark street" spreading to activate all of your available attention on this issue. It's as if your mind's "eye" was taking individual snapshots as you walked, but when you heard the footsteps, your mind replaced its Polaroid with a video camera to capture everything that was happening. This is why memories of traumatic events often seem to happen in slow motion. It's the richness of detail of the data that makes the event seem slow.

This video camera of consciousness requires a lot of energy and is only activated when needed. It would be exhausting to be paying that much attention all the time--and unnecessary. This concentrated consciousness to deal with a problem in the present moment is the reason that consciousness exists in the first place. Now we know where, and how, it occurs in the brain, as well as why. This would also explain why, no matter where we poke and prod, we cannot find I-consciousness inside the human brain--because it is a mechanism, not an inner being. The inner being is an illusory by-product of language.

Because consciousness is only occasionally on red alert, the rest of the time it is like a guard in a prison tower\--waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Consciousness needs to be ever vigilant, but it often finds itself in a situation where little ever goes wrong. As a result, consciousness is often bored. This is another of the signature features of consciousness; if you don't keep it occupied, there's no telling what kind of mischief it might you get into.

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CHAPTER 27: THE SCIENTIST AS PSYCHOPATH

If you were a psychopath, would you know it? You would think that you would, but as it turns out, the reality is "maybe, maybe not." In 1966, a man named Charles Whitmore climbed a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and shot almost fifty people, killing seventeen. He was eventually killed by the police. Before he went on this shooting rampage, he had killed his wife and mother--leaving notes claiming that he loved them and was happy that they were in heaven now.

He left a suicide note that began:

I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

When an autopsy (which he requested in his suicide note) was performed, a walnut-sized tumor was found pressing on that part of the brain that controls violence and aggression. Apparently, Charles knew. He knew that something was wrong, but he couldn't control himself. Many refused to accept this analysis because we need to blame someone when such things happen, and he was the only person available.

There are times, however, when a person can be a psychopath and not know it. James Fallon is a neuroscientist who is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine. He is, by his own admission, a psychopath. How he discovered that he was a psychopath--and why he is teaching university students instead of punking for Bubba in prison--is an interesting story. Jim (Morgan* called him Jim) was involved in a study analyzing the brain scans of the most violent psychopaths when he saw a pattern that none of his colleagues had noticed. What he had discovered was nothing less than the "neural signature of a psychopath."

Since between 1% and 3% of the population in the United States fits the profile of a psychopath, it was nice to discover something that might make it easier to identify them for potential treatment. Treatment programs that involve neural bio-feedback have proven successful when tested on prisoners. Psychopaths can be trained to control their urges--as long as they want to control their urges. It's like quitting smoking; the first step is the hardest. You have to want to quit; then it becomes possible. Unfortunately, wanting to change isn't easy--and relapse always lurks around the corner.

Coincidentally, Jim had ordered scans of the members of his own family to screen for Alzheimer's disease. The scans were all negative for Alzhemer's, but Jim noticed that one of the scans had a pattern that seemed familiar. He thought that he had gotten one of the psychopath scans mixed in with his family scans by mistake. That logic worked until he discovered that the scan was of his brain.

It was something of a shock to say the least. How could he be a psychopath? He'd never hurt anyone. He didn't get into fights. He was a university professor entrusted with training our youth! Then, he checked his genetic profile and discovered that he had dozens of genes that were linked with violence and aggression. Oops! In researching his family history, he discovered several murderers (including Lizzie Borden). The pattern was disturbing to say the least.

Still, he couldn't imagine that he actually was a psychopath, or that the people he knew thought so. He was sixty years old; certainly, somebody would've mentioned it by now. He decided to ask his family and colleagues. "Of course you're a psychopath, Jim, we've all known that for years; you just don't hurt anyone." They mentioned his most endearing traits: "You play with people's heads; you manipulate people; you're too competitive; you've always got to win. You're a psycho who doesn't kill--but you're fun at parties, and you know a lot of interesting stuff!"

Don't you find it remarkable that an intelligent scientist could reach the age of sixty and not notice that "he plays with people's heads, manipulates people, and always has to win?" I've often thought that highly intelligent people frequently do not seem to be very critically self-aware; they are self-aware just not critically self-aware. They tend to see the flaws in others but not the flaws in themselves, or they see big flaws in others and small flaws in themselves. It may be a form of cognitive dissonance--to not notice the effect that you are having on others to avoid stress.

Highly intelligent people often think of awareness as intelligence, which it isn't. Our conscious mind concentrates awareness (a present-moment function); our inner being is the domain of our intelligence (pattern recognition) and the analyzer of the data provided by our conscious awareness. Our conscious mind loves to take credit for things that our inner being does, which may be why smart people often think that intelligence is consciousness (and vice versa).

Jim still had to answer a key question: "Why hadn't he killed anyone?" He decided that it was because he had had a happy childhood surrounded by loving family. This "herd nurture" did not change his psychopathic personality; it did what herd nurture does--it controlled his psychopathic instincts so that they would not damage the herd. He was allowed to be a psychopath as long as he didn't hurt anyone. This is the same restraint that we expect from people who are sexually attracted to children; they can live amongst us as long as they control their urges. If they don't control their urges, we're willing to do "whatever it takes" (which often gets ugly) to protect our children. By channeling his psychopathic nature into the enterprise of science, Jim was able to gain some level of control over the worst elements of his personality. We just have to hope that he doesn't get involved with animal experiments.

When you think of scientists as psychopaths** who lack self-awareness but think they know what is best for us, then the world starts to make a bit more sense, doesn't it? It's like the discovery that psychologists and psychiatrists are often attracted to those professions because they have psychological and psychiatric problems themselves.

"The blind leading the blind" is certainly better that being blind alone.

* Jim's story is told on the Season Three episode of Through the Wormhole (narrated by Morgan "First, God; then, Lucius Fox; now, Mr. Wizard!" Freeman) titled "Can We Eliminate Evil?" The Charles Whitmore story appears on the same episode.

** Isaac Newton is certainly science's most famous psychopath. Newton was perfectly happy to lie and falsify documents to get his way--and his way was to "crush his enemies." Gottfried Leibniz was one of his hapless victims. Leibniz's crime was to have published his theory of calculus before Newton published his--giving Leibniz a publishing priority that Newton would not let stand (so he crushed him). When Leibniz died, Newton said that he had taken great satisfaction in "breaking Leibniz's heart." Later in life as Master of the Mint, Newton was able to pursue his enemies all the way to Tynburn where he could watch as they were drawn behind a sledge to the place where they were hung until almost unconscious, then disembowelled while they watched in horror, and then emasculated, beheaded and quartered (cut into four pieces to be dispayed on London Bridge or some other prominent place). Vlad the Executioner. Apparently, Newton lacked the "loving parents" that temper such tempers.

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CHAPTER 28: BRING IN THE CLONES

"It takes all kinds to make a world." El Quixote*

We tend to think of the nature versus nurture argument as it relates to our parents. I might be like my father or my mother because I carry their genes or because they raised me and "created" me in the sense of: "Give me the boy until the age of seven, and I will give you back the man." But family herd behavior is just the tip of the herd iceberg as far as human beings are concerned. Unlike most creatures that might belong to, at most, two herds--family and species--human beings belong to a multitude of herds. The possibilities are practically endless. In addition to family, we have our school and university relationships, our jobs or professions, our political affiliations, our neighborhood, our city, our state, our country, sports, clubs, bars, secret societies, social networks, gambling dens, houses of rising suns. It's easy to make the argument that conflicting herd allegiances are the source of many of our neuroses. We serve far too many masters.

Modern evolutionary theory's reliance on "the gene" to explain all things "evolutionary" has led to a curious form of blindsight. Scientists tend not to notice the significance of herd influences. For example, if you clone a herd of cattle from a single cow, you do not get a herd of identical cattle as genetic scientists might assume. They may all look the same; they may all be genetically identical; but they do not act the same. Not by a long shot.

Scientists have actually cloned a herd of identical cattle, and they discovered that the cloned herd had all of the "character types" of a normal herd of cattle. There are dominant cattle, submissive cattle, nurturers, defender/fighters. The herd has its needs, and the cattle instinctively fill all the necessary niches. In times of war, we discover many who we once thought to be non-violent to be capable of quite brutal violence. Psychology experiments have shown that college students who were given power over another group of students soon adopted the characteristics of sadistic jailers. Herd influence is a form of hypnosis. The hypnosis is instinctive; it has been honed by millions of years of evolution. Our inner being knows what is expected of it and does its best to comply.

Which brings us to white bread. Many think that enriched white bread is a twentieth century invention of mass production--which it is--but few know that white bread has a history that shines an interesting light on the modern invention. Enriched white bread obviously filled an economic dream of mass production, but it also fulfilled a well-understood human need. The madness of crowds led to its invention and not vice versa as many assume. As far back as the eighteenth century, the English had developed a preference (to say it was a "taste" would be clearly wrong) for white bread:

The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn [wheat]. Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health...to a most absurd gratification of a misjudged eye; and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.

Tobias Smollet, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 1771

White bread was a fashion\--the Hula Hoop of its day--the product of a herd mentality that ignored nutrition reality for external appearances. Poisonous white bread was the herd triumph of form over function; our desire to eat fashionable bread led us to consume "chalk, alum and bone ashes." But crowds cannot remain poisonously mad forever without going extinct. White bread made from bleached white flour can be viewed as the evolutionary successor to the "deleterious paste" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You could say that "it saved our bacon."

* From Don Quixote, Volume 2, Chapter 6 ("de todos ha de haber en el mundo"); also, a song by Roger Miller

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CHAPTER 29: THE ACT OF CREATION

"If you only have two alternatives, then choose the third." An old proverb

Creativity is the third option. While it is stimulated by crisis, it can actually arrive at any moment because the work is done below the level of conscious awareness, and you never know when it will be finished. We all have had the experience of thinking of the perfect response to something that someone has said to us--only we think of it in the middle of the night or the next day!

In the early sixties, Arthur Koestler wrote a book titled The Act of Creation in which he claimed, citing numerous examples, that creative inspiration was a function of our inner being (Sundance) and not of our conscious mind (Butch). Even mathematicians and scientists achieve their greatest inspirations (Archimedes' "Eureka!" in his overflowing bathtub) in their inner being first. Only after these inspirations bubble up into conscious do they "work out the math" (or the science) to prove that the inspiration was correct. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn't. The key feature of unconscious inspiration--the certainty that it is correct even when it isn't--is clearly visible here. From the back cover of the 1989 Penguin Arkana paperback:

Modern science states that up to a point every person is an automaton. The Act of Creation begins where this view ceases to be true. Koestler affirms that all creatures have the capacity for creative activity, frequently suppressed by the automatic routines of thought and behavior that dominate their lives. The study of psychology has offered little in the way of an explanation of the creative process, and Koestler suggests that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example in dreams and trance-like states. Then the mind is capable of receiving inspiration and insight.

You can see how a book that I read over forty years ago has served as an inspiration for the ideas in this book. In many ways, this book is a condensation and a simplification of Koestler's ideas. In the frontpiece of his book, Koestler inserted a figure in which he showed, with numerous examples, that the flow of inspiration was from:

HUMOR to SCIENCE to POETRY

When we are confronted with the unknown, our first response is to laugh nervously--perhaps as the best evolutionary alternative to panic. Then, we try to figure out what is going on; that's the science part, but it isn't enough. The new experience must be integrated into our lives. Most experiences will be tagged to be forgotten because they are unimportant, but the important things that the individual or herd learns need to be assimilated. This is where poetry comes in. Poetry connects what we have learned to our established functioning societies in a simple poetic way ("never light three on a match").

Because we live in a scientific age, the mere mention of the word "poetry" inspires a "Yuck!" reaction. Nobody understands poetry. At best it rhymes or is funny; when it doesn't, we're lost. Poetry seems to be the opposite of science. There is no poetry in science; beauty, perhaps, but not poetry. The poetry of quantum science would be a nonsense poem like Jabberwocky.

In a sense, poetry has not managed to keep up with modern science. That may be one of the reasons that poetry and fiction have failed to inspire us as they once did. They have not been able to integrate the discoveries of science into the fabric of our societies in a way that satisfies us as human beings. The question of whether poetry has failed us, or we have failed poetry is still open to interpretation.*

Nobody knows for sure.

* When asked in an interview to tell us something surprising about himself, evolution writer Richard Dawkins said, "I'd love to be a poet." ("Richard Dawkins: How I Write," Noah Charney, The Daily Beast, November 27, 2013) Perhaps if he were, he could help bridge the gap between poetry and science.

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CHAPTER 30: THE FEAR FACTOR

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Franklin Delano Roosevelt*

There are two kinds of fear. The first is the kind of fear that all animals feel. Animals fear death when there is an immediate or imminent threat. Once alerted to the presence of a predator (or a forest fire, even if it is still far away), animals will feel fear until the danger has been realized or has passed. This fear is Instinct #1--survival! This is not the fear we need to be afraid of.

The second kind of fear is a direct result of human language. Animals do not fear the potential for danger tomorrow. Fear of the future is only experienced by human beings because it can only be expressed in human language. Fear of what might go wrong tomorrow is a uniquely human fear. It arouses in human beings the same kind of instinctive responses that immediate danger arouses, but the hormones that our bodies produce to deal with present-moment danger are of no value when dealing with the potential for future danger. They create a present-moment stress that is an inappropriate reaction to present-moment circumstances. My body should not produce adrenaline today because I'm getting the results of my medical tests tomorrow, but it does if I'm worried about the results!

Roosevelt correctly identified the fear of what may happen tomorrow ("future fear") as a negative fear that can be very harmful for human beings. Any fear that can be imagined can be experienced--the rain forests are disappearing; sea levels are rising; acid rain is destroying our lakes! The herd fear of bad things that might happen tomorrow has always been a driver of human societies.

Because it is impossible to know the future, the fear of the future leads us to many dark places--and a few light ones. This fear of an unknowable future explains our obsession with armies and weapons systems and the idea that we should act today to protect ourselves from tomorrow. We spend unfathomable amounts of money to protect ourselves because of this fear.

Some of it, of course, is money well spent.

* From his First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933)

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CHAPTER 31: SMOKING HOT

"I am gasoline...and matches. I turn everything to...ashes." Tim David Kelly*

Why do teenagers smoke cigarettes? Several generations ago when I was a teenager, we smoked cigarettes to look cool while acting rebellious. Smoking was "win-win." Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and James Dean taught us how a cigarette ought to hang out of the corner of your mouth. Cigarettes were sexy. The phrases "cigarette breath" and "garbage mouth" had yet to be invented. If challenged with the idea that cigarettes were addictive, we would glibly claim that we could quit anytime. What did we know? We were invincible!**

All animals hate uncertainty. Because we understand it better, human animals hate uncertainty more than any other animal. We hate to worry about tomorrow. We do whatever we can to eliminate/alleviate this fear, but there's a flip side to every coin. Human beings also crave risk. It's not so much that we like risk (although many do), but sometimes we just crave it.

The forms of risk that attract people vary greatly. Some like physical risks; others prefer social risks; others can't resist intellectual risks. Whatever your "risk pleasure," the reason we all occasionally crave risk is simple; we are programmed for it. Sex is risk wrapped in pleasure. The reason that sex is so intensely pleasurable is to convince animals to take a risk that no reasonable animal would take. Animals don't know that sex leads to reproduction, but they do know that there is an intense competition for sex. The instinct to participate in that competition is the strongest instinct that animals possess--after survival.

Of course, there's a bell-curve for risk as there is for many things. Some people crave a lot of risk; some people crave as little as possible; most are somewhere in between; but I would think that the desire for "absolutely no risk" is rare (and, perhaps, a pathology).

Our instincts run deep.

* Song "Gasoline" by Kicking Harold (Overhaulin' theme song; lyrics by Tim David Kelly; AJ is smoking hot!)

** In all fairness, we still are!

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CHAPTER 32: THE SEXIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD

"Women seem wicked when you're unwanted." The Doors ("People are Strange")

From the perspective of our instincts and ego consciousness, there are two definitions of "the sexiest woman in the world." One is a group definition; the other is an individual definition. They are both sexist--they are only based on men's opinions. Woman are entitled to their opinions, of course, but they have no effect on the outcome. Men decide who is sexiest amongst women, and women decide who is sexiest amongst men. Sex is Instinct #2, of course. Dead men don't have sex, so survival is Instinct #1. You have to survive to procreate. This is why men fight over women. They need to demonstrate their survival ability so that they can "get the girl" (just like microbes). Risk and sex are intimately intertwined.

The herd definition of the sexiest woman in the world is "any eighteen-year-old." While the precise age may vary from society to society, the essential point is that a woman in the "first flush of available sexuality" (legally that's eighteen in my home state so we'll go with eighteen here) is as sexy as any woman can possibly be. That's why we have Debutante Balls and Coming-Out Parties.* From an evolutionary perspective, it's easy to understand why they are the sexiest women in the world. These are newly available women who are going to have a bumper crop of children next year--and the men know it. It's also easy to understand why twenty-three-year-old women already feel old. They've had to witness four generations of eighteen-year-olds pass them by in the four years since they were part of the parade.

At the individual level of consciousness, the sexiest woman in the world is "any woman who wants to have sex with you really badly right now."** I can feel women cringing at this definition, but if you just think about it, I hope you'll see that it contains at least an element of truth. I think that women may also find nothing more attractive than a guy who is just aching to have sex with them (unless they don't want to have sex with him, of course). Because it is true, women like to keep a close eye on their husbands when they are around other women. Even a frumpy matron in a library can become a sex kitten if she hikes up her skirt in the stacks to reveal to the man she's chosen to seduce that she's not wearing any underwear.

* As near as I can tell, Debutante Balls are for future boy-girl pairings while Coming-Out Parties are for same-sex couples.

** This reality explains why female private detectives who try to seduce men in bars for quick anonymous sex (so that the women in their lives can feel confident that the men who have pledged fidelity to them will not stray under any drunken circumstance) are so successful. It's not the liquor; it's evolution. Male monkeys will do the exact same thing (risking a beating if they get caught) even without the alcohol to loosen them up.

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CHAPTER 33: THE ETERNAL YOUTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

There is only one "I." Somehow, instinctively, we know this. I understand that your "I" is more or less the same as mine. I know that your "I" observes a totally different person who has led a totally different life and is totally different than me, and yet I know that your "I" thinks about you the same way that my "I" thinks about me. I hope that by now we all understand why this is so. Since "I" is a limited app, it is more or less the same in everyone because it does the same things. It is the same thing in all of us.

I-consciousness never grows old. I may grow old, but "I" never grows old. The I-consciousness of a seventy-year-old feels the same as the I-consciousness of a sixteen-year-old or a ten-year-old for that matter. The body of a seventy-year-old feels very different from the body of a ten-year-old, but the mind's "I," for all its wisdom and maturity, feels the same.

It's easy to understand why "I" does not age. "I" only exists in the present moment. I-consciousness thinks about the past and the future, but it can only think about them in the present moment. Because I-consciousness only exists in the present, it doesn't age. The present never changes; it's always the present. The present is the present is the present. The present is the eternal now, and the present is where "I" live, but because "I" thinks a lot about the past and the future, it tends not to notice that it only exists in the present.*

Many people have commented on the fact that consciousness doesn't age. In a very real sense, I-consciousness is eternal youth. Perhaps, it was this aspect of consciousness that first led us to think that I-consciousness could survive death. That which does not grow old would not, in theory at least, have to die, no? As a universal app, I-consciousness does survive the death of any individual.

* That our "real self" (inner being) is ruled by a "false ego" (I-consciousness) that fails to realize that it only exists in the present ("Remember, Be Here Now!") is the message of all mysticism.

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CHAPTER 34: THE BROTHERHOOD OF ALL LIFE

When scientists discovered DNA, they realized that it was a dramatic confirmation of the old adage that "we are all brothers." DNA demonstrated conclusively that all forms of life--absolutely all life forms--are brothers. Every life form is really just another "kind" of DNA that it takes "to make a world." It's not just the Brotherhood of Man anymore; it's the Brotherhood of All Life.

In the two generations since DNA was discovered, scientists have repeatedly confirmed the interrelatedness of all life. If all the ants on earth were to disappear, all of the world's land ecosystems would collapse. There is no way of getting around the interrelatedness of all living things. While there is clearly violent conflict in the living world (Spenser's "survival of the fittest" is based on the reality that everybody eats somebody else), there is also a balance in nature that keeps that conflict in check. Foxes don't eat all the rabbits; if they did, there would be no rabbits to eat tomorrow. While all living things must give up some percentage of their members to the survival of the fittest, all living things strive to keep that percentage to an absolute minimum. Herds aid in the survival of their individual members; individual members aid in the survival of the herd.

Our own bodies are hierarchal systems of single-celled organizations that operate independently, but in harmony with each other, just like the interrelated systems of fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, plants, fungii, insects, birds, etc. function as an integrated whole in a rainforest. In our bodies, individual members of each of our internal systems die and are replaced at a phenomenal rate. Death is everywhere in our bodies and operates constantly; systems exist just to deal with all the dead bodies. That death is an integral part of the cycle of life is clearly obvious at the level of single-celled creatures, but it is equally obvious in larger structures like anthills. The conflict between "not wanting to die," which all living things possess (remember the bacterium's "recoil from danger" reflex and the sick parrot), and being willing (or unwilling in the case of sick parrots) to sacrifice yourself for the greater good of the whole goes all the way down in the living world. White blood cells compete for the opportunity to die in battle against foreign invaders by being eaten alive; their only "reward" is that they get to reproduce before dying--a theme we see repeated throughout the living world. Sex and death are a heady mixture.

In the nineteen twenties, a German philosopher named Albert Schweitzer created an ethical philosophy that was based on a respect for this will to live and reproduce that is shared by all living things. He called his philosophy Reverence for Life, and to be clear, he meant a reverence for all life. As a philosophy, it was always controversial. A reverence for all life implied a reverence for mosquitos, scorpions, rattlesnakes, malaria, smallpox, and polio. Even Christ's council to "love our enemies" can't be extended to include leprosy and pneumonia, can it? If ever there was ever a hall full of holes, it was the Albert Hall.

There is a bell-curve amongst people regarding their personal Reverence for Life. A majority of the people (the high point of the bell) feel a reverence for a lot of life but not for all life. At the bottom of the curve, we have people who feel no reverence for life on one side and people who fell a reverence for all life on the other. Schweitzer and those with psychopathic tendencies are the opposite tails of the distribution.

Still, it's hard to avoid the obvious implication of Schweitzer's philosophy, which is that we ought to show as much reverence for as much life as possible. Isn't this how it ultimately works out in nature (the balance of nature again)? Don't we all teach our children some form of this, shall we call it, practical Reverence for Life philosophy?

Scientists have discovered that the majority of the bacteria that live in and on our bodies are important to our proper functioning so that we should rethink our "ick" response to the word "germs." Almost all of the germs in our bodies are "good germs"--important germs. Even a "bad germ" like pneumonia will lie harmlessly dormant in our bodies all of our lives so that when we get sick, it can proliferate and kill us to remove the danger that we might pose for the herd. These pneumonia germs act like a Gestapo Center for Disease Control. They chose the final solution to save the herd--kill the sick parrot!

Reverence for Life runs counter to the traditional view that human life is superior and that all other life is to used by humans as we see fit. We have come to suspect that this view may contain the seeds of our own destruction as we now understand that humanity is the cause of one of the greatest mass extinctions of species in earth's historys the mass extinction of species that it has led to. century, that this view contains the seeds of our own destruction as . A legal system based on the Reverence for Life might be just what we need to save ourselves from ourselves. The modern movement to have farm animals treated more humanely is certainly a good sign.

I once heard a story (I have no idea if it is true or not) about Winston Churchill who was attending a secret, high-level meeting to plan the invasion of Normandy. At one point during the meeting, Churchill noticed a spider on the table. He used his notepad to scoop up the spider and then gave the notepad to an aid with instructions to take the spider outside and set it safely free. I would imagine that many might find it odd that Churchill would concern himself with the fate of a spider while planning an invasion in which thousands of Allied lives would be lost, but from a personal perspective, I didn't find it odd at all.

My life-changing event regarding the world of bugs occurred when I was about eight years old. A neighborhood kid told me that if I wanted to see something really amazing that we should put some salt on a snail. I took the lure--who doesn't want to see something really amazing? I supplied the salt and did the shaking, but when I discovered what salt actually did to a snail, I felt a revulsion at my own behavior that has stuck with me to this day. I do what I can to not disturb insects and will go out of my way to avoid harming one (while understanding that I step on ants unwittingly all the time). If I do step on a bug, I apologize to it; it wasn't my intention. Without realizing it, I had become a lifelong member of the group that inhabits the hole-filled Albert Hall.*

Like Justice (with a capital J), Reverence for Life can be thought of as an ideal that can never be reached but that should always be strived for. This middle path involves a degree of capitulation to the average person's reverence for some life--where the debate is over "which some." We might decide to save lab chimps from science experiments, but not lab mice. At minimum, that would be moving in the right direction.

* We all appreciate the Beatles for counting the holes without telling us how many there were. That information would surely have been disheartening.

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APPENDIX

CHAPTER 35: THE CAMBRIDGE DECLARATION ON CONSCIOUSNESS

(The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was written by Phillip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch. The Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 12, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, by Low, Edelman and Koch. The Declaration was signed by the conference participants that very evening in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfor Room of the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK. The signing ceremony was featured on the CBS program 60 Minutes.)

On this day of July 12, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals. While comparative research on this topic is naturally hampered by the inability of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about their internal states, the following observations can be stated unequivocally:

The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.

The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important to generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviors in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems in humans can generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and non-human animals' neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision-making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).

Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns simiar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.

In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in non-human animals with compounds known to affect conscious behavior in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behavior in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and non-human animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provides evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.

We declare the following: "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates."

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THE END

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AUTHOR'S PHOTO

To maintain his anonymity, Nobody! likes to pretend that he's Steve Martin ("to throw the paparazzi off the scent"). To be clear, Nobody! is NOT Steve Martin.

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SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!

"We think Nobody! should make a movie!" Nobody at the American Institute of Corn Porn ("Pornography made entirely from corn--for when the ethanol subsidies end! Think creamed corn--and COBS!")

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