Do you know what kind of animal you are? it is quite important to know. if you call yourself a humanist, for example, don’t you need some idea of what a human being is so that you can make sure that your behavior is consistent with your ethics? if you think humans are a bit shorter than angels, as the Judeo-Christian tradition says, shouldn’t you know how much shorter, so you can be appropriately aspirational but not frustrated or cocky?
And then there is the problem of personal identity. when you say “I love you” or “I’m scared”, how sure are you of handling that powerful and mysterious pronoun? Are you as sure as modern neuroscientists that “you” are just the chemical events that happen in your brain? Are you satisfied with that explanation?
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I guess if you were asked what “you” are, part of your answer would involve saying that you’re human. so back to the first problem.
All these questions worried me a lot. I thought the best way to approach them was to take a journey through human history, stopping and diving, using a sort of archaeological method of acting, into three pivotal ages: ages when seismic shifts in human self-understanding occurred. these were the Upper Paleolithic (the vast majority of our history: we are still truly hunter-gatherers, even if we wear a suit and sit slumped in front of a laptop), the Neolithic (when we caged the natural world and ourselves), and enlightenment (when the universe, once seen as a hotbed of consciousness, was declared to be just a machine).
I wrote a book about this trip. It’s called being human. Now I’m a little less dizzy than I was about saying “I love you.” Although many mysteries have been deepened and multiplied, I think I have an idea of the kind of animal you are and I am.
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These are some of the books I took along the way. some were nice; something infuriating.
1. the deal with the stuff by iain mcgilchrist a huge book and a huge achievement. a continuation of the epic of mcgilchrist, the teacher and his emissary, which explored the way in which our perception of the world and of ourselves is influenced by, or is, the conversation or confrontation between the two cerebral hemispheres. matter with things is a devastating assault on the idea that there is only matter (whatever it is) and that consciousness can arise from a conglomerate of unconscious units.
2. Scatterlings by Martin Shaw Very few nature books are wild, and very few are worthy of their subject matter. This is. it is a story about being claimed by a place, and about how we are dying because (being stories ourselves) we need good stories as we need clean air, and yet we are only offered the tawdry stories of material reductionism and free market – stories that literally demean us. Shaw knows how stories seep from the ground. the earth, like everything else, has agency, and wants us to audition for roles in its ever-evolving stories. what is a prosperous human being? For Shaw, as for Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, it is something that a human body has, that defines its position by reference to everything else in the world rather than by reference to itself, and that has a good deal to do with it. local history.
3. the origin of consciousness in the collapse of the bicameral mind by julian jaynes often parodied, seldom read, jaynes argues that (for example) the voices of the gods in the heads of homeric heroes were really the voices of a compartment of the mind, heard by another, and that true modern consciousness arose when the wall between those compartments dissolved. Although there is too much dissonance with the archaeological record to convince me, it is a fascinating thesis, supported by a dizzying array of references, and Jaynes is a brave and intrepid writer.
4. The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms The market is awash with books expressing gleeful optimism that neuroscience is about to tell us what consciousness is, why it is there, and how it is generated. Solms is with the mainstream materialist cohort in thinking that consciousness is a function of brain activity. I would prefer to say that brains receive, process, and perhaps transmit consciousness. but solms book stands out from the pack, marked by appropriate wonder and doubt.
5. modern man in search of a soul by carl jung our consciousness is relatively uninteresting and insignificant compared to our unconscious. most of what “I” really am and what “I” really do wells up from far below the surface. Jung is one of the great explorers of the dark but sovereign subconscious. you will meet the archetypes of him if you dream diligently, fast enough or if you sit in a winter forest and look into the distance.
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6. nine-headed dragon river by peter matthiessenmatthiessen, better known as the snow leopard, was an advanced zen practitioner. this book contains some of his meditation journals. they are full of dizzying worked examples, showing how to see how your own mind works.
7. conscience: a brief introduction by susan blackmore the most accessible overview of the subject, vigorously written. she thinks my views are gullible and atavistic, and she says so splendidly and convincingly. she reflects on her question: “what were you aware of a moment ago?”.
8. breaking convention: essays on psychedelic consciousness one of a set of proceedings from a biennial conference focusing on the academic study of psychedelics and related topics such as shamanism and out-of-body and near-death experiences. tectonic scientific progress is made by looking at outliers: the evidence that doesn’t fit your comforting preconceptions. these studies do that.
9. beyond the words of carl safinamoving accounts of the reasons to suppose that various non-humans, including killer whales, wolves and elephants, have emotions and a type of consciousness similar to ours. if they are conscious, why shouldn’t the stones be too?
10. the gates of perception by aldous huxley based on his experiences taking the hallucinogen mescaline. Huxley concluded that the brain acted like a throttling valve, slowing the input into our brains to a manageable trickle. we may be drawing conclusions about the universe based on a small fraction of the available information. we could be radically misunderstanding it. It has recently been shown that human neural networks can process 11 dimensions. we normally use only four. we are prepared for much, much more reality than we think.
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being human by charles foster is published by profile in the uk and metropolitan in the us. to support the guardian and the observer purchase a copy at guardianbookshop.com. shipping charges may apply.
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