17 | Consciousness, Rocks, and Ways of Seeing

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

In Episode 16 I concluded, after a survey of different ways to define consciousness and the self, that there is no consensus about a definition. As such, I decided to come to this topic descriptively, through the lenses of four different dimensions, rather than by trying to establish a definition of my own. My descriptions draw from multiple definitions, because it seemed to me that each attempt to define consciousness was paying attention to some important aspects but perhaps excluding others.

The main distinguishing factor in my descriptions of One-, Two-, and Three-Dimensional Consciousness is awareness: whether a “subject” simply experiences events and stimuli (One-Dimensional), or is aware of experiencing them (Two-Dimensional), or is aware of being aware (Three-Dimensional). 

Keep in mind that a subject might be human, animal, plant, rock, etc. I am using the term “subject” to refer to any “recipient” of an action or stimuli.

And that fourth type, what I called Multi-Dimensional Consciousness? In this case, I am imagining a subject which experiences what happens, is aware of experiencing it, is aware of being aware, and in addition to everything described in the other three types of consciousness, is aware of experiencing what others experience, perhaps even aware of what everything experiences: all things, people, sentient, beings, the entire cosmos, perhaps all universes if there are plural.

I am leaving room for the possibility of dimensions of consciousness and selfhood that are beyond the human level, or at least beyond the individual human level. I have not yet defined this dimension, words for which often include the divine, the subconscious, collective consciousness, cosmic consciousness, etc. That raises lots of other questions of course: if there is a multi-dimensional consciousness, is that something only one being experiences or possesses (ie, a singular divine being, God)? Is it something other beings have to a greater or lesser degree as well? Can it be cultivated? I need to hold those thoughts for now.

 

Imagine It This Way…

Let me try to bring this into focus through a more experiential, imaginative way of describing what I am getting at, in the form of questions. 

Does water in some way experience the cold that freezes it into glacial ice? If so, how?

Does a rock experience the crush of that glacier, grinding it into soil? How?

Does a sub-atomic particle within the soil that was the rock experience the effects of the environment the rock is in? How?

Does the soil from that rock experience the rain when it soaks in deep? How?

Does a worm experience something in and from the soil? How?

Does an ant crawling on top experience the soil as it carries food to its hole? How?

Does a leaf from a tree growing in that soil experience a gentle wind? How?

Does a bird in the branches of the tree, which perhaps ate the worm, and feels the gentle wind, experience them? How?

There is a cat watching the bird in the tree. What is that experience like for the cat?

There is a human who experiences petting and holding the cat in their lap, as it looks out the window at the bird in the tree. What is that experience like?

Suppose for a moment there is a consciousness other than the human holding the cat, aware of all the experiences and cognitive functions of all the other things and beings listed. In what way is that being aware? Aware in “third person” of what the others are experiencing? Or aware in first person, thus experiencing them subjectively? What is that experience like?

I have presented my descriptions of the four dimensions of consciousness now in two different ways. At about this point in an Episode I often pause to include a poem or a song. I am tempted! But this time I will hold the creative expressions until near the end. Stay tuned for that!

In the rest of this Episode I will begin from exploring One-Dimensional Consciousness in which subjects experience stimuli or actions from others or from the environment, but so far as we know, are not aware of that. 

 

An Approach?

What types of things or objects or beings or elements of the cosmos would this include? And how might I go about deciding that?  

There are two different challenges in settling on an approach.

The first is that there is no way for me to actually know what someone or something else is aware of, if indeed they are aware at all. That is as true of a rock as it is of someone in a coma. There may be modes of awareness, instruments of awareness other than what we think we know (ie., other than brains and neural activity for example).

The second challenge is that I can never touch the surface much less probe the depths of the many fields of human inquiry, and experience, and thought, and study, and belief that could offer wisdom for this exploration: philosophy, psychology, religion, linguistics, anthropology, physics, chemistry, biology, botany, zoology, geology, and so on almost ad infinitum.

I can’t know from the inside what or who is aware of what, and I can’t probe all of the possible fields of inquiry that might help me come to conclusions. What to do?

My plan is to just begin, even if I am somewhat arbitrary in choosing a starting point. Then I will try to follow the questions where they might lead and seek the answers in the various disciplines as those present themselves. It’s an imperfect plan and depends a good deal on intuition to surface the questions, decide on the fields of inquiry, and determine what I think an answer might be. 

 

The Question Inside the Question

Answer to what? I see a question inside the question, a question that pre-dates the way I lay out the four dimensions of consciousness, and it is this:

What does it mean for a thing, or person, or being to “experience” existing?

Two comments right away.

First, about the word, “experience.”  Let’s take rocks as a case study. Does a rock experience anything? It depends upon what we mean when we use the term “experience.”

I am employing the term here in a strict sense: there is a cause, and an effect, and the effect happens to the rock. That effect is what I am referring to as “experience.” So, the rock in this sense does experience the impact of the glacier, rather brutally I might add. 

That does not mean that I am assuming the rock has a psychological or sensory experience of being crushed, both of which would probably indicate Two-Dimensional consciousness in my model.

That leads me to my second comment which is to repeat the point made above: we can’t experience what is inside the experience of another subject. This is even true when we think of the experiences of other humans. Although we can imagine, and empathize with, what another human is experiencing, we don’t really know. So, how much more is this the case when we consider what we presume to be inanimate objects. I have no idea what a rock’s experience really is.

But isn’t this all absurd, even to ask about rocks being aware of their experiences? I assume most listeners will agree with something like this: “rocks don’t experience anything because they don’t have brains, nerves, emotions, ears, or any other instrument or faculty that enables experience.” 

But notice how riddled this statement is with assumptions that determine the conclusion. 

A statement like what I just quoted is banking on the truth of an assumption: that we know all the “instruments and faculties” that enable experience.  

But do we actually know? 

 

Rocks and Plants

To try to explore this, for the rest of the Episode, I am going to ask us to think more about rocks, and about plants.

 

Rocks

I have what I would call an imaginative way of seeing the world and in that fertile imagination of mine rocks take on personality. I have feelings for rock formations. I imagine them having personalities in some way. I think of them as storing memories and carrying imprints from their centuries of existence. 

At the same time, parts of my brain tell me that while this is all fine as imagination, it is not scientifically possible. I assume that most of my listeners will share a similar assumption.

I recently came across an article from 2023 in The Guardian in which people were invited to respond to the question, “are rocks conscious.” Here are a few of the responses from the readers.

“I’ve just asked a rock (ie., if it was conscious). It showed no sign of either understanding the question or attempting a reply. So, no, I don’t think rocks are sentient.”

 

Another:

“I just asked my two year old grandson. I didn’t get a response.” 

A humorous opening I admit, but respondents got more serious too.

“Academic philosophers have of late been exploring an alternative approach…panpsychism. Instead of explaining consciousness in terms of matter, we account for the emergence of matter by postulating very simple forms of consciousness at the base of reality. This doesn’t entail that rocks are conscious, but it does mean that consciousness exists beyond the realm of biology.” 

This person has identified a major fault line in philosophical consideration of our question, namely, is consciousness a result of something in the material world (ie, chemically determined brain functions) or vice versa? Moving to more comments:

“Short answer is to change the word “conscious” to “aware”. Only objects that are alive, and have a metabolism, can be aware. Machines can register a sound and remember it, but they are not aware. They simulate consciousness but don’t possess it.”

Note how this conclusion presumes that there are only certain means of being conscious (having a metabolism), and also presumes a definition of what I have called Two-Dimensional consciousness (having awareness). 

“As far as anybody knows, neuronal activity is required for experience. When rocks grow neurons, perhaps they will be conscious.” 

Another assumption based conclusion, though at least it had the humility to begin with the caveat, “so far as anybody knows.”

I found this next one fascinating. From a geologist: 

“As a geologist, no, rocks are not conscious. They are not aware of their being, nor do they make conscious decisions.”

But this geologist went on to write:

“But also as a geologist, who has spent a long time working on granites…there is something special about them. The granites define a certain type of landscape and therefore character of place. They come with their myths and legends and are said to whistle different ways in certain weathers. Generations of artists and writers have been inspired by the granites…Could rocks be conscious? Maybe.”

The geologist represents for me a person trying to balance ways of knowing, the scientific and the imaginative and intuitive. I also think they were very close to describing what I called entanglement in the Episodes exploring the nature of the cosmos. 

Should we try to balance the two ways of knowing (or more)? Our decisions about whether imagination belongs in a scientific or philosophical discussion will also be based on the sorts of assumptions, in this case about whether certain types of cognition, and certain ways of knowing, are superior to others. That topic is brimming with questions about what we assume truth to be, and what we assume about how to know the truth. 

More from the article:

“One could argue that rocks are conscious. That even though they don’t have a brain or nerves they are somehow aware. To do this we can compare rocks to a couple of things. Plants don’t have a brain like animals, yet it has come to light recently that their root system is akin to a brain…Another thing we can compare rocks to are slime molds. Slime molds can solve mazes and learn despite being single-celled and without a brain.” 

That comment came from questioning whether we know all the different modes of being conscious, or all the different physical conditions necessary for it to exist. If a root system can function like a brain, what else might function like a brain?

Back to the rock: if it is ground up by a glacier or thrown through a window by a young child it will in some way “experience” that. But is that sufficient to say it is conscious? 

In my description of One-Dimensional consciousness the criteria is simply that something experiences something. And my definition of experience is that something happens to something, in this case, a rock gets crushed or thrown. In that way, yes, a rock is conscious. By that definition, of course, everything in the universe is conscious!

For me the more interesting questions will emerge when we turn to Two-, Three-, and Multi-Dimensional consciousness.

Might rocks have Two-Dimensional consciousness, might they be aware of experiencing the impact with the glass when a child throws them through a window? My education and what I think of as common sense tells me no. But some theories in physics and philosophy, and some religious ways of seeing the world tell me that I can’t rule it out without further digging.

Leaving rocks for the moment, I turn to plants. 

 

Plants

Plants are an interesting case, because while they lack aspects of what some assume are necessary for consciousness (brains for example), they exhibit “behaviors” we associate with conscious beings.

Plants can sense changes in their environment and respond. They curl their leaves when we touch them or when they trap an insect or other prey.

Plants seem to make decisions about how fast to grow and in which direction. 

Plants seem to learn and adapt. Some plants will stop curling their leaves after learning by experience that a drop of water isn't a threat. 

Plants seem to monitor a variety of changes in order to anticipate what may happen, not just respond to what is happening or has happened.  

Plants use electrical signals to process information, and then communicate to other plants. 

Plants behave as if they possess something like what I have defined as Two-Dimensional consciousness.

That is what I might call the clinical evidence or data says to me. But again, I can’t get inside of a plant to experience what it experiences or to be aware of what it might be aware of.

I end up agnostic about both rocks and plants, then. For now, at least.

 

Where To Next?

As I have done in prior Episodes, to assess the questions I have been looking at relative to rocks and plants, and then other aspects of consciousness, I need to decide how I will incorporate philosophy, physics, and religious heritages into the inquiry.

I can’t unfold all that in this Episode, of course, but here are some introductory thoughts.

 

Philosophy:

Some philosophers believe that rocks and other inanimate objects have some degree of consciousness, while others argue that they do not. For example a theory known as panpsychism has garnered a lot of attention, both in support and in critique. Panpsychism is the idea that all things in the universe have some degree of consciousness. Those in support cite quantum theories, critics argue the theory is irrational and unscientific. 

 

Physics:

Some physicists say that photons exhibit behaviors that they deem indicative of consciousness. When photons are fired at background with or without an observer, photons seem to be able to tell whether they’re being observed. 

 

Religious ways of seeing:

In addition to my prior practice of drawing in insights from several of the so called world religions, in these Episodes I want to make mention of a heritage I have not included previously: the ancient and almost universal way of seeing the world as “animated” by spirits, and thus commonly referred to as animism. 

There are many different expressions of animism, but they share in common the belief that the natural world is populated by intelligent spirits, and that these inhabit or indwell physical objects like plants and rocks and trees, and also animals, and fish, etc. 

The question of whether, and in what way, the world we inhabit may be conscious in some way is a question that philosophy, physics, the so-called major world religions, and the spiritual heritages of animism (and polytheism as well) have all wrestled with, developed theories about, differ over, and at some points come to similar conclusions about. 

Whether they differ or agree, they are all trying to explain the world we live in, account for our experiences of it, and understand what it all means. They are all, as it were, gathered around the same basic reality and trying to describe it from their respective experiences and assumptions.

 

Drawing to a Transition (Not a Conclusion!)

In the coming Episodes I will explore more fully how those three fields of knowledge and experience might speak to the questions of consciousness, and the self. 

As part of transitioning towards the next stage of exploration, I will conclude this Episode with two creative offerings, a song and a poem. I have included them in prior Episodes. 

I will first present the song, called Shimmer (and is available to stream if you want to hear it again, search for Kevin Caldwell and Shimmer). 

Here it is…

 

Shimmer

There are auras in the attics 

There are spirits in the dawn 

Something’s living out in the black holes

The tongues of angels are singing in our songs

There’s a glowing inside the dry leaves 

A steady breathing underground 

There is laughter in the stones of mountains 

Eyes of light and fire are watching all around 

 

I shiver with a longing 

I’m shaking with a hunger 

I shimmer in the silence 

Of the living flaming temple carved deep inside me

Beyond the shape of cats in my windowsill

Beyond the barrow lands and tombstone hills 

I see a crimson new day fog sent here to find ME

 

I have been fired in a furnace 

Tempered by cold and burn

Hammered out on an anvil 

My leathered skin a map of every road I’ve traveled 

I’m stacks of stone in quarries mined

Some treasured and others tossed aside 

Time is grinding every treasure down to gravel 

 

There are auras in the attics 

There are spirits in the dawn 

Something’s living out in the black holes

The tongues of angels are singing in our songs

There’s a glowing inside the dry leaves 

A steady breathing underground 

There is laughter in the stones of mountains 

Eyes of light and fire are watching all around 

 

Sunlight in the shadows 

Moonbeams in the dawn 

I see morning’s giddy madness 

All dressed in flame and dancing in wild abandon 

I grab my hat and join the line

Move my heavy feet to keep the time 

With the rhythm inside us all, down in deep canyons 

 

There are auras in the attics 

There are spirits in the dawn 

Something’s living out in the black holes

The tongues of angels are singing in our songs

There’s a glowing inside the dry leaves 

A steady breathing underground 

There is laughter in the stones of mountains 

Eyes of light and fire are watching all around 

 

Watch as we shimmer in all that shimmers

In the shimmering we all shimmer

All is shimmering and we shimmer 

In the shimmering we are shimmering

We shimmer 

We shimmer…

  

If everything shimmers, what is it that shimmers through it all, through us? Is it the subatomic activity of physics? Some sort of “energy”? Is it conscious? The multiple spirits of animism? The Divine? Those are all questions we will return to. 

Now for the poem. It was written as a way to try to express artistically how quantum physics describes the cosmos (at least some versions of quantum theory). 

It is titled, Rippling Skies.

 

Rippling Skies

I turn my eyes.

 

The sky ripples

Canopy of lights glowing

Red, growing,

Slowing, dying

Already dead

Seeds in the cinders of stars

Worlds of worlds in an ember,

Every pregnant ash

A fullness of empty vastness

A point of ripening intensity

Density of verdant heat, explosive power

 

Every burst births a cycle

Expanding despanding unspanding respanding expanding again…

Universes begetting universes

 

“Beside, within, before, after”

Are the words that we agree to use.

 

As if we know!

 

Words are flotsam floating atop inscrutable unfathomable seas 

Teeming with creatures 

Frolicking with gleeful disregard for the laws 

Of our pragmatic reassuring necessary grammar

 

But really, real-ly?

 

Every world is a where with no there,

              And a there with no where.

In a when with no then,

              A then with no when.

 

We live as we live 

Because we must live 

As if we live in place and time,

With these people, 

And plants, and pets, and problems

 

As if all of this in fact works the way it seems to work,

The way we need it to work, 

Need to believe it works

In order to set foot outside a door on a winter morning

Or to see and name in wonder a setting sun.

 

Because this is the only way I can live 

As I live as this I who lives this way.

 

But really, real-ly?

 

I carry in myself and am myself carried by:

Universes begetting universes

Expanding despanding unspanding respanding expanding again…

Every burst birthing a cycle 

A density of verdant heat, explosive power

A point of ripening intensity

A fullness of empty vastness

Every pregnant ash

Worlds of worlds in an ember,

 

Seeds in the cinders of stars

Already dead

Slowing, dying

Red, growing,

 

A canopy of lights glowing

In the rippling sky.

I turn my eyes.

 

More Mystery to Come

Whether we live in a cosmos that is conscious or not, the world and everything in it is mysterious, and so are we.

In the next Episodes I will come back to philosophy and physics and religion and to the dimensions of consciousness I have laid out. To be honest though I am not sure how yet! Between now and then I assume the steps to explore these mysteries will get clearer, though the mystery itself will just get more mysterious if prior Episodes are any indication! 

Until next time…