Through empty blue water like space, you come down onto a dive site in the Raja Ampat archipelago. Below an expanse of open water, “Blue Magic” is a huge mound, flat like a mesa, rising from the seabed.
The top of the reef, oval-shaped and slightly hunched, looks about seventy yards long or so, with steep sides falling away. Approaching, you can see the jumbled living mesa, but not the terrain below and around it. It is a “seamount”—a reef that comes up from the ocean floor and sits there like a world.
A couple of years after that dive, I swam down onto another seamount, Roma, near the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Roma has barrel sponges that look like the bases of ancient stone columns, with ornate, thickly grooved sides. On that dive, I remembered Blue Magic and had a sense, silently in my mind, of why these sites seem significant. It is that world-like character. You come in and the seamount seems to rise from nothing. But you know it is supported from below, and its life is sustained and suspended in energy flows.
The reef is a collection of countless animals, bodies building on bodies. A depression in a corner has an anemone with anemone fish. A little over from there is a cleaning station, where a nervous, dark-blue sickle-tailed fish is having its skin cleaned of unwanted life by a smaller fish while another large fish waits. Coral is stacked in plates and folds or grows in branches like a tree. The animals are barrels and filaments and stars, each pursuing its projects, also completely tangled and connected, each touching neighbors, who touch others.
These places summarize some features of the Earth as a system: the seamount is isolated spatially, but embedded in flows of many kinds—light, nutrients, oxygen. It is not a single organism, but is made largely out of interconnected life. Collaborations and conflicts are jumbled together, with organisms dependent on others they can’t see, but link to in long chains and webs.
At Blue Magic, an oceanic manta came in. These rays can be thirty feet long. I don’t know how big this one was—smaller, certainly, but still huge, and an impossibly graceful animal, a wing extended in the sea. Its movement was effortless, weightless, gliding in like an idea, a passing thought.
Though massive as an animal, the manta seemed to have been created from quickly made lines. Its body’s markings were white on a near-black gray, with rough edges, very much as if the manta had been drawn with charcoal on coarse-grained paper. I am an atheist; I think that religion is a mistake. But if I wasn’t, I’d think this was God sketching in charcoal.
Life, pockets of order and the control of energy, appeared early on Earth. Life exists within flows, in traffic, using resources and changing its environment. Life includes reproduction, along with the metabolic control of processes. With reproduction comes recurrence and multiplication: a few give rise to many. With multiplication, variation, and the inheritance of traits comes a Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection. This sets in place a process, the first of several, in which innovations can be retained, and spread, because of their beneficial effects.
Several paths lead out from there. Two paths, interlocking, mattered especially to this book. In one of them, some bacterial cells invent a form of photosynthesis that establishes a flow of oxygen gas into the atmosphere. These cells are taken up as symbionts in algae, and their descendants become part of the cells of land plants. Green plants spread and carpet the Earth with solar panels.
These organisms, by filling the atmosphere with oxygen, also make a different kind of life possible. That path starts with another group of single-celled creatures, who came to live in colonies, then in more integrated groups, becoming animals. A controllable internal skeleton, used in single-celled protists to change body shape and act, becomes the basis of muscle, and hence of action on a multicellular scale.
Initially, this part of the tree of life shows just glimmers of the active cohesion of animals; the path starts with frond-bearing creatures fixed to the seafloor, or creeping slowly along it, while film-bodied beings hover above. Then, with the aid of growing levels of oxygen, this cluster of evolutionary experiments runs rampant, giving rise to the rest of animal life, including its transformative power.
Animal action is controlled by nervous systems—not all animals have them, but the exceptions are very few. Nervous systems in some groups become elaborate, and the scope of action grows. As bodies, nervous systems, and senses become more sophisticated, actions become more targeted and have new kinds of effects. Learning enables past successes to shape future behavior. Useful habits can later be augmented, and partially replaced, by plans based on inner models. Animal culture arises, and takes on a special role in a small group of primates who make a home on African grasslands. They develop language and deliberation. Plans are directed on mere possibilities, represented and discussed. Their technologies change the reach of animal action.
All this is part of an account of the place of mind in the natural world. Minds are private, the home of perspectives and points of view, inner ramblings and quirks. But minds evolved in a common space, and they affect that common space, our common world. Our minds inhabit an ecology of action, a scene where actions arising from many different perspectives converge and play out.
How likely or unlikely was this to happen? I’ve covered a few questions of that kind explicitly, and other answers are suggested by things learned along the way. It is striking that life appeared quite early on Earth. This suggests that life might arise readily when conditions are right. While some form of life may not be too hard to get, finding a form of photosynthesis that fills the atmosphere with oxygen, or anything that could play a similar role, might be a much rarer step, one that life on other planets may not hit on. As things went, life on Earth changed just about everything, but some of the scientists whose work I used in chapter 2 might say that even after life was established, that cascade of further changes was far from inevitable. It needed something like our water-splitting, oxygen-releasing form of photosynthesis. This enabled the Earth to generate many more inhabitants, in more environments, and it made the animal way of living possible.
I discussed all this with the biologist Andrew Barron, after these ideas were in place in the book, and his reply was that I was being “oxygenist”—coining this term to refer to an unreasonable chauvinism. Who knows how things might go elsewhere, or might have gone here? Maybe there’s another path by which life could become planet-changing, using different chemical pathways. Many of the other biologists whose work I’ve used here would probably plead guilty to oxygenism.
If the animal way of life can become established, with oxygen or without it, we might then expect it to explore all sorts of paths. Simple forms of culture, like simple forms of life, might be quite accessible. Although this is uncertain, there’s a good chance that learning by tracking the good and bad consequences of one’s actions evolved several times, independently, in different groups of animals. This is clearly true of learning by imitation, given that bees, as well as birds and mammals, can do it. Once nervous systems are in place, they can discover a range of ways for actions, and their beneficial consequences, to be retained and spread. It’s harder to know whether a human-like path, with language, society, and technology, would be likely to arise if the experiment was run again, though I suspect that it would.
Likely or not, it happened with us. We have emerged from the thicket of animal evolution with unusual powers, with reflection, debate, and foresight, and also with unusual efficacy in our actions. We have these powers, and can explicitly ask: How should we use them?
The scope of human influence over other animals has gradually become enormous. The majority of mammal and bird life on Earth is either livestock we control, or is us—humans themselves make up a large fraction of vertebrate life on land. We have squeezed out much of wild nature. In the last part of this book I argued for habitat preservation, rewilding, an end to cruel factory farming, and a massive reduction in the use of animals in experiments.
Especially in the discussions of wild nature and why we might protect it, I found myself moving away from familiar and worked-out options in ethical theory. For example, the goal of prevention of suffering might encourage us not to protect wild nature. In many settings, reducing suffering is a good goal, but in this case it should be balanced against other goals. I criticized appeals to natural rights, such as a right to live free of interference. I tried instead to work out how we might act if we are guided by an appreciation for the vast creative engine that got us here. This includes not just other animals, the present outcomes of the many paths of animal evolution, but the whole ecologies in which life took and continues to take new forms.
The motivation I offer for protecting wild nature can look a bit like an aesthetic matter, but it’s not that we are standing back and noting some object’s beauty or impressiveness, then deciding to protect it for that reason. It’s not that we want to keep wild nature around just so that we can appreciate it. I am not sure what the best words are for what I have in mind, but gratitude and a sense of kinship have a role here, and these are quite different from an aesthetic interest. It’s more a matter of identifying with a process than appreciating it as an onlooker. I don’t deny the aesthetic side, and can imagine an alternative world in which we, reflecting together, look back on what we arose from and find it gross or horrible. That would raise new questions. We might then decide to cut ourselves loose, as much as we can. But our actual situation is not like that.
A picture of our place—in evolution, in the history of the Earth—does not tell us what to do. It can point to actions, to commitments we might make, but all of this is very much a choice. We can take on the project of protecting wild nature, but we could also head in a different direction, looking for a future Earth that might be more benign in some ways, but also impoverished. The future I worry most about is not so much one in which people actively try to “civilize” the Earth, but one in which we don’t make much effort to protect natural ecosystems because we don’t see much reason to look after what might be lost. We need positive reasons to resist those tendencies, to act against them. In this book I’ve tried to make the outlines of these choices clearer, and tried to motivate, as a task we might embrace, the protection and restoration of wild nature.
Given all that’s gone before, there’s one more topic that it makes sense to look at. This is the span of our individual lives, in space and time.
Our human lives have a fair degree of definiteness to their boundaries. Where each of our bodies begins and ends in space is pretty clear (give or take the bacterial colonies inside our guts—those might be in some ways part of us and in other ways distinct). The same is true of our beginnings and endings in time. Each of us begins from a fertilized egg. The new individual grows up and develops, while keeping a fairly constant form, before growing older and dying.
Other organisms are less definite in their beginnings and ends. When a bacterial cell divides, is the result two daughters and the death of the parent, or does the parent live on in one of them? If so, which one? A tree might send out a root that initiates a new stem, and if the root breaks, the two trees are entirely separate. Is that something like a birth? And where are the spatial boundaries of “the” tree while the two stems are still attached?
For life to continue, there needs to be a way of preventing metabolic processes from diffusing away into the surrounding chaos. Compartments and borders of some kind are necessary. This is the role of cells. But when many cells are working together, there’s no need for these larger units to be always neatly marked off from one another. In chapter 2, I talked about the “circus of forms” that evolution has produced at this multicellular level: clusters of coral polyps with algae inside them, colonies of cyanobacteria, symbiotic associations (ant and acacia) that can be loose or tight. Living things often have vague boundaries, and this is another reason why it’s common to think about ecological systems using biomass rather than counts of individual organisms; in a lot of cases, it’s not at all clear how the count of organisms would go. This applies to plants, corals, and many others.
Now let’s turn to the mind. It seems, at least, that our minds also have pretty definite boundaries, tied to those of our bodies. If there is no afterlife, then when I die, that will be the end of my mind. Each of our minds is, it seems, “owned” by an individual person, and private to that person in many respects. This relationship might have some exceptions and qualifications. In chapter 6 we looked at the synchronization of brain activity across individuals. There I discussed some radical possibilities, including a literal merging of minds, but even those views would allow that one person’s mind is mostly pretty distinct from another’s. In rare and fascinating cases, physically conjoined twins seem to have a partial unity, or at least very unusual contact, across their two minds. “Split-brain” patients are another variant.
All these phenomena shake up our expectations in a useful way. And they lead to a question about how things might have been, or how they might be elsewhere. Could the mind, as a feature of life on Earth or another planet, have evolved in a massively spread-out and extended way, merging and blurring rather than being tightly associated with distinct individual bodies and forming individual selves? Is it an evolutionary accident that matters are the way they are here? I want to suggest that it’s not much of an accident. The kind of individuality present in animal lives like ours has connections to the evolution of the mind, including felt experience, and the messages here relate to our boundaries in both space and time.
Here is a broad distinction between kinds of living things at the multicellular scale. I’ll call it the distinction between modular and unitary kinds of life. These are standard terms in biology, though I am broadening them a little.
Modular organisms include oak trees, corals, fungi, and marine animals such as bryozoans that form colonies that look like moss or spaghetti. Unitary organisms include ourselves, ants, and octopuses. Colonies of bacteria, if we think of them as units, are also modular in the sense I have in mind. In all these modular cases, there’s a collection of small repeated units that work together to some extent, and the details of how they are organized are flexible—it doesn’t matter much whether an oak tree has ten branches or twenty, or how the spaghetti of a bryozoan colony is arranged. In a unitary organism, like us, the details matter more. People differ a lot, but they can’t stay alive unless they have the same basic physical organization, with a heart connected to other organs in a certain way, and so on. As a unitary organism grows, its parts get bigger while keeping their general patterning. As a modular organism grows, it makes more copies of the small units (“modules”) that comprise it.
It’s the modular organisms that have vague boundaries, that merge into one another, that raise problems about whether we have one of them or many of them. Unitary organisms, like us, are usually easier to count.
These two kinds of life also behave differently. Modular animals can’t move well, and there are no modular animals on land. A modular animal is a bit like a bee colony in which the bees are all stuck together, and each bee buds off new bees. It would be hard for such a being to fly, though perhaps it might walk. Unitary animals can act as wholes, if it makes sense to do so. They are more centralized in their organization, though with plenty of eccentricities and partial departures from this principle. (An octopus, again, is a unitary organism.)
Action is more elaborate in unitary organisms, and their bodies, as wholes, repeat over generations. When the form of an animal body is repeated in this way, it allows the steady evolution of behavior on that recurring platform. All this implies that complex behavior and nervous systems go with the unitary body organization. Given the link between those features and felt experience, it’s no accident that felt experience is found in our kind of body. I don’t mean just that our kind of felt experience goes with our kind of body, but that experience itself, given that minds are controllers of action, goes with our kind of body. Minds came to exist to enable action in animals with bodies of roughly our kind—unitary, well-bounded bodies.
That first set of ideas was about our shape and boundaries in space. There’s also a link between this line of reasoning and how we are located in time. Some parts of what I’ll say next have theoretical steps that can be questioned, but here is how the story could go.
A crucial fact about reproduction in animals like us is that we each emerge through a “bottleneck,” a one-celled stage. Our bodies are rebuilt in each generation from scratch. This seems in some ways a waste. If you want to grow up and get big, why start out as small as you possibly could? But the one-celled stage has a lot of importance in individual development and in evolution. The rebuilding from scratch, the fresh start, enables a small mutation in the genes of one cell to ramify through all the cells as they divide to make the new organism. A small change can affect everything in the body.
In many animals, like corals, reproduction only occasionally goes through a bottleneck in this way; you can bud off copies of yourself for much of the time, and then occasionally take things back to one cell, often at a stage when sex enters the picture. When reproduction is sexual, the one-celled stage also has the role of uniting the genetic contributions of the two parents.
All this gives rise to something close to a discrete start to each life in animals like us. It also has consequences for aging and decline. For various reasons—competition, external risks and threats—it makes sense to grow up and become able to reproduce earlier rather than later, as long as you’re able to do the job well. It’s also worth taking on costs that come due later in life, in order to do well at earlier stages. For many animals, this means that a natural decline tends to happen after reproduction, on a rough but reliable schedule.
I don’t want to oversimplify. The “immortal jellyfish,” Turritopsis, reaches a particular stage in individual development and then turns around and runs backward toward a more juvenile state, and can turn around and run forward again. But there’s a general pattern here: Animals who are capable of felt experience will be behaviorally complex and mobile, hence unitary in organization, reproducing through a one-celled bottleneck, and with a pretty definite beginning and end to life. It’s no accident that felt experience is associated with our kind of body, and also with our kind of path from birth to death.
Might all this change in the future, with new technology? Even if the shape of our lives and deaths makes sense in this way, even if it’s all biologically comprehensible, we can still step back and ask what we think of this arrangement. Should we just accept it? Or should we fight it, and try to take a different course?
Here are two philosophers on life and death. First, Derek Parfit, a classic eccentric academic figure, always in the same white shirts, making his way back and forth between universities in England and the United States, working on problems of the self, ethics, and identity. He died in 2017.
Parfit’s interest in philosophy was prompted, he said, by “split-brain” cases of the kind discussed a few chapters ago. His 1984 book, Reasons and Persons, is a long exploration of how ethical questions and choices about action relate to what kind of beings we are, especially what kind of continuation we have over time. Suppose that an efficient future means of transportation is one where your body is annihilated on Earth and rebuilt, exactly and near-instantaneously, on Mars. But on one occasion, the machines do not work right and your original body is not destroyed, so you wake up in both places. I said “you” wake up, but how can it be you who does this, if two of you wake? Science fiction writers have explored these cases. Parfit worked through the philosophical side, especially questions about the self, very carefully. He seemed to have endless patience as a philosopher, forever revisiting the same questions and never tiring of them.
He ended up arguing for a kind of deflation, a destabilizing revision, of selfhood and identity. Some questions of the form “Who in this scenario is me?” do not have real answers. At each time, you have beliefs, memories, wishes, and projects. You pursue the projects that seem good ones at the time. Across different times, there can be links—continuities and connections—between the mind you have now and what happens in the “same” mind later on. Your physical body also normally continues, but Parfit thought that this fact is not very important compared to the psychological side, and whether we are looking at physical bodies or felt experiences, there is no deep fact of your you-ness, a you-ness that stretches through time as a permanent identity. There are just various psychological links, which your brain is responsible for, between experiences now and experiences later on. He also thought that the links of experience and memory that connect us at different times are all that we should care about when we reflect and make decisions; you shouldn’t worry about how the decisions you make now will affect some definite future you. In unusual cases, like the teletransportation case I mentioned above, a single mind that exists now might have strong mental continuities to more than one mind in the future. Fine. Don’t worry about which one is really you. It doesn’t matter.
Thinking all this through, Parfit came to see survival and death differently. He encountered a kind of freeing, or opening up, and found himself seeing death as less bad:
When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people, but the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
The “further fact” he refers to at the start of the passage is the idea that there is a definite identity, a fundamental Parfitness, underlying all the mental changes that might take place. Giving up a belief of this kind, which Parfit did because of arguments, not because of how he wanted to feel, led to a kind of peace.
Thomas Nagel is another philosopher who has written about death, immortality, and what it is to have, or be, a self. Nagel has also been willing to go against trends in philosophy that have taken many of us down hardheaded, reductionist roads; he has long been suspicious of all that.
Nagel opposes Parfit’s view of survival and death entirely. He rejects Parfit’s view of what the facts are in this area, insisting that there does have to be a deeper fact about the continuing identity that each of us has over time. And he writes that if he did agree with Parfit’s view of what a person is, rather than finding Parfit’s sense of freedom, he’d probably find it depressing:
[Death] is a great curse, and if we truly face it nothing can make it palatable except the knowledge that by dying we can prevent a greater evil. Otherwise, given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of mathematical induction I would be glad to live forever.
Mathematical induction works like this: If you have a series of things that have an order to them (first, second, third …), then even if the series is infinite, you can sometimes prove that all of them have some notable feature. You do it by showing that the first one in the series has the feature, and then showing that if any one in the series has it, then the next one does, too. That is enough to show that they all do, even if their number is infinite. This is an “induction” in a sense, but not in the sense where inductions are always uncertain and provisional. Here Nagel imagines being asked, over and over again, whether he wants to go on. He does want to now, and he thinks that at every later stage, he’d always choose to go on for a bit longer (unless going on was awful in some particular way). Because he wants to go on now, and thinks he will always want to go on each time the choice arises, he must want to live forever.
One reply to this argument applies an idea from another philosopher, Bernard Williams. If you are looking at choices way off in the distant future, even if you are sure that in some sense it’s still you making this choice, that person will probably be very psychologically different from you now. Just about any amount of change could happen along the way. This observation might be seen as questioning the step where Nagel says he knows that at each stage he will choose to go on: Who knows what he’ll choose? Or, and this is closer to what Williams had in mind: Why does it seem relevant to Nagel now that this future person, with a very different mind, would make a particular choice? After a long time and lots of psychological change, what is the practical difference between the chooser being Nagel and being someone else, who might make their own choice whether to continue on?
Like Parfit, I doubt that the kind of deeper sameness of a person over time that Nagel believes in is real, and I agree that this recognition can change our view of survival and mortality. Something akin or allied to Parfit’s attitude might also be reached by zooming out and thinking about the biological side of things, especially the way organisms and their minds come and go on Earth. In a way, the message here is different; Parfit’s change of perspective came through a loosening of ties between the stages making up a single “self.” The message I’ve been trying to get across is not one that proceeds first by fragmenting us, but one that points directly at connection—at our material continuity and kinship with the rest of life on Earth, and the significance of turnover, the coming and going of individuals.
How do these reflections relate to the possibility of an endless continuation of one’s mental life and experiences enabled through technology? We should set aside the idea of literally “endless” continuation, as events at the scale of the universe as a whole might not allow that. But we can certainly think about lives that run for several millions of years without running into issues of that kind. Then there are a number of scenarios to consider, including some in which a person takes up scarce resources each time they go on for another century, and some where they do not.
Suppose first that whenever you choose to go on, Nagel-style, you are choosing to take up a “slot” rather than make space for a new arrival. Do you always want to go on? I don’t. What if there was no exclusion of others by your own continuation? Your mind is uploaded as software, and the computing that keeps you going is cheap, using a huge solar array. A great many of us can be up there in the machines at once, and you are not squeezing anyone out.
First, I do not think of this as an easy supposition, a nearby possibility, in the way that many people do. I don’t think our minds could be transformed into bits of software that could be run on a suitable machine indefinitely. In order for your, or anyone else’s, mind to continue on, the right biology has to be in place. The view of consciousness sketched in chapter 6 has this consequence.
Even if something like this continuation scenario is possible, some versions of it seem rather empty to me. If I lack a body materially involved in the affairs of the world, a great deal would be missing. On the other hand, social engagement might continue, at least in some manner. You could be with your partner forever, if they’ll have you.
At several points in the discussion so far, I have imagined that one person’s endless continuation would squeeze out the possibility of other lives. But the human population may peak and decline before long, due to the “demographic transition” taking place in more and more countries of the world (a drop in birth rates due to economic development and a freeing of women from traditional roles). Perhaps a materially based immortality would have none of those imagined costs to others, after all?
If human numbers dropped enough, my view of immortality (or a dramatically extended life) might indeed shift. I might start to worry about losing the human project and see a need to stretch each life out as far as possible. When I say this, I assume in this scenario that we have started to do better with our care of the Earth, in ways discussed at the end of the previous chapter. But whether we imagine a future with a great many humans or fewer of them, I would rather retain a world with turnover, with new lives, not one where the same individuals go on and on and on. In nearly all cases, I would want to give up my place, hand on the baton, myself.
I understand the point of thinking through the more farfetched scenarios—the endless, disembodied, cost-free mental continuations. I can vaguely imagine a completely different physical basis for my existence, and then I might see the idea of turnover and endings differently. I might then want something more like what Nagel wants. But we can also think about our situation in a more realistic way, with our physical nature on board. Here we treat our minds not as barely housed, floating, ghost-like beings, but as parts of the material world as a whole, embedded in evolution and the Earth’s development. When we see our nature in this way, you might still take on an attitude of total resistance to mortality, but you might instead find yourself at home in this coming and going, this coming onto the scene and departing from it. It’s not just that thinking through the biological side of our existence shows that it would have been hard to have things any other way, and this might make acceptance of our lot easier. That’s not what I have in mind. Rather, this coming and going is part of the Earth’s history, with all its creative character. I identify with that process, including the turnover and renewal, the flow of new arrivals who then depart and leave room for more.
At the very start of this book is an epigraph from a poem by Walt Whitman. The poem is a reflection on death and renewal, written during the US Civil War. Whitman worked, on the Union side, as a volunteer nurse. His collection of poems about the war, Drum-Taps, was published in 1865, just after the conflict ended. The Whitman epigraph is an encapsulation of some central themes of this book: turnover, continuity, atoms reused, making their way round a cycle and into new life.
Some parts of the poem were left out of my epigraph. (The full text is in an endnote.) The poem’s aesthetic includes an affection, on the part of the “Mother of All,” for death—“O my dead, an aroma sweet!” This is not just an affection for the dead men, something that is also part of the poem—“my young men’s beautiful bodies.” Beyond this, he writes of “sweet death” itself. I didn’t want that idea in the epigraph. One can have awe at the renewal that Whitman describes without this sensual attraction to death.
Whitman also tried to have some things both ways; he seems to have had a hankering for personal, spiritual immortality despite his appreciation for turnover and renewal: “without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature.” He said that not in a poem, but in conversation with his biographer Horace Traubel. Regardless of what Whitman himself thought (and one recalls his famous comment about containing multitudes), there’s no need to try to have this both ways. Why must mortality and renewal, the ongoing creation of new individuals with their new beauty, involve a sham? As Whitman expressed in the poem, one can appreciate and celebrate these transformations—“let not an atom be lost!” One can feel an identification with the processes characteristic of our enlivened Earth. Those processes include, for beings like us, lives that take the form of a journey, being brought into existence by nature’s energies and then dissolving back into them, as others have before.
Most of 2022 was a hopeless time for scuba diving all over my usual sites on the east coast of Australia. It was a year of torrential rain, floods, and more. One day I went down to Cabbage Tree Bay, just north of Sydney, not to dive but to see some friends. This bay was the site of many of the meetings with animals, especially octopuses and cuttlefish, that led to the writing of the trio of books of which this is the third. This is where I began to think about the lives and minds of animals far from us in their evolutionary path.
I walked down the hill. To my surprise, the water, having recently been dull green, was sparkling, clear, and calm. Faint ripples at the surface seemed to hide a world of life below. A cormorant, an air/sea traveler, was sunning on the rocks between fishing expeditions. I had no scuba gear with me, but in the late afternoon I was able to get hold of my wife’s snorkeling mask, a too-small wetsuit vest, and an old camera setup I’d used years ago when working on the book Other Minds.
I swam out, and encountered giant cuttlefish right away. No matter how often I have seen then, I am always amazed by these eight-armed, color-changing, spaceship-like creatures. Big males were touring and displaying. I followed them up and down the shore, watching the long, whole-body stretches and the colors, all the shifting reds and oranges. It was a Sunday, and the water was full of people. I was delighted that even with all the geared-up free-divers, wary tourists, young kids, and startled passing swimmers, not one person bothered the cuttlefish. A bemused-looking but untroubled animal was being visited for a while, at a good distance, by five or six different snorkelers. The animals were treated with complete respect by everyone I saw, and I think with a good deal of awe, too.
There we were, living on Earth, all ages from tanned old locals to young children first encountering the sea. The sanctuary, Cabbage Tree Bay, had been established about twenty years earlier, a small reserve that has been almost miraculously successful in bringing sea life back and providing animals a home.
I followed a few of the cuttlefish back and forth along the rocks, watching them change their colors for a bit over an hour, until I was freezing in the too-small vest. I then stayed with one as he tucked in his arms and swam away from the crowded area near the seawater pool, out through the reef, jetting backward like a relaxed and eccentric missile. With no one but me following, he headed out to sea.
The sand soon dropped away. I could see a few scattered rocks below. The cuttlefish was in the middle of the water column, still swimming backward.
After a while, I put my head up to look around in the gentle slosh of waves. We were farther out than I had thought. We were where the Pacific began, with the whale sharks and mantas, all the beasts below. I waved goodbye to the disappearing cuttlefish, turned, and swam in.