In the previous chapter I headlined three levels at which I believe the lives of our ancestors were transformed by consciousness, three levels at which, if we look on the negative side, we could say the lives of psychological zombies—lacking those extra brain circuits—would be impoverished compared with our own. Now in separate chapters, I will treat these one by one—beginning with the simple pleasure of pure being.
The bottom line about how consciousness changes the human outlook—as deep an existential truth as anyone could ask for—is this: we do not want to be zombies. We like “being present,” we like having it “be like something to be me,” and only in the most drastic circumstances would we have it otherwise.
Lord Byron says it: “The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to gaming—to battle—to travel—to intemperate, but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”1
Tom Nagel as a philosopher says it more soberly: “There are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. . . . The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.”2
John Galsworthy, in one of his Forsyte novels, describes fourteen-month-old Kit Forsyte taking a bath: “He seemed to lend a meaning to life. His vitality was absolute, not relative. His kicks and crows and splashings had the joy of a gnat’s dance, or a jackdaw’s gambols in the air. They gave thanks not for what he was about to receive, but for what he was receiving.”3
The word “sensualism” approaches but hardly does justice to what these writers are getting at. Maybe we need the word “presentism.”4 At any rate, the emotion is a basic and familiar one: the yen to confirm and renew, in small ways or large, your own occupancy of the subjective moment, to go deeper, to extend it, to revel in being there—and, where you have the skill, to celebrate it in words.
Here is John Keats, in a letter to a friend, sharing his mouth with us: “Talking of Pleasure, this moment I am writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—good god how fine—It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.”5
Or here, on a more heroic scale, is Albert Camus, inviting us to enter the skin of his young body as he luxuriates among the flower-covered Roman ruins of Tipasa on the Algerian coast: “We enter a blue and yellow world and are welcomed by the pungent, odorous sigh of the Algerian summer earth. . . . We are not seeking lessons or the bitter philosophy one requires of greatness. Everything seems futile here except the sun, our kisses, and the wild scents of the earth. . . . How many hours I have spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying to match my breathing with the world’s tumultuous sighs! Deep among wild scents and concerts of somnolent insects, I open my eyes and heart to the unbearable grandeur of this heat-soaked sky.”6
Or here, to take it down to a more domestic level, is Rupert Brooke, stirring up thoughts of lesser ecstasies as he provides an inventory of one small sensory delicacy after another.
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon.
The list is long. The poet fondles each moment, like a bead on a rosary.
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such—
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns. . . .7
He is only just beginning, and I will return to this astonishing paean to sensation in a later chapter. But in reading this and the passages before it, I want to remark how rooted in the natural world all these precious experiences are. There is nothing in Keats’s or Camus’ descriptions, and only the occasional item in Brooke’s, that has any contemporary cultural reference. Absinthe leaves, blue massing clouds, moist earth, and so on, have, since time immemorial, been freely on offer to anyone with the senses and the inner leisure to appreciate them. We can and should assume, therefore, that our human ancestors of 100,000 years ago, or maybe as much as a million, relished many of these same experiences.
But then perhaps we should assume that the emotion I just now called presentism does in fact go back much further and spreads much wider. There is no lack of evidence that many nonhuman animals have evolved, at some level, to like “being there” just as humans do—which strongly suggests that they experience a qualia-rich version of the subjective present, basically like ours.
Galsworthy, looking for an analogy for the boy in his bath, went straight to animals: “the joy of a gnat’s dance, or a jackdaw’s gambols in the air.” And there are, of course, animal parallels to be drawn on every side, not just for Kit Forsyte but also for Keats, Camus, Brooke, and even Nagel. Dolphins surf the waves. Dogs chase their tails in frenzy. Bonobos give each other erotic body rubs. Cats stretch themselves before the fire. Lambs frolic on the spring sward. Monkeys leap from high cliffs into water pools.
At the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania, a chimpanzee beside a stream was observed by scientists drawing her fingers repeatedly through the rippling water, trans-fixed, it seems, by the delicate play of light, sound, and touch on her body. Other chimps began to copy her, and within months this kind of water play had become a family tradition. “Sitting intently nearby was Golden, who watched for a time before mimicking Gaia’s exact motions. Playing in Kakombe Stream, the field team observes, has since become something of a Gremlin family tradition: Every time they cross the creek, Golden finds time to sit on a rock with her hand immersed in the water, overturning stones on the streambed.”8 But at Gombe scientists have also observed examples of much wilder, Byronic sensation seeking, as when a chimpanzee emerges into the open in a thunderstorm and dances and stamps and screams as torrents of rain run from his back and lightning forks the air.
Marc Bekoff describes: “I once saw a young elk in Rocky Mountain National Park run across a snowfield, jump in the air and twist his body while in flight, stop, catch his breath and do it again and again. Buffalo have been seen playfully running onto and sliding across ice, excitedly bellowing as they do so.”9 George Schaller describes a two-year-old panda on being released from a dark tunnel: “It exploded with joy. Exuberantly it trotted up an incline with a high-stepping, lively gait, bashing down any bamboo in its path, then turned and somersaulted down, an ecstatic black and white ball rolling over and over; then it raced back up to repeat the descent, and again.”10
Birds are up there too, as this account reveals:
A common feature of the hot, dry inland of Australia is the dust devil or willy-nilly, a small vortex with winds about 60 kilometres per hour. It can carry dust hundreds of metres into the air. . . . A common native bird, the galah, has been seen flying into these whirlwinds and being hurled upwards, screeching loudly. On reaching the top, the galahs fly down and enjoy another ride by re-entering the vortex near the ground. There is one report of a flock of galahs flying into a much less common and more dangerous tornado. The winds, spinning at over 100 kilometres per hour, immediately spat them out, screeching with delight.11
“To feel that you exist—even though in pain”? It certainly looks that way.
So here is the question. Why should feeling that you exist—and valuing the feeling—be biologically adaptive, so that the underlying brain circuits would have been selected in the course of evolution?
I believe the answer (at least the beginning of an answer) is right there in front of us. It is that a creature who takes pleasure in the feeling of existence will develop “a will to exist” and so, at least as we see it in humans, “a will to live.” But I must unpack this. How does a will to exist differ from simply an instinct to exist, or just existing? Most biological organisms evidently manage to live their lives just fine without having the will to do so. We would never attribute a will to live to an oak tree, an earthworm, or a butterfly. These organisms, when the need arises, act instinctively in a variety of preprogrammed life-preserving ways. Human beings do the same much of the time. You eat your food, withdraw your hand from the flame, heal your wounds, and so on, without giving a thought to your existence. So how might there be added value in your having evolved to be conscious of existing?
It could work like this. If natural selection can arrange that you enjoy the feeling of existing, then existence can and does become a goal: something—indeed, as we’ll see, some thing—you want. And the difference between your wanting to exist and simply having some kind of life instinct is that, when you want something, you will tend to engage in rational actions—flexible, intelligent behavior—to achieve it. You will do things that are not rewarding in themselves but that are calculated (on some level) to deliver the goal. You may even do things that are punishing—including going through pain.
I admit this may sound like some sort of bootstrap operation, rather as if natural selection had designed a creature to take pleasure in the sound of its own heartbeat. But why not, if it works? We accept that Nature made sex pleasurable so as to encourage animals to take the steps that lead to sexual intercourse. Then why not make the feeling of existence magically delightful in order to encourage conscious creatures to do the things that lead to their existing?
For human beings, the case hardly needs making. Happily, we have all seen how it plays out in our own lives. “Where am I going?” the boy sings in A. A. Milne’s poem “Spring Morning”:
Where am I going? I don’t quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where am I going? The high rooks call:
“It’s awful fun to be born at all.”12
Awful fun is not the half of it. We know life can at times be unspeakably beautiful. But what about those high rooks? And galahs, and chimpanzees? Do nonhuman animals really want to feel that they exist? And if they do, is it indeed evidence that these animals are phenomenally conscious?
We need not doubt that there are many species of animals who, just like humans, go out of their way to have fun. They want, as it were, to live it up. The galahs seek out the whirlwinds. Dolphins follow a ship to ride the bow waves. Chimps beg to be tickled.
I once observed a young mountain gorilla who climbed a high vine to fetch down a gourd-like fruit. My field notes record: “She plays with the fruit, tossing it from side to side, letting it drop into her hands, then she grips the stalk between her teeth so that the fruit dangles from her mouth, stands bipedally and turns somersaults. Next she stands, still holding the fruit between her teeth, and beats it repeatedly with both hands, making a sharp clapping sound.” The following day she came back to the same vine with the obvious intention of fetching down another so satisfactory a plaything.13
Every dog owner has seen the lengths to which a dog will go to get taken for a walk, the anticipatory joy when he succeeds, and the hang-dog look if he realizes he is not getting what he wants. There are few sights so pathetic as a dog who, having been taken out in the car for what might have been a run in the woods, realizes he is approaching a boarding kennel, where his existence will be put on hold.
Do examples such as these really add up to a will to exist in these animals? Certainly, if you were in their place, conscious presence would be both the goal and the condition of your making these efforts to engage with life. It would be the qualia you would be deliberately seeking. If you were a psychological zombie, you simply would not bother to do these things. And I would say it is a fair assumption (though by no means a logically secure one) that if the animals were zombies, they would not bother either. True, we should be cautious about reading too much into the behavior of species distant from ourselves. Yet we should not feel bound to read too little either.
The survival benefits of delighting in “existence” are obvious. For a start, any creature who has it as a goal to indulge its senses in the kinds of ways described will be likely to engage in a range of activities that promote its bodily and mental well-being (even if occasionally at some risk). Such a creature will do life well, we might say. But it will not stop there. Since you can reach these moments of intense existence only by doing all the other things required to stay alive, then, for at least some animals, being alive as such will become a goal. You will not just live well, you will want a life because you want to feel.
So here is the crucial question. Could not natural selection have achieved the same result in easier ways? Given that there are indeed benefits to be had when living it up becomes a goal of behavior, then why not simply add some extra reward circuits to the brain so as to make the experience of intense and varied sensory stimulation “positively reinforcing,” as the behaviorists would say, without going the extra mile to invent the drama of phenomenal consciousness? Psychological zombies could surely have sensory fun—of a zombie sort. Zombies could still be designed to engage in play.
Yes, so they could. But I believe the reason their play would be so much shallower—and in the long run less life affirming—than that of a conscious creature is this: phenomenal consciousness gives you (or at any rate gives you the illusion of) a substantial thing to value. The great object of life—the ball that, as a conscious being, you strive to keep in the air—is not a shallow physiological variable, not a mere number, but something psychologically in a different league. It is the existence of a conscious self.
There, I have said it: a “conscious self.” It is time to bring the “self” to center stage. The concept of self is a complex one, and it will not be until much later in the book that we get the measure of it. I will argue later that in the course of evolutionary history, selves have come to exist on different levels in different species. The self of an adult human being certainly has no equivalent in animals (or human infants, for that matter). But, to begin with, I want to focus on something basic: let’s call it the “core self,” by which I mean no more or less than the owner and occupier of the thick moment of consciousness. When “you feel that you exist” as the subject of sensation, the core self comes into existence in that illusory time space.
This is not my idea. It is originally Aristotle’s idea (although seldom acknowledged as such in contemporary philosophy.) I wrote above, in chapter 4, how Aristotle drew attention to the paradoxical temporal depth of consciousness. “The undivided ‘now’ of sensation must rest upon a duration with which it does not altogether coincide. . . . It is another time . . . It may well be something other than any time at all.” But where did he go with this? Remarkably, he went on to argue that it is precisely this “extra” time dimension that underlies—and brings into being—the core self: “If someone senses himself or something else in a continuous time, then it is impossible for him not to notice he exists. . . . In all sensation, simple or complex, sharp or dull, the animal . . . feels that it lives.”14
Aristotle realized that it is impossible not to notice that I am when I feel—Sentio ergo sum. Descartes, fifteen hundred years later, claimed that it is impossible to doubt that I am when I think—Cogito ergo sum. Yet, as several modern writers have observed, Aristotle’s “Sentio” is much truer to lived experience than Descartes’ “Cogito.” “Sometimes I think and other times I am,” wrote the poet Paul Valéry.15 For novelist Milan Kundera, “I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive.”16
The logical corollary of this, and indeed the obvious psychological fact, is that if I do not feel, I am not. Your core self comes into being only as and when you have sensations. And to suggest, as some theorists have, that there could already be the shell of a self—an empty self, waiting in the wings—ready to lay claim to sensations if and when they arise, is to get things back to front. The philosopher Gottlob Frege misleadingly argued that “an experience is impossible without an experiencer. The inner world presupposes the person whose inner world it is.”17 But in truth an experiencer is impossible without experience; the existence of the person presupposes the inner world that makes him who he is. Johann Fichte said it better: “What was I before I came to self-consciousness? The natural answer to this question is: I did not exist at all, for I was not an I.”18
In fact, as natural historians of consciousness, this is something we see for ourselves every morning. At the beginning of this book I invoked the great awakening that happens each day on Earth: innumerable conscious selves emerging from the chrysalis of sleep. Marcel Proust wrote of how, on waking, there is “a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being.”19 Here is Paul Valéry again: “One should not say I wake but There is waking—for the I is the result, the end, the ultimate Q.E.D.”20
So then what next? What when, as the great physiologist Charles Sherrington has described it, “the full panel of the ‘five-senses’ is in session, and . . . the individual has attained a psychical existence”? From that moment on the core self becomes the entity that you, as a conscious creature, think of yourself as being and in whose future you now have a unique and peculiar interest. “Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy, by a dramatis persona, the ‘self.’”21
It is your own self, occupying your inner space. For let us note (and we will discuss this more fully later on) that it is a key feature of the self that emerges from sensation that it belongs to you, the subject, alone. Imagine how it would be if the “my space” of the social Internet were not only a Web site to which you were alone in having the password for uploading new information, but a site that was essentially unviewable by anyone else, and yet the site where it felt the real you resided. Imagine it? But that is precisely how it is! Your self has become essentially your concern, your responsibility.
Admittedly, there has been fierce debate among philosophers about whether this notion of the singular all-important self can stand up to analysis. Several critics have argued that people ought not to be so impressed by the autochthonous illusion of selfhood, as undoubtedly they mostly are. Thomas Metzinger wrote in response to an earlier essay of mine: “Of course no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever was or had a self. A self could never be something you have—like a bicycle or book by Dostoevsky. . . . The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process.”22
James Branch Cabell, the early twentieth-century American author and wit, took a particularly sardonic view of the importance people attach to this supposed thing: “What thing is it to which I so glibly refer as I? If you will try to form a notion of yourself, of the sort of a something that you suspect to inhabit and partially to control your flesh and blood body, you will [find] . . . there seems to remain in those pearl-colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very little save a faculty for receiving sensations. . . . And surely, to be just a very gullible consciousness provisionally existing among inexplicable mysteries, is not an enviable plight.” “And yet,” he added, “this life—to which I cling tenaciously—comes to no more.”23
Maybe so. Yet, in light of our discussion, it seems obvious that these deconstructionists have missed the point: the point of what a self amounts to psychologically. Cabell, rather than ending on that downbeat note, might better have stressed the extraordinarily positive fact: “And yet, to this life—which comes to no more—I cling tenaciously.” For it is this that matters: “the sort of a something,” which as scientists we may well agree is “very little save a faculty for receiving sensations,” has been transformed by the magic of conscious phenomenology into some thing that you can cling to. The great object in life has become that your core self should thrive. As William James wrote: “To have a self that I can care for, nature must first present me with some object interesting enough to make me instinctively wish to appropriate it for its own sake.”24
We can only guess how wide the circle goes among nonhuman animals—how wide the charmed circle of those who because they live in the conscious present can contemplate and enjoy their own existence. To declare my prejudice, I do not think that gnats—even joyful, dancing gnats—have a will to exist or have so much as a smidgen of a conscious self. I have no opinion about fish and cold-blooded land vertebrates. But I do take seriously the evidence for mammals and birds. What I see there—in a cat’s and gorilla’s and panda’s and galah’s straining for sensation—are indeed the signs of a core self devoted to its own continuance.
But we cannot leave things at this point, with consciousness simply as a motive to love life in certain species, including our own. As natural historians, we have to see the extra face of this. For there is at least one species of animal for which clinging to life tenaciously means more than loving life. With human beings, it also means fearing personal death—the extinction of the self. This will loom still larger for us toward the end of the book. But some of the issues are pressing, and I want to go there right away.
Though we have been discussing the evolution of consciousness in animals in general, we have every reason to be especially interested in human beings. And when the evidence suggests that there is something special going on with humans, we must not ignore it. As it happens, all the issues raised earlier in this chapter about the motivating effects of consciousness as a biological force come into sharpest focus when we consider an outcome that very likely matters to human beings alone.
Human beings. It could hardly be more obvious. Being is what it is all about. But this creates problems for humans of a unique kind. Humans are a part of nature, yet in one respect they are at a disadvantage to all other species. They know too much. They want to be, yet they know that every precedent—all too well recorded—teaches that not being is their certain fate. John Keats was twenty-four years old when he enjoyed that nectarine, but within two years he had died from consumption in Rome. Rupert Brooke was twenty-seven when he wrote that poem, “The Great Lover,” and a year later he succumbed to septicemia on a troopship in the Dardanelles. Albert Camus was forty-six when, with the unfinished manuscript of his story of growing up in Algeria in a bag beside him, he was killed in a car crash on the road to Paris.
Inevitably, you see that it is coming your way too. Yet, being no less in love with life than any other conscious creature, your own death may seem completely out of order—it was never part of the deal. Tom Nagel has said it well: “Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man’s sense of his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past. . . . Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods.”25
You signed up to be there indefinitely. And maybe nothing hits you harder than the realization that one day you will not be able to. Here is an excerpt from an interview with the novelist Philip Roth. “‘You said you’re afraid of dying. You’re 72. What are you afraid of ?’ He looks at me. ‘Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it.’”26
True, it can be argued that to be afraid of oblivion is a kind of logical error: you cannot reasonably fear not feeling, because not feeling is not a state of being. Two thousand years ago the poet Lucretius tried to persuade us that after we die, “we shall not feel, because we shall not Be. . . . And since the Man who Is not feels not woe (For death exempts him and wards off the blow, which we, the living, only feel and bear), What is there left for us in Death to fear?”27
We may agree that, strictly speaking, oblivion is unimaginable because the mind cannot simulate a state of mindlessness.28 But that is hardly the point. When you fear death, it is not that you fear being somewhere you cannot imagine, it is that you fear not being somewhere you can imagine (and are living in right now). Philip Larkin made the argument better than anyone in his poem “Aubade.” “Specious stuff,” he calls it,
. . . that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.29
The point is that oblivion figures in people’s imagination as the negation of being there. You fear the deletion of “my space”—as Nagel said, the cancellation of possible goods. Zombies would have nothing to worry about even if they saw death coming, because they could not fear the absence of something they have never had. Humans, however, can and do fear death precisely because of what they do have.
It means that for human beings, this fear is indeed one of the public effects of consciousness: something that would surely catch the attention of the Andromedan scientist if she were looking. It is a big effect too. The psychoanalyst Ernst Becker has written: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.”30 To the extent that this is true, it follows that human beings’ fear of death must always have been highly visible to natural selection—and hence so must have been the consciousness that lies behind it.
As we will see later in the book, anxieties about death show up in human behavior at many different levels and have been a driving force in the development of culture and civilization. But for now I want to keep the discussion simple. Does the raw fear of oblivion help people survive?
I have not seen the question put like this before. But maybe that is because the answer is so obvious. Jean-Jacques Rousseau may have exaggerated when he claimed, “Without [the fear of dying,] the entire human species would soon be destroyed.”31 But it is certainly the case that in a thousand different circumstances, human beings have looked death in the face and—not liking what they saw—have taken whatever steps they could to avoid it.
Let’s take just one example. The climber Joe Simpson, in his astonishing tale of survival after a climbing accident in the Andes, Touching the Void, relates how, first of all, the feeling of pain reassured him: “A burning, searing agony reached up from my leg. It was bent beneath me. As the burning increased so the sense of living became fact. Heck! I couldn’t be dead and feel that! It kept burning, and I laughed—Alive! Well fuck me!—and laughed again, a real happy laugh.”32 That night, Simpson found Shakespeare’s lines running through his head, teasing him, urging him on:
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.33
The void: Simpson touched it and recoiled. And so he dragged himself back into the world of the living.
Presumably there have been countless other instances where humans have done the same—refused to succumb because they were not ready to let go, because, in the words of Dylan Thomas, they “raged against the dying of the light,”34 not of course always with such admirable acts of courage. To avoid personal death, people will sometimes behave in craven and immoral self-serving ways. As Dr. Johnson famously said: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”35 And when he knows he will be dead in the next hour, unless he does something about it, we should not be surprised if his mind turns to escape, perhaps at any cost. Modern humans are not necessarily the descendants of heroes; they are the descendants of those who stayed alive when others did not. Like it or not, human consciousness must regularly have proved its biological worth in just such moments of last resort.
Think of the extravagant lengths to which throughout history people have been prepared to go in the vain hope of ensuring the survival of their selves after they die. How much more have they always invested in not dying to start with.
But these are indeed human responses. Do any nonhuman animals fear death? It has generally been assumed that they do not—actually could not. I do not disagree. There are three reasons for saying so.
The first is that nonhuman animals have a limited capacity for “mental time travel.”36 Even if they are able to look forward to the future, and to imagine the possible recurrence of good or bad things that have happened in the past, it is very unlikely that they can imagine a hypothetical scenario: the occurrence of something that has never yet happened to them. Yet dying is of course just that—a lifetime first. It means a nonhuman animal could not think about being hanged in ten minutes’ time, let alone a fortnight. As W. H. Auden wrote, contrasting this state of blissful ignorance starkly with that of humans: “Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read / The Hunter’s waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf / Unable to predict the fall.”37
The second reason is that nonhuman animals will not have had anything like the exposure that humans have to the accumulated evidence of death. Even if an animal has had occasion to see another animal die, it will still not have much cause to generalize this fate to include itself, let alone see death of some sort as inevitable. Voltaire remarked: “The human race is the only one that knows it must die, and it knows this only through its experience. A child brought up alone and transported to a desert island would have no more idea of death than a cat or a plant.”38 It may be true that if an animal has seen another of its species killed, after being caught by a lion, for example, then, provided it is clever enough, it might possibly conclude that if it itself gets caught by a lion, it will be killed too. But without the support of a shared culture, this is a lesson very unlikely to be learned.
But the third and clinching reason is that nonhuman animals do not have the conceptual wherewithal to appreciate the finality of death. How could the animal possibly anticipate that the death of the body brings with it the death of the self ? If an animal thinks about it at all, it will most likely conflate being dead with being asleep. And sleep, though it does entail the temporary extinction of consciousness, is of course not such a disaster. Indeed, everyone’s experience—yours too—has been that sleep is a bourn from which the self has always returned. This is no doubt why human beings find sleep such a seductive model for being dead. And if humans do not always get the truth of it, is it likely that nonhumans ever do?
The difficulties that chimpanzees have in appreciating that death is the end is revealed in the primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa’s observations of a group of wild chimpanzees at Bossou, Guinea, following the death from pneumonia of a two-and-a-half-year-old female infant, Jokro.39 I quote Matsuzawa’s field notes verbatim (a marvelous film is also available online):
January 25th 1992.
Jire [Jokro’s mother] puts her daughter on the ground. I look at Jokro’s chest, but see no signs of breathing. I realize that she is dead—she died this very day. Jire takes Jokro’s hand and places her body on her back. Just like when she was alive, Jokro is “riding” on her mother’s back in prone posture.
January 27th.
Two days have passed since Jokro’s death. Her corpse is lying face up, supine posture, on the back of the mother. The belly is swollen with gas. Jokro’s body has started to decompose. Jire chases away the flies circling her dead infant.
January 29th.
4 days after death, Jokro’s body has begun to dry out—it is mummifying. But the mother has returned to carrying it the way she would a live infant—right side up, and in the normal prone position. Tua, the alpha male of the community, sniffs Jokro’s corpse. I myself can smell the strong odour of decomposition. However, other members of the community show no signs of aversion to or fear of the lifeless body.
February 9th.
15 days have passed since Jokro died. Her body has now completely dried out. Jire continues to chase away the flies attracted to the dead body. Then, she picks up the body and looks directly into its face. She starts to clean Jokro’s face. She grooms her daughter’s remains as if she were still alive. Soon after, I observe a youngster playing with the body, while the adults are taking a rest. He takes Jokro’s body and climbs a tree with it. He swings the corpse and lets it fall to the ground from a height of about 5 metres. He rushes down the tree and picks it up, then climbs up and drops it again. Meanwhile, Jire looks on gently.
February 17th.
A very interesting episode occurs. Tua, the alpha male of the community, rushes toward me in a charging display. He uses Jokro’s mummified body as a part of his display. Chimpanzees usually use dead branches to accentuate power in a charging display. Yet this time, Tua uses the body of a dead infant. However, I notice a subtle detail. When Tua turns around, he gently switches the body from his right to left hand. With branches, he has never shown such delicate handling as with Jokro’s remains. Tua abandons the body right in front of me. The mother, Jire, retrieves Jokro’s body, just as she always has.
If chimpanzees find it so hard to appreciate what has happened when, in front of their eyes, one of their number has permanently ceased to be alive, we can be sure that this is not a fate that they can ever imagine to be coming their own way. And if they cannot imagine it, they cannot fear it.
I argued earlier that there are many nonhuman animals that, because they value their own consciousness, enjoy life and want more of it. And chimpanzees are of course up among the best of them. “The creature . . . will want to live because it wants to feel.” My point now is that if you are a nonhuman animal, you can very well want to live without having any fear of death, given that either you do not see it coming or do not understand that death means no more life. It is these dreadful premonitions that make the human situation so much more anxiety laden—but also, for that very reason, so much more focused on survival.
We are at a surprising pass. If fearing death is, indeed, a uniquely human trait, if fearing death is one of the consequences of being conscious, and if fearing death helps to keep human beings alive, this suggests that consciousness—core consciousness—contributes more to the biological fitness of human beings than to that of any other animal. It could even mean that human consciousness, at this basic core level, has in fact come under new pressure from natural selection.
We might have expected that new kinds of selection pressure would be in play when it comes to the grander forms of selfhood that I will discuss later in the book. But I think no one—unless he or she had independently made the journey of this chapter—would have expected this in relation to the core self. Whether this has really made a significant contribution to the phenomenology of consciousness in humans—whether it has reshaped the ipsundrum—is a tantalizing question. But, as I said, we should delay discussion of all such issues about the possibility of there being species differences in “what it is like” to be phenomenally aware until we have a more complete picture of how consciousness may have developed to serve this role and others.
Let’s move on then to another, very different way in which the internal magic show can change your life: by having you cast a spell beyond your own body on your physical surroundings.