Consciousness and humanity

Humanity, our great collective with no Earthly rival, exists as a product of our consciousness – the mind’s subjective experience of self and world. Subjective experiences may have evolutionary origins as far back as the Cambrian Period some 500 million years ago, when capacities for egocentric representations of the world seeded in the brains of stem vertebrates and, by different mechanisms, in stem insects1. As for vertebrates, so also for insects: the possibility of each individual having its own subjective awareness of the surrounding world and its mobile body within it. Early humans in North Africa more than 140,000 years ago communicated selfhood with bead necklaces or bracelets made from sea-snail shells2. This earliest use of symbolic ornaments may have expressed a radical leap in subjective experience, into self-awareness extending to self- or group-enhancement. By 75,000 years ago, social enhancements had developed into shifting fashions for wearable beads3.

Subjective experience for modern humans encompasses a vivid consciousness of all our mental states: our individual thoughts, motives, intentions, desires, fears, doubts, inspirations, longings, pleasures and sorrows, comforts, hopes and hurts, and their expression in relationships, manners, gestures, prejudices, aggressions and confessions. And for any mental activity that may have evaded wakeful awareness, the unconscious mind lies waiting to motivate and guide our rational and irrational behaviours4. For all our avowed self-knowledge, we spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about ourselves, endlessly failing to fathom reality except from within it5. What component, then, of our shared humanity exists beyond the clamour of conscious and unconscious minds?

Fernando Pessoa, who placed his confessions under a pseudonym, written on loose scraps of paper and never published in his lifetime, reflected6:

“In all my moments of spiritual liberation there was a dormant sorrow, vaguely blooming in gardens beyond the walls of my consciousness, and the scent and the very colour of those sad flowers intuitively passed through the stone walls, whose far side (where the roses bloomed) never ceased being a hazy near side in the obscure mystery of who I am, in the drowsiness of my daily existence.”

Why were the flowers sad? Because he would not heed their unwavering invitation: Into my garden come! Wake from your stupor, poet! I would; I want to be in the garden of happy flowers, beyond the measure of consciousness. I will break walls to find it! Oh, but no – my very desire immediately hides the treasure from me. Damn you consciousness, for constructing your fortifications, all that infrastructure of humanity, from the mind’s own products. Pessoa was not alone in his conflict with self-defeating individuality.

Suppose we cease this futile struggle, consider surrendering … what would we surrender? Given the timebound structure of mental activity, which is very tiring, we could surrender our grip on time. What would we surrender to? We can surrender to grief, or to love or joy, those unmediated freedoms that come from within. How should we do it? Suppose that we perceive the scent and colour of flowers, any flowers, directly and joyfully, without judgement of them or intentions for them, not drowsily but with sensitivity towards them7. Does our raw delight and innocent wonder not expose an essence of our universally shared humanity? Let’s imagine it does, and further that one humanity, comprised of many subjects, entails a moral duty to curb prejudices and aggressions against one another, and uphold justice for all8. How lovely is that – morality borne of an immeasurable freedom.

• Insects may hold the key to the origins of consciousness (Baron, A. B. & Klein, C. 2016. PNAS). Bumblebees engage in ball-rolling activities compatible with hedonistic play, a form of sentience (Galpayage Dona, H. S. et al. 2022. Animal Behaviour).
• Humans used wearable beads more than 140,000 years ago for non-verbal communication about the self or the group.
• 75,000 years ago in South Africa, shell-bead necklaces changed over time in their stringing styles.
• Sigmund Freud’s 1900 theory of the unconscious mind recognised and systematised limits to the rationality of behaviour.
• For 17ᵗʰ century philosopher René Descartes, consciousness provided the proof of our existence: “I think, therefore I am”. Even by doubting my existence, reasoned Descartes, I confirm the existence of an entity doing the doubting. Descartes thereby distinguished mind from matter. His understanding of truth as the product of autonomous reason opened a path to emancipation from the revelational truth of religious doctrine, which began in the Enlightenment period that followed after Descartes. The 18ᵗʰ century philosopher Immanuel Kant differentiated between reality as it is in itself and the reality that our mind accesses and structures. His rejection of the mind as a source of unfiltered truth led him to conclude that pure reason, which wields so much authority in the pursuit of moral imperatives, cannot advance beyond speculation in the domain of metaphysics. The true nature of our existence remains cryptic to this day, because we have no view from outside our experience of it. Our one tool for objective enquiry – the conscious mind – can only ever present existence in terms of our lived experience. Why then do we have consciousness at all? Why does neural processing in our brain produce the felt quality of subjective experience, rather than bypassing our awareness for the performance of its functions? This question, formulated by David Chalmers in 1995, endures as a hard problem for academic study because subjective perspectives fall outside the scope of classical objective explanation. The many plausible answers it has elicited, from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to analytical and spiritual philosophy, all continue to resist empirical testing sufficient for a consensus explanation.
• The quoted passage is one of some 500 fragments left by Fernando Pessoa (b. 1883, d. 1935) and collated posthumously in the Livro do Desassossego, here translated from Portuguese by Richard Zenith.
• What does it mean to perceive phenomena directly, unmediated by reflection? Immediacy of experience happens above all in nature, whose supreme indifference absorbs our attention, merging observer and observed, dispelling the separation of subject from object. Brush carelessly against a nettle for a felt experience that transforms into pain, free of malice in its sting. Pablo Neruda loved stones of all sorts; he would have appreciated the fossilising of sentience into Cambrian rock strata.
  When you touch topaz
  topaz touches you:
  a gentle warmth awakes
  …
  the smooth touch
  of stone and human
  inflames a quick cross-pollination
  which later returns to be what it was:
  flesh and stone:
    considerable rivals.
  (Pablo Neruda 1970 Las Piedras del Cielo [Stones of the Sky] XXV, translated from Spanish by James Nolan)
• The ancient Roman scholar Cicero argued in the 1ˢᵗ century BCE that our universally shared humanity entails a moral obligation to curb brutality and uphold justice. By the 1ˢᵗ century CE, Roman scholar Seneca had expanded these moral duties to encompass benevolence. On the subject of doing useful services for an ungrateful person, who may nevertheless have need of them and find value in them, Seneca considered in CE 62 that “we give not so much to a person as to humanity.”

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index