I had an amazing, stimulating experience this afternoon and evening.  Mogs took long naps both days this weekend, which allowed Carrie and me to dive into last week’s and today’s editions of the Sunday New York Times (last week’s arrived while we were away in Colorado; we first laid eyes on it when we got back to Olympia this Friday night).  Now, two editions of the Sunday NYT is a tremendous amount of reading, but I’m proud to say that this afternoon alone I exhausted nearly every part of last week’s paper that I wanted to read, and began reading today’s paper.

So.  In last week’s NYT Book Review there’s a review of “The Superorganism,” a new work on biology co-written by Edward O. Wilson.  According to the review, the central premise of the work is that colonies of certain social insects, like ants and bees, function not as collections of individuals, but rather as whole organisms: “[A] colony is a single animal raised to a higher level.  Each insect is a cell, its castes are organs, its queens are its genitals, the wasps that [sting] are an equivalent of an immune system.  In the same way, the foragers are eyes and ears, and the colony’s rules of development determine its shape and size.  The hive has no brain, but the iron laws of cooperation give the impression of planning.”

This excited me because it harkened back to philosophers whose work I studied in school, stuff that greatly affected me (and that I honestly should review to make sure that I got it right the first time around).

Jaegwon Kim gave me the idea that consciousness might not be CAUSED by the workings of our brains, but might only supervene on those neural processes, so that emotions and other experiences closely coincide (for lack of a better word) with the activity of brain cells.  Daniel Dennett and Ned Block imagined that a system that was vastly complex, but made of stuff that did not resemble brains, might nevertheless be the locus of conscious experience.  Block’s famous example was the entire nation of China, populated by millions of individual people communicating by cell phones, like a brain full of firing neurons; he suggested that taken as a whole, such a system might have “experiences” that no one part was conscious of.

Since those times, I have had a lot of fun viewing different systems and other collections as potentially greater than the sum of their parts.  I like to move up and down the macro-to-micro scale, and imagine what might be happening at each level.  Are there multiple consciousnesses?  Are you and I part of some larger consciousness?

Mogs woke up from her nap, and I started making dinner for her and Carrie.  I turned on All Things Considered on NPR, and lo and behold, there was Andrea Seabrook reporting on E.O. Wilson and “The Superorganism.”  In the piece, she talked about the striking rarity of social organisms, contrasted with their tremendous success as species.  Viewing colonies of ants as their own kind of separate organism – an entity that’s easy to miss, if you’re not looking for it – got me thinking again about the (seeming) uniqueness of human consciousness, and my sense that we may be part of something bigger.

From the NYT review of Wilson’s book: “The superorganism has castes, based not on genetic differences but – like our own social classes – on the environment in which they are brought up.  Sometimes, a chemical message does the job, but cold and starvation can be just as effective at condemning an individual to a humble life as a worker.”

Sounds like something from a naturalistic novel, doesn’t it?  Reading this, and hearing some of the things in the NPR report, invigorated a process I’ve been going through recently, thinking about character in preparation for my next fiction project.  When the report finished my creative juices were flowing.  I thought of a story in which a character strives through art to achieve beyond his station in life, but is stymied by health problems – namely, an organ that malfunctions by “overperforming” in some way.   It’s probably a goofy idea – haven’t Thomas Hardy and others already written this story? – but given the halting progress I’ve made as a fiction writer, I take inspiration where I can find it.

Then Andrea Seabrook read the parting words for the program, a quote from, again, E.O. Wilson:

“You are capable of more than you know.  Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path.  Aim high.  Behave honorably.  Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.  Persist!  The world needs all you can give.”

Now, I am not normally given to goose flesh and chills up the spine, but hearing this really did it to me.