Hi Everyone 👋🏽

Welcome to Growth Imperatives, a curation of found ideas I send every other week that asks how we can imagine the world differently. This week, I want to share some articles exploring how we perceive ourselves and the rest of life that surrounds us.

This week

🧠 Widespread Consciousness
🥀 Missed Connections
👬🏽 Human Brethren

🧠 Widespread Consciousness

The idea presented in this article that animals like squid, lobster, and bees might have consciousness—that they might experience feelings like pain and pleasure—continues a long trend of discoveries that give credence to an animistic world. But this doesn't diminish anything about us. It means humanity is less alone than we make ourselves believe.

It also makes me rethink my eating habits. I already wasn't a fan of eating crab; the idea of breaking their bodies apart myself and sucking out their insides makes me feel uneasy. Maybe now I know why. 🥲

The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited earlier this month, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before. For decades, there’s been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to us—the great apes, for example—may well have conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.

The new declaration, signed by biologists and philosophers, formally embraces that view. It reads, in part: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).” Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document could represent the beginnings of a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness. ...

The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature. ...

If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it may have the capacity to experience feelings such as pain, pleasure, and hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.

“I hope the declaration [draws] greater attention to the issues of nonhuman consciousness, and to the ethical challenges that accompany the possibility of conscious experiences far beyond the human,” Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, wrote in an email. “I hope it sparks discussion, informs policy and practice in animal welfare, and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation that we have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.” ...

There was a big debate about whether fish are conscious, and a lot of that had to do with them lacking the brain structures that we see in mammals,” she says. “But when you look at birds and reptiles and amphibians, they have very different brain structures and different evolutionary pressures—and yet some of those brain structures, we’re finding, are doing the same kind of work that a cerebral cortex does in humans.”

Read: A New Declaration of Animal Consciousness by Dan Falk

🥀 Missed Connections

While we currently see a binary between the human and animal worlds, the relationship has historically been more integrated and immediate. Much like the political polarization that social isolation creates, how does our distance from both nature (i.e., from ourselves) and our more animalistic qualities help create our current ecological situation?

It is a uniquely precarious moment to be an animal of any kind. All around us, other species are disappearing some 10,000 times faster than base extinction levels, causing the ecologist Stephan Harding to write in the book Gaia in Turmoil (2009) that we are ‘hemorrhaging species’. And yet the blood loss is often invisible. We do not mourn the beings we never learned to see. This is Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, but it is the first precipitated by one species: ourselves. ...

The evolutionary biologist E O Wilson coined the term ‘Eremocene’ to describe a contemporary era defined by both literal and existential isolation. He was referring to extinctions, but the phrase captures a particular paradox of modern life. On the one hand, we live in an anthropocentric society where human life is privileged to devastating ecological effect. On the other, as we play out increasingly online existences – lubricated by instant deliveries or the way we work and stream at home, alone – misanthropic solitude has also become increasingly normalised (just look at the memes). Not only are we failing to consider other species, we are flailing in our connection with one another. ...

Popular discourse tends to silo these two issues, imagining that the breakdown in intra-species connection has nothing to do with the inter-species one, and vice versa. Looking at the moments where we visualise ourselves as nonhuman, though, suggests that in examining our own experiences of ‘being animal’ we can learn to live and connect better in our human bodies, too. ...

The rapid technologising of modern life has separated all of us from our bodies, but rather than view ourselves in union with our nonhuman neighbours, we tend to get defensive. Hungry for our own dignity, we dig deeper into the myth of our exceptionalism. ...

Slippages between human and nonhuman forms have, across history and cultures, been far more fluid. ‘[I]ndigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives,’ writes the Native studies scholar Kim TallBear. The very idea of a binary between human and nonhuman stymies a logic whereby ‘objects’ and ‘forces’ such as stones and thunder contain sentience too. During the Upper Palaeolithic period, now considered to have been the seedbed of human consciousness, cave drawings depicted men with hooves, and beasts with hands and spears. Indigenous creation stories tell of humans descending from animals, marrying them, and morphing between forms. Zeus was said to transform into a swan, a bull, a snake; Ganesh, one of the most worshipped Hindu deities, has an elephant head and four human arms. It was not just gods and shamans who took on animal traits, it was humans themselves, often to summon strength in wars and hunts. ...

Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021). ‘And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’ It is shame that drives us to evade our animality, contends philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the book Hiding from Humanity (2004), so uncomfortable are we with our own ‘propensity to decay and to become waste products ourselves’. The more we confront the degradation of our oceans and lands, however, the more we must face that it’s not just animal habitat under threat – it’s our habitat, too. Faced with this mounting unliveability, we look to the nonhuman for ideas of survival.

Read: An Animal Myself by Erica Berry

👬🏽 Human Brethren

The idea that we're above nature is buttressed by the fact that all other human species, which once existed alongside us, are now extinct. Understanding that we mated and raised children with other species like Neanderthals should make us reevaluate what it means to be 'human,' as this article argues.

Where is the cutoff? For example, there's as much genetic difference between us and gorillas, as there is between gorillas and chimpanzees. Not having a clear definition begs us to question what is also the barrier between us and the rest of nature.

[T]he distinction between us and other animals is, arguably, artificial. Animals are more like humans than we might think—or like to think. Almost all behaviors we once considered unique to ourselves are seen in animals, even if they’re less well-developed.

That’s especially true of the great apes. Chimps, for example, have simple gestural and verbal communication. They make crude tools, even weapons, and different groups have different suites of tools—distinct cultures. Chimps also have complex social lives and cooperate with one another. ...

[I]n the past, some species were far more like us than other apes—Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals. H. sapiens is the only survivor of a once diverse group of humans and human-like apes, the hominins, which includes around 20 known species and probably dozens of unknown species.

The extinction of those other hominins wiped out all the species that were intermediate between us and other apes, creating the impression that some vast, unbridgeable gulf separates us from the rest of life on Earth. But the division would be far less clear if those species still existed. What looks like a bright, sharp dividing line is really an artifact of extinction. ...

I admit this sounds speculative but for one detail. The DNA of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other hominins is found in us. We met them, and we had children together. That says a lot about how human they were.

It’s not impossible that H. sapiens took Neanderthal women captive, or vice versa. But for Neanderthal genes to enter our populations, we had to not only mate but successfully raise children, who grew up to raise children of their own. That’s more likely to happen if these pairings resulted from voluntary intermarriage. ...

We could define humanity in terms of higher cognitive abilities—art, math, music, language. This creates a curious problem because humans vary in how well we do all these things. I’m less mathematically inclined than Steven Hawking, less literary than Jane Austen, less inventive than Steve Jobs, less musical than Taylor Swift, less articulate than Martin Luther King Jr. In these respects, am I less human than they are or were?

If we can’t even define it, how can we really say where it starts and where it ends—or that we’re unique? Why do we insist on treating other species as inherently inferior if we’re not exactly sure what makes us, us?

Read: How Human Are We? by Nicholas R. Longrich

That's all for this week!

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