Dumb Animals

A while ago my wife and I came down with RSV – respiratory syncytial virus. We had never heard of it before, and quite frankly m’dear wish we never had. Avoid it like the plague, which it shares a couple of symptoms with, although the diseases are completely different in all other respects. But I’m not here to bemoan our trials to caution the unwary, although any unwary out there, please consider yourselves duly cautioned; with gusto.

This story begins on about day four of the full onset of symptoms, when I was running a temperature and with zero appetite for anything other than everyone just to ‘Leave me alone so I can die... Now, would be good.’ Having not really eaten for two days I was lying in bed in some semi-delirious state when an over-whelming desire to eat yoghurt and honey came over me. My stomach made some sort of rebellious ‘Really?’ noise but I dragged myself off my I-Wish-I-Was-Dead-Bed and staggered to the kitchen to assuage my strange but very clear urgings. I generally eat a peculiarly flavoured honey from Tasmania called Leatherwood Honey and my yoghurt of choice is coconut honey so I dolloped out about a cupful of yoghurt and mixed in a big tablespoon of Leatherwood Honey and knocked it off in about thirty seconds. Whereupon so impressed was I by the flavour I repeated same, taking about forty seconds this time. I went back to bed and managed some fitful bouts of sleep, or resting with eyes closed mainly.

Over the next three days I existed pretty much on yoghurt and honey; not because I thought this was a good thing to do, but because I was simply responding to a very clear message from my body. Well, I understood what it wanted, but I had no flaming idea why it did.

On day six I had a tele-conference with my doctor, having been told not to come in person when I explained to the receptionist that I thought I had RSV. Once in the tele-conference, when I got to the part of ‘temperature’, ‘night sweats’, and 'crazy dreams', my doctor advised that she thought I probably had a secondary respiratory infection and prescribed a dose of hefty anti-biotics.

Yes, but that’s not what this about. A week or so after all my symptoms had subsided I went into the doc’s surgery and she ordered an X-Ray, which the next day on a follow up visit she deduced and informed me that I’d had pneumonia, brought on by the RSV as a secondary infection. As I sat in the car preparing to drive home afterwards, the penny dropped. RSV is a viral infection; pneumonia is a bacterial infection. Honey, especially undiluted and untreated varieties, like my Leatherwood, has anti-bacterial properties. Yoghurts, of the live culture varieties, like my brand of coconut yoghurt, have pro-biotic properties, i.e. good bacteria. Well there you go, only took this massive, human-defining consciousness and self-awareness just under a fortnight to have its ‘Ah-ha!’ moment. My dumb animalistic, instinctive ‘hind-brain’ had identified within a day what I could do within the realm of what was in my immediate environment to fix the condition. The condition that my supreme consciousness had had no idea I/we had at that time.

In the immortal words of the wonderful Julius Sumner Miller – why is it so? Or perhaps just as appropriately, in the words of William Shatner, a.k.a. Captain Kirk, weird, or what?

Having thought about all this for a while, I came to theorise that we’re sort of kidding ourselves with our sense that our self-conscious (i.e. aware) self is the sole or even major defining aspect of who we are. Think about it. Let’s assume for argument‘s sake that animals lack this self-awareness, or at best only have a rudimentary version. Anyway, no matter how you might think about it, it seems to me that even those animals ‘highest’ on the IQ ladder don’t have this all-encompassing, self-perpetuating notion of themselves as the centre of the universe and rightly so, by Jove. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair, says the bloke or shiela standing in front of their vanity mirror. If this notion of our self-awareness and it’s (more or less) peculiar attachment to Homo is even half right, then we’ve probably only had it for say, one or two million years? Wow – long time... except life has merrily and very, very successfully bundled along on this wee blue marble for something like 3.7 billion years. My maths is horrible but that sounds like self-awareness has been around less than 0.001% of the time that life has existed.

Animals know what’s best for them most of the time; most of the time enough so that their species survives, thrives and breeds on. Of course it might have helped the dinosaurs to have been able to look up in the skies 65 million years ago and gone “Run! It’s a freakin’ asteroid!” But the vast majority of time, and the vast number of instances of life, self-awareness has been a non-requirement. In fact, given how often we humans carry on like pork chops, dis on not just our fellow humans, but animals, plants and the entire planet in fact, on the basis of our beliefs, or stuff we think of, or things we perceive, through our 'higher self-awareness', there sounds like a very strong case that life as a global whole would be a whole heap better off without it.

So, why do we have it?

I have no idea. I dare say there are a dozen or more theories that even a five-minute web trawl can come up with. It does seem however that we, and everything else on this planet, is currently paying a pretty hefty price for it. What I do know is that you can also find on the internet squillions of pages talking about Artificial Intelligence, its pros and cons, the shape of the future and whether it will be the end of humanity. Fine, so sure, debate that while the current ‘intelligence’ is doing just fine, thank you very much, in hurtling towards its own demise and that of most of its fellow travellers.

Self-aware? You’re kidding me, right? Is it really a better intelligence than the dumb animal instinct that made the amazingly unaware, self-aware me, go eat honey and yoghurt?

You see, unlike the dumb animal stuff, self-awareness doesn’t actually make you do anything, necessarily. Other than, maybe, wring your hands at the fate of the planet and turn away to dump all that self-awareness into one or other of the innumerable oblivion methods we’ve devised to... ah... be like, totally non-aware, dude.

Weird or what? No, consequential.

Why is it so? Because we make it so.

Outstanding.


Now please go help some bees survive.