Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

by Carl Safina

Edward S. Curtis,

It is quite possible to be religious, to feel spiritual, without religion. The Latin root of the word “religion” means to be bound in relationship, to feel an obligation and a bond that one holds in reverence. The feelings come from sensing connections.

Potawatomi writer and scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Confucius, 551–479 B.C.E.), in ancient China. He emphasized family and kindness and gave humanity the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not wish for yourself.”

Peter Matthiessen

We are one point in the unfolding of all. We are not just a speck in time and the universe; we are the universe and all of time in a speck.

Zoroastrianism injected several monumental concepts into the world: that we exist in a dualistic universe of opposing good and evil forces; that a law-giving Creator of the spiritual and material world exists in a kingdom of justice; that this good Creator is opposed by an evil force; that people have free will to choose good or evil; that after death their acts will be subjected to a divine judgment; that a virgin will give birth to the savior of the world; and that this world will pass and a renewed existence will be inhabited only by goodness. Zoroaster’s views reverberated. From Zoroaster’s Persia to Egypt to the eastern Mediterranean, voyagers, traders, and travelers exchanged everything from goods to alphabets to ideas about existence, influencing Greek philosophers and eventually—most importantly—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Zoroaster gave us ideas in whose wash and waves our Westernized minds are still bobbing.

Most scholars believe that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were compiled (incorporating some much older material) in the fourth or fifth century B.C.E.—around the times of the major Greek thinkers. Likely through such Jewish Platonist philosophers as Philo of Alexandria, Plato’s divine crafter profoundly influenced Judaism and, later, Christianity. Plato had positioned his divine crafter as outside of space and time, creating the world we’re in. In the Bible’s Genesis, a similar God, existing before everything, outside of everything, creates Heaven, creates Earth, and then: God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them. . . . God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” And so at the Creation, the Abrahamic tradition pounds a cosmos-splitting dualist wedge, inaugurating a world created to be subjugated by its newest tenant. All is “put here for us,” making the Abrahamic tradition perhaps the most self-centered of all the world’s belief systems.

The newer religions of Christianity and, later, Islam would build their mansions right in the gap between Heaven and Earth, defining “faith” as a victory of things unseen over the world we see. A Christian definition of faith attributed to Paul the Apostle is “the conviction of things not seen.” Jesus tells a doubting Thomas, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing,” and Islam’s Qur’an says its text is “a guide for those mindful of Allah who believe in the unseen” (2:2–3). Plato’s cancellation of attention and reverence for the seen world became a matter of faith.

The modern scholar Heather Eaton observed, “Although each religious worldview has some perception that life does not end with death, the Christian tradition has potent otherworldly imagery that has both depreciated Earthly life and supported notions that salvation means from this world.”

When we give up our ideology, whether it be religion or something else, we find that we are on a journey to self-discovery within the universe and our place in it. If we are wise, we will follow the path.

All of life on Earth is one lit candle that has maintained itself and proliferated for nearly four billion years solely by the process of living cells dividing. A living thing can die, but non-living things cannot be brought to life. A living thing is enlivened only because it is part of the unbroken flame. The flame is sometimes called metabolism.

Aliveness is not purely chemical or physical—it is emergent.

Life on Earth creates the most unique and extreme complexity yet detected in the universe.

When something is more than the simple sum of its parts, we might think about what matters. And everything that matters—all meaning—is more than the sum of parts.

Life is the most improbable thing in the universe.

A computer is merely complicated. Living organisms are complex.

Complexity creates unpredictability.

Components of a cell act on their own to create the concert of the functioning cell. This is what Schrödinger meant by “events which are a paragon of orderliness.” By self-propagation and self-differentiation, cells themselves diversify into tissue and organs and organisms. Organisms make up species, which exist within and because of community interactions and dynamic dependencies. Life helps to create the planetary conditions necessary for its own survival, from altering the atmosphere by producing oxygen, to plants and fungi creating soil, to creating regional weather

as do rainforests, to the madness of a coral reef, to animals busily building nests and storing food. Living things can respond to contingencies by exercising options, using chance encounters to their advantage. Even the very concept of advantage and disadvantage applies only to living things. Machines do not create conditions suitable for their functioning, do not create themselves, make their own parts, do not self-propagate, do not form communities, do not self-evolve or self-diversify. A more basic difference distinguishes the living. Living things have purpose: to stay alive, to create more life, to adapt to a world that likewise adapts to their presence in the world. Cedars or spiders are always busy doing things for themselves, in their own interest. No machine has purpose or self-interest. A machine has merely a use. Only aliveness creates conditions for meaning.

a cosmos aware of itself, capable of wonder.

Owls and other non-human animals know things, as Ben Kilham has said, while we believe things. We are the only animal capable of absorbing centuries of illogic; of perpetuating delusional thinking; and of acting out fervently and violently those things for which there is no evidence, or that evidence, with blinding incandescence, refutes. For millennia the main project of Western thought has been to labor to be who we are not, to loathe our natural selves, to designate and denigrate all “others,” and to disregard our world.

You take part of a system . . . then you sing a false pattern into the whole. The curse is a deception made real.”

power in the hands of the unwise is danger.

“Naming is the beginning of justice.” Justice means to get what is deserved. For most creatures, what is deserved is the chance to live freely. Injustice begins in misperception, fear, and domination. Justice begins in recognition of relatedness.

There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough There is no curse greater than the desire for gain. Therefore, whosoever knows what is enough will always have enough.

After a career studying the human brain, Jill Bolte Taylor experienced her own near-fatal stroke (described in her book My Stroke of Insight and her online TED talk). While she was losing her sense of who she was, she was feeling, she says, that “my soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea. . . . I was completely entranced by feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience.” She believes that a wise but seldom experienced part of our mind recognizes “this marvelous planet, which sustains our life. It perceives the big picture, how everything is related, and how we all join together to make up the whole.”

Predator and prey are less enemies than partners in a dance. There’s killing, yes, but neither of these unifying opposites destroys the other. A yin and a yang making things whole, maintaining dynamic balances.

Humans do what they value doing. We are who we keep choosing to be.

A PAUSE HERE TO SHED some light on light. In the former world, light on Earth originated almost solely from the sun, with a meager assist from other stars. Moonlight is sunlight reflected. Wildfires and volcanoes generated some light, but trivially. Fireflies and phosphorescent mushrooms, yes, but they’re hardly a night-light. Phosphorescent sea plankton, jellies, and the glowing bacteria wielded by a few fish and squid offer no night guidance to land-bound beings. And none of that small constellation of glowing beings could have powered photosynthesis, by which the world uses light to create living matter. The light for Earth that created life on Earth was solely sun-sourced. That remains essentially true, despite city nights and fishing fleets visible from space. The business of “light” is strange. And “sight,” very strange indeed. “Light” is not a property of those particular wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum. What makes them “light” is something that happens only within nervous systems equipped with organs capable of reacting to certain wavelengths by creating coded nerve impulses, then interpreting the impulses. What we

call light strikes our eyes only; none reaches our brain. In the back of an eye, the retina consists of several layers of differing cells with differing functions. When particular wavelengths strike, these cells create impulses channeled to the optic nerve. The optic nerve carries not the wavelengths—not the “light”—but only the electrochemical signals. Next, from the encrypted encoding that the optic nerve delivers, specialized sections of that amalgamated collection of neurons and functions that we call the “brain” construct a three-dimensional facsimile of the world in space. These illusions, we experience as light and sight. The images are so convincing, we feel that we are seeing out. We use this grand illusion to navigate at high speed, to catch or strike objects in motion, to detect someone we might one day love, or even to store a memory, a retrievable reconstructable imagined image of something fond or feared. Human optic nerves do not encode impulses from the infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths adjacent to humanly visible light, but some other animals see these colors exquisitely well. Human difficulty seeing at night, and the sensation of “darkness” itself, results from particular limitations of our primate optic system, limits easily breached by the optic systems of nocturnal beings such as owls. Plants, lacking nervous systems and visual receptors as we understand them in animals, almost certainly have no ability at all to perceive sensations of light, despite...

Buried within at least one galaxy is a sparkling planet that has spawned an explosion of tiny glittering flecks capable of looking out and watching themselves perform. Minds. We are the universe aware of itself.

Think about this: WE ARE THE UNIVERSE AWARE OF ITSELF!

SCIENCE IS how the universe is beginning to understand itself.