The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

At times, when a cephalopod is resting, its skin will flow through color and textural displays that appear unconscious—as if the electrochemical flux of its thoughts were projected onto its surface. In this state it is truly like a mind floating, unsheathed by flesh, in the open ocean.

And yet we still do not understand what happens when we read a sentence. Meaning is not neuronal calculus in the brain, or the careful smudges of ink on a page, or the areas of light and dark on a screen. Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world.

Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even “prove” it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences—what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love—as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A self-referential loop. Something out of nothing. None of these are satisfactory. Definition eludes us.

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

Maybe the octopus isn’t the only one who leads a solitary life.

In consciousness? But they still do not agree as to whether I am truly conscious or not—though I believe I am.”

Language is abstract, yes—but it emerges from real relations with real things in the world and bears the traces of that ancient relationship. These traces will be the keys to deciphering the symbols of another species—if only we can recognize them.

This is the mystery we thrust ourselves into: A single neuron is not conscious of its existence. A network of billions of unconscious single neurons is. These monads living in a world without perception become a being that perceives, thinks, and acts. Consciousness lies not in neurons, but in a sophisticated pattern of connectivity.

we have no clear definition of consciousness—even though it must be the most important element of our own experience on the planet. Why do we fear so much in the other this thing we so little understand in ourselves?

“Or a monster in the Latin sense,” Kamran said. “Monere. A warning. A portent. After all, if your theories are correct, this animal may be to a large degree a product of the Anthropocene and our exploitation of ocean resources. A species born, or at least accelerated, out of the stresses we have placed on its environment.” “Thinking of them that way isn’t right, either. Their existence isn’t for us. We can’t treat them like a portent or a symbol. Whatever they mean to us, their existence is their own.

It is not just the symbols we use in our language that are arbitrary—it is what we choose to signify with them. We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place. In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.

Only recently has science begun to look beyond the physical structures of life to the relationships humans have with nonhuman beings in our environment—to our immersion in and reliance upon nature, which persists no matter how much we try to push it away with our constructed, unnatural worlds. Science has finally begun to admit that the nature we are immersed in also communicates, has values, and strives. We have finally taken the first steps toward truly observing life—not at a distance, as its masters, but in fellowship, recognizing a part of our selves.

We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.

Perhaps this is why humans are driven to create minds besides our own: We want to be seen. We want to be found. We want to be discovered by another. In the structured loneliness of this modern world, so many of us are passed over by our fellow humans, never given a second glance.

“Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity.

of it. That’s all. Consciousness is awareness. I would say, Don’t doubt yourself—but the fact you have a self that can doubt it is a self proves the existence of that self. So, go ahead and doubt yourself.”

You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it. What more is there? Being human means perceiving the world in a human way. That’s all. So, you are human.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

We invent whatever we are capable of inventing.

But we can’t stop inventing, can we? We are compelled to invent. It is written into our DNA. Man is the technological animal.

“So you see, it is not human beings that are controlling technology—rather, it is the other way around. Technology has always been an unstoppable force, a creature evolving out of our need to invent—a creature feeding that need and creating the shapes and possibilities of our lives, shaping us to its purposes.”

We are, and have always been, a part of the world. We do not stand above it. We are “involved” with the world. This word has a sense not just of participating, not just of complication, but also of a curling inward, a coiling we call “involution.” We are coiled into the world, nestled inside its processes, wound into its forms.

That’s the thing about humans—we think everything is about us. We attribute everything to our own actions.

Symbolic language retains meaning even in the absence of physical points of reference: the word “tree” does not need a real tree to be present to communicate its meaning. Symbols form systems that remain stable from one generation to another. Even for centuries. These complex systems take on their own significance. In the end, it does not even matter if the Greeks burned Troy. What matters is that the story is communicable and reproducible. It has a meaning and a life of its own. Symbols are forever. Or, at least, for as long as there is a society capable of interpreting them and unleashing their communicative power.