Animals Are People

A chapter from Animals Are People by Peter Morville

Chapter 21

As twilight fades into night, my senses heighten. The moon is shrouded in clouds, yet still I can see clearly. We are in the hayfield, woods to the right. Ahead of us, beyond the pasture fence, is the pond, dark and still. A gentle breeze warns of coyotes. But they are miles away. No cause for alarm, for now. I hear everything. The symphony of frogs, a choir of crickets, the haunting call of a barred owl, a mouse rustling dry leaves, a truck in the distance, the nibbles of each of my three babies. It’s time to bed down. But my little ones are loving on the clover. So I let them be.

A pickup trundles down our dirt road. We’re on the far side of the hayfield, over a hundred yards away, so no worries. There’s a soft plop. My ears rotate. I hear the ripples of the muskrat as he swims. And then I’m blind. It’s not too dark. It’s too bright. I freeze. I can’t move. I can’t see my babies!

I sense a separation. My terror splits us. I know what she doesn’t. A man in the truck is spotlighting us, while his buddy lines up a kill shot. It’s move or die. But I can’t move. It’s not my body. My instinct for flight drowns all reason. My mind nudges hers. We step to the side. The rifle blasts.

We run for the woods.

Fuck! Are my babies okay? It happened so fast. I mean, her babies, I guess. I’m in bed, soaking in sweat, and I am so fucking angry. The truck races past our house. I know it’s them. Bastards! Minutes later, I’m in the field, sweeping my flashlight back and forth — no body, nor sign of blood. I think I saved the mom and her three babies. I know I did. Either that, or I’m batshit crazy, and it was all just a dream.

Class begins, and still I feel like a deer in the headlights. I want to tell Inari. But it’s too absurd. Not only did I inhabit the mind of a white tail deer, but I made her move. I wouldn’t believe me. Why in the hell should Inari? I need to get a grip. They have enough chaos to deal with already.

“Jo, I’ve considered your idea, and I’m in. Let’s turn my boring philosophy text into a novel. Our conversations plus your animal dreams and illicit activism will make quite a story. We must change names to protect the guilty. It’s a manifesto. Not a confession. Jo, what do you think?”

“I’m happy as a puppy with two peckers! Seriously, Inari, I am so excited. We can start next week when you’re here.”

“The good news is my part is mostly done. You can use my first draft and lecture notes. You know, Jo, I’ve long believed that books change lives, but you made me grok the power of story. A reader invites a writer into their mind. The writer’s story, a stream of consciousness conjured only with words, plunges the reader into an alien umwelt. And this enchanting experience, this consensual hallucination — it changes the mind of the reader, forever. It’s not hyperbole to say words are spells. It’s magical, Jo.”

“Yes. It’s the magic of Narnia.”

“Jo, I want you to weave our philosophical arguments and your visions and adventures into a world changing story. Wittgenstein says, ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ Let’s you and I prove him wrong. Let’s make it obvious to everyone that animals are people —”

Inari coughs and can’t stop. Using the respirator to breathe, they raise their right hand, asking me to wait. A minute or so passes. I hate this fucking disease. They are a good person. It’s not fair. Inari drops the mask, breathes, then looks at me, and shrugs. “Sorry. I talk too much.”

Inari has no patience for sympathy. It’s that stiff upper lip. So I feign calm, and I carry on. “I’m excited to write our novel, Inari. But can we discuss the premise that animals are people? Dad and I had a fight about it. We patched things up. Mostly. But I wish I had explained it better.”

“Sure. Where did you get stuck?”

“Dad said that a person is a human. I didn’t admit it at the time, but that’s the first definition I found.”

“Jo, when I say that ‘animals are people,’ it’s a gentle provocation. I’m asking folks to question words, categories, and beliefs. Our everyday vocabulary is imprecise. Meaning depends on context. A company is a person by law. A dog is food by custom. Philosophy asks us to clarify intent. When I say animals are people, what I mean is, every animal is an individual, a sentient being who thinks and feels, a person who deserves respect.”

“Animals have all the attributes of personhood. That’s what I told Dad. But he just doesn’t see it.”

“Culture binds and blinds, as do language, law, and labor. Everything in your dad’s life tells him animals are things. A farm is a business. Meat is a product. A cow is property.”

“How do you change culture?”

“I don’t know. But I can tell you where to start. Remind yourself that it hasn’t always been this way. Our ancestors saw animals as people. This truth lives on in the languages of indigenous peoples. Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us that in the Potawatomi language, ‘There is no itfor nature.’”

Inari stops — swallows twice, breathes deep — and, to my enormous relief, resumes speaking without a coughing fit.

“Kimmerer says, ‘living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t.’ Jo, all creatures were our kindred, until Aquinas and Descartes stole their souls.”

“Inari, what if we flip the script? It’s obvious that animals are people, so the burden of proof falls to the deniers.”

“Jo, I wish it were so easy. But animals are people is a claim to consciousness, which is notoriously hard to prove, and just so happens to be today’s topic. So speak to me of Nicholas Humphrey and blindsight.”

“He studied consciousness at Cambridge by cutting holes in the skulls of cats and monkeys, and mutilating their brains. He noticed one of the monkeys whose visual cortex had been surgically removed could navigate the environment and interact with objects as if it was sighted. It was a mystery. How can one see without the brain region that governs vision? Even odder, the monkey didn’t appear to know that it could see. Nicholas Humphrey proposed blindsight, a theory that was later validated by studies of brain-injured humans. There are two pathways from the eye to the brain. The new one drives our conscious experience of vision, while the old path delivers perception without sensation. So, blindsight is insentient vision. You think you are blind. But you aren’t. It’s wild.”

“What does that prove about consciousness, Jo?”

“Humphrey says, ‘I think it’s quite possible that phenomenal consciousness arrived relatively late and long after cognitive consciousness was already in place. If that’s so, for much of history, our ancestors could have been cognitively conscious but not phenomenally conscious — conscious but insentient. And presumably the same could still be true of many animals today.’ Humphrey claims that the vast majority of animals are zombies, incapable of pleasure or pain, happiness or suffering.”

“That’s convenient for a man with a history of vivisection. Is this theory based solely on blindsight?”

“Humphrey says, ‘When animals seek sensations for sensations’ sake, it’s strong evidence that they are in fact sentient. Waterfall displays by chimpanzees, tobogganing by dogs, masturbation by ducks.’”

“So we know that an octopus isn’t sentient if she doesn’t masturbate? Blimey! Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Jo, is it binary — a select few experience life, while most are automata with the moral status of a clock?”

“There’s a hierarchy. As ‘sensitives,’ starfish and slugs are instinctual, whereas ‘sub-sentients’ such as frogs and octopuses are intelligent. They think but don’t feel. On top are ‘sentients’ like dogs, chimpanzees, parrots, and humans. And there’s a spectrum. Humphrey says, ‘Helen Keller, being both blind and deaf, was arguably less phenomenally conscious than other normal humans.’”

“Well, isn’t that special.”

“Inari, blindsight is interesting. But Humphrey’s argument that most animals are zombies is pure sophistry. It’s motivated reasoning. And he knows it. He confesses that his experiments had ‘a worrying power dimension,’ and he says, ‘I was valuing my curiosity about how the monkey’s brain works over the monkey’s interest in enjoying the use of its brain.’ The man is a sociopath.”

“Ask not what they believe, but what their belief justifies. So tell me about Daniel Dennett.”

“It’s as if René Descartes woke up in a horrible mood after being dead for a few hundred years.”

“Such cheek! How so?”

“Dennett agrees with Descartes that animals are automata. And then some. He says, ‘We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.’ Dennett claims that sentience is an illusion, and that there is no self.”

“I trust he’s not quoting Buddha. Jo, what makes Dennett believe, I think, therefore I am not?”

“Dennett sets up substance dualism as a straw man, trading Descartes’ theory of the pineal gland as the seat of the soul — the organ in the brain where the magical joining of mind and body occurs — for his multiple drafts model. He says, ‘There is no single, definitive stream of consciousness, because there is no central headquarters, no Cartesian theater where it all comes together,’ and ‘all varieties of perception, indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity, are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs.’”

“Jo, his word salad is hard to digest. What does it mean?”

“Our brains are computers. And self is an illusion. It’s a trick we play by using language to talk to ourselves. But he’s the one turning tricks. Dennett defines consciousness as narrative, as if our sensations and emotions don’t exist. I seriously wonder if Dennett is a zombie! On the bright side, he says we can live forever. Since ‘you are the program that runs on your brain’s computer,’ it’s possible in theory to upload your consciousness to the cloud.”

“The only trouble with his claim is — the brain is not a computer, the self is inseparable from body-environment, and subjective, conscious experience is all that matters.”

“He says access consciousness is introspection. Our narratives are accessible to cognition. And phenomenal consciousness is sensation and emotion. We experience qualia: the taste of wine, the pain of fire, the blueness of sky. After he splits consciousness in two, he performs his magic trick. Dennett makes experience vanish. He claims there are no qualia, only ‘dispositional states of the brain.’ So, Inari, all that matters to you, doesn’t exist to Dennett.”

“Jo, what does his belief justify?”

“Man’s dominion over animals. If the self is made of words, those who can’t talk aren’t conscious. Dennett says, ‘languageless animals’ can’t suffer like us, as suffering is ‘having one’s life hopes, life plans, life projects blighted by circumstances.’ It’s as if the man never felt pain!”

“So, a bat is an automaton?”

“Dennett savages Nagel. He claims it’s not like anything to be a bat, since ‘we know that bats don’t talk.’ It’s so dumb. We don’t need words to feel. And bats do talk. They talk to each other about food, sex, and status. As we speak, scientists are using artificial intelligence to decode bat language. Inari, that’s what drives me batshit crazy. Dennett is so damn confident — and so bloody wrong!”

“Tell me about David Chalmers.”

“He says that while Daniel Dennett may be a zombie, most of us are not, and ‘a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being.’ Chalmers is focused on phenomenology and the hard part of the mind-body problem — how can a physical system give rise to conscious experience? If the mind arises from the brain, how and why? Is it self-organization by emergence? Does ‘I’ belong in the same category as a flock of birds? Chalmers says consciousness is ‘the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.’ In contrast to Dennett, David Chalmers displays humility and curiosity.”

“Is it like something to be a bat?”

“Yes. He says, ‘there is probably a continuum of conscious experience from the very faint to the very rich.’ So, sentience is spectral. Chalmers even admits the possibility of conscious machines. He suggests ‘wherever there is information, there is experience,’ and he asks, ‘what is it like to be a thermostat?’ It’s a form of panpsychism, the belief that everything in the universe has a mind.”

“What does Chalmers say about quantum mechanics?”

“He says that it’s nearly as hard a problem as consciousness. And both mysteries feature an observer. With respect to Schrödinger’s cat, Chalmers says, ‘The only remotely tenable criterion that has been proposed is that a measurement takes place when a quantum system affects some being’s consciousness.’”“Jo, the relationship of mind and matter is unknown. Sentience is a grand mystery. Let’s end there. Jo, I know that consciousness is hard going, but you’re doing great. I’m proud of you. I’ll see you soon — in Virginia.”

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A chapter from Animals Are People by Peter Morville