Being An Animal
Intelligent Action
It is hard to know what to make of our universe, for there is nothing to compare it with.
We can conceive of universes similar to our own but with different histories, and of universes that run under different regimes of physical laws and constants, but no other universe is observable. Our guesses are just the playthings of our imagination
Life was born on our planet when, early in its history, bands of molecules fell into a pattern where, simply by behaving in the way that was natural to them, more and more molecules just like them were created. A game had begun where the aim was to make new players and the reward of success was to keep on playing.
The first players of this game had a practical intelligence. Their actions built order into the world, for the moves that were rewarded were those that manipulated molecules with precision, channelling energy and building precisely the forms that the players needed to keep on playing.
Over thousands of millennia, the game of life evolved and splintered. New families of players entered the fray. But death and extinction were a constant presence. Only the most skilled lineages of players could continue.
Sentience
For the first few billions of years, all life’s intelligence was blind. Complex cells evolved, then multicellular organisms, but the order-building that was transforming the planet had no awareness of what it was doing. Plants just grew. Animals just ate and digested. Symphonies of action resounded, unheard.
Some creatures developed central nervous systems that coordinated complex behaviours, but even this was part of an automatic channel of intelligence.
It was only when animals with complex brains evolved that a new phenomena appeared. Decision-making was needed at the level of the whole animal, for an animal can’t hunt and hide at the same time. To make the best choices, information from many perceptual areas of the brain had to be integrated with information from the animal’s memories and information about the animal’s needs, such as how urgently the animal needed food or water. Somehow, in the binding together of all this information into a whole coherent enough to guide complex behaviours, an animal gains a felt sense of their situation as a whole. Animals began to experience their own lives and a new form of intelligence was born — a channel of awareness.
A Model Reality
Consciousness creates a lived-in replica of the animal’s environment. It renders colours, shapes and sounds. It positions objects in space. It gives the animal pictures of their surroundings that are a sufficiently good fit for objective reality for the animal to be able to treat their subjective modelling as if it was reality itself.
The animal can make decisions within their integrated sense of what the world is like that enable them to act highly intelligently. They can make apt choices of what to do next and steer themselves through complex environments.
The automatic channel still works away, taking care of everything that doesn’t need to be part of the top-level decision making. Enzyme production. Digestion. The beating of the heart. And the automatic channel feeds the animal’s awareness with information about the features of the world that are likely to be most salient.
Every animal has needs such as nutrition, rest, safety and procreation — everything that might enable the animal’s lineage to continue. What matters is the actions the animal takes to meet these needs, so its mental renderings must be felt as well as seen. There must be pain where the automatic channels senses damage, hunger where the need for nutrition becomes acute, and lust where the need for procreation comes to the fore.
Motivation
Since human beings are animals first and foremost, we spend our lives within our renderings of reality. And since our brains are all fairly similar, we can mostly agree on what the world is like.
We have similar sensations when we see an ocean sparkle on a sunny morning, or when we bite into ripe peaches, and we can mostly agree on what it’s like to feel pain or fear. We are all driven by similar emotions. We all have social needs to be met, so we crave a sense of belonging. We want respect and status. And we want our kin — and all others we empathise with — to flourish.
Our felt sense of the world propels us into action. Our awareness gets focused by our attention circuitry on the patch of world where we sense the most need for action. Then our awareness binds disparate streams of information together to shape that action. Possibilities are zipped up and acted out. We perform in ways that we couldn’t if we were limited to the automatic channel alone.
Death
Moment follows moment. Day follows day. We experience and we act. Experience and act.
Sometimes the most pressing need is rest so we sleep. Sometimes it is to escape a threat, or to be appreciated. We are constantly matching our felt needs with opportunities for action.
But, as with all creatures, our time within this world is limited. If we are lucky enough to escape premature death, we will enter old age and our powers will decline. We will weaken, physically and mentally, until we reach a point where we’re no longer able to sustain our own heartbeats.
Hopefully we’ll be glad of having been a protagonist at the centre of one line of real world story — one particular creature’s passage through this world.