‘Moby Dick’ – My Nemesis?

This is going to have to be a personal post rather than purporting to be a more abstract lit crit or review of said novel. I want to start more generally. A-levels seemed to be structured in an interesting way from an external perspective, that at some point they would confront the student or pupil with a particularly challenging, testing incident which almost seemed designed to force them to make a decision regarding their possible future or otherwise in that field. This may of course be paranoia, but if it is, it might still make a lot of sense to do this. For me, both English Literature and Biology seemed to do this, actually at the same time, although RE didn’t so far as I can tell, unless there’s something about my approach to such a subject, which after all has similarities with Philosophy, which meant that I breezed through whatever it was supposed to be. It may have been Biblical criticism. Alternatively, maybe it’s just that exposing oneself to a rigorous, wide-ranging and relatively advanced area of study just will tend to test one and is simply more likely to provide such hurdles. I’ve mentioned in passing that my experience at Pegwell Bay was nasty enough to persuade me that marine biology was not my future, but I won’t dwell on that because I want to focus more on what was happening at the same time and my response to it.

The Pegwell Bay experience was in fact linked to the ‘Moby Dick’ one. Since I was busy away trying to do fieldwork in a muddy patch of beach over in Thanet, I didn’t get informed of the summer reading for A-level English Literature. It wasn’t all bad by the way: there were cuttlefish eggs washed up on the beach containing fetuses which changed colour according to their background, and it may also have borne in certain facts about me to one of my biology teachers which were helpful when he became year head for writing my reference for UCCA. However, a couple of things came together, one of which was that I totally failed to read the set novel for the summer, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I also failed to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, but that was easier to remedy because it’s an anthology. ‘Homage To Catalonia’ was also involved now I come to think of it, and I managed to bluff my way through that quite effectively. The same was unfeasible for Melville’s brick of a novel. I haven’t re-read it for the purposes of this blog, but I have listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests going on about it and other things, and one comment made on it is ironically probably true of my life. The reviewer said that reading that novel was likely to completely change one’s life and attitude towards literature. Ironically, that’s entirely true of me because what it did was persuade me not to want to have anything at all to do with mainstream literature ever again, and this has been a major theme in my life ever since, with one exception in the form of considering writing my MA dissertation on the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s plays, which I didn’t follow through, and thereby hangs another unrelated tale too boring to relate here.

I first heard of ‘Moby Dick’, probably in November 1975 when David Attenborough mentioned it on ‘Fabulous Animals’ as a story where a white sperm whale is pursued by the one-legged Captain Ahab who dies holding on to the harpoon impaled in their side. It seemed to be some kind of sea story, something on which I was quite keen on at the time – Flannan Isle comes to mind, and the mysterious fate of the Waratah. There was nothing in my experience which should’ve put me off it, although I never considered reading it back then. And of course I unfortunately never considered reading it when I was supposed to either. It’s a dramatic life change to shift from being so enthusiastic and engrossed in mainstream novels to being utterly hostile and disillusioned about them. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the sheer length of ‘Moby Dick’ and the circumstances surrounding my failure to read it, but it was also observed by my O-level English teacher that whereas the earlier course did a good job of encouraging love of literature, the later one tended to kill it stone dead, such that even decades later someone exposed to it is happily using the cliché “stone dead” rather than using my imagination a bit more.

I still don’t really know what to make of the novel. It’s been observed that it has strong homoerotic overtones and that it probably isn’t post hoc eisegesis to read that into it. “Ishmael” shares a bed with Queequeg early on in the story and the man’s world described almost throughout lends itself to that too. Queequeg’s tattoos are also significant masculine adornment, and his unused coffin being decorated with them and later saving “Ishmael’s” life after the shipwreck, where he hugs the empty coffin until rescued. This seriously suggests that the references to “seamen” and “sperm” are absolutely meant as doubles entendres, and this is not a retroactive projection by bored schoolboys, but the actual “Moby Dick” title just seems to be a happy accident as the word “dick” wasn’t used that way back then. It seems strange that something so puerile-seeming could be incorporated into a popular mainstream novel of the nineteenth century without any comment, but maybe it was hidden in plain sight, as so many things are. It probably goes without saying that the whale in this is easily interpreted as a phallic symbol, and in fact just as many phalluses are unwanted and intrusive, the presence of this book in my life was also like that. It’s a massive erection, basically.

There used to be a whale fetus in a large jar in one of the biology labs. I always used to feel equally sad and fascinated about it. I expected that some unfortunate event had occurred to the mother, possibly in the Faroes, which had led to it falling into the school’s hands. The human skeletons which used to be present in state schools often also had dodgy origins and the one at mine was apparently eventually repatriated to its next of kin, which was actually two separate families as it was made up of two separate sets of human remains. I don’t know what happened to the whale, but I wonder if it might have been used by the English department in connection with the novel.

I’d long been fascinated by whales, and in fact cetaceans in general. The only ones I’d actually seen in the flesh except for the pilot whale were bottlenose dolphins, but there had been a lot of emphasis over the ’70s and ’80s that they were both magnificent and endangered, and in Britain they are of course the property of the Crown, like swans. It was what everyone used to associate with Greenpeace. Beyond that, as I’ve said before I used to be really into reading stories centred on other species such as ‘Watership Down’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ and many others. These don’t sanitise the lives of the animals concerned and there’s plenty of death and suffering in them. Anthropomorphism also varies. ‘Tarka the Otter’ probably does it the least out of these examples. I’ve talked about my “preganism” before on here. I wasn’t to go vegan for three years after reading the novel and at that point wasn’t even vegetarian although I’d considered it. However, I had already long since begun to adopt what I might call a biocentric attitude: that humans are members of the animal kingdom and not set apart in a manner which is different than the individual traits of any other species.

I read ‘Moby Dick’ with that mindset, and having that attitude makes it a really difficult read on top of the difficulty the book presents more generally. Whales are charismatic organisms associated with characteristics such as majesty, grace and beauty. Melville does attempt to acknowledge that in his writing, but when it comes down to it, ‘Moby Dick’ is basically about a group of men who go out and murder numerous beings for their livelihood. They’re basically contract killers, but their victims are also generally arbitrary, with the exception of Ahab and the White Whale. It isn’t even expedient that these individuals need to be gotten out of the way as it might be in war, espionage or organised crime. They’re not even on the level of drive-by shootings, which seem to be about demonstrating loyalty and how far a gang member is prepared to go. These murders are arbitrary and solely motivated by profit, and okay it may be a tough life and manly, dangerous work but it reflects an obliviously genocidal attitude towards the biosphere. All that said, there is some mitigation in that in a sense going out and murdering whales is more humane from a utilitarian perspective than killing buffalo, a comparison Melville doesn’t make because the big massacre didn’t happen until a couple of decades later, because a whale can have a mass of more than a hundred buffalo and only one of them dies to provide all that mass of material for food and industrial purposes. By contrast, murdering the nameless beasts exploited for their milk, or sheep and pigs requires a lot more deaths to produce the same amount of materials, so in a sense whaling is much less unethical than “livestock” farming, and this is reflected in the murder of pilot whales in the Faroes – it’s just the same as what happens in a slaughterhouse except that it takes place in the open for all to see rather than being hidden away as if we’re ashamed of it as a society. But I felt like I was being expected to empathise with characters carrying out genocide. Now that can happen of course, and I’m sure that there are plenty of works of art that attempt to force their audiences to throw their lot in emotionally with the “baddies”, as ’twere, but when this is done as far as I know this is more to give the readers pause for thought about humanising evildoers. I wouldn’t say there’s no element of this at all in the story but I still feel that Melville cannot bring himself to condemn the practice of whaling completely, and it’s hardly worth observing that this is because he’s a man of his times and culture. Likewise, I can’t step out of my life and times in considering this book, which raises the frequent question of universality.

Melville does not, however, portray whaling as a morally neutral or positive activity. In chapter 105, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?’, he does contemplate the possibility of whales becoming extinct at a remarkably early stage for that mindset. He compares the blood-soaked lower decks and crew as the corpse’s flesh is rendered to being in Hell, in Chapter 96, ‘The Try-Works’. This, however, also draws a parallel between this industrialised work and the “dark Satanic mills”, so it isn’t that the rendering toil is particularly infernal just because of what they’re essentially doing so much as it being infernal along with, say, working down a coal mine or in a steelworks. Hence industrial labour itself is a form of damnation, and certainly those who work in slaughterhouses are doing “proper” work and also the dirty work for a carnist population who seem to prefer to be oblivious, and the existence of factory ships out in the ocean carrying out the same dirty work is similar. But I don’t know whether Melville shows them in the same light.

I suspect that the White Whale is supposed to be a tabula rasa. I think it’s possible that the whiteness is supposed to be like a screen onto which diverse things can be projected. Chapter 42 is called ‘The Whiteness Of The Whale’. Without reading it, the concept of White fragility, though highly anachronistic, comes to mind, as does Han Kang’s ‘White Book’. Melville himself seems to portray whiteness as blankness and makes it horrifying, evoking the polar bear, the paleness of death and going on to connect it to cosmic indifference, and this might actually be the key to the whole book. Captain Ahab sees a rival in the White Whale, but none of the other captains or any of the crew think that way. He’s trying to make the whale personal when in fact the sheer vastness and whiteness make the true nature of the animal beyond comprehension, like the Universe. One gets the impression that “Ishmael” and Melville are both wrestling to make sense of the whale as a concept, and that the sheer length of the book is an attempt to render his narrative incomprehensible in the same way as the whale, and by extension the Universe, are. To the White Whale, Ahab is at most a tiny figure standing on a ship at the top of the world, dimensionally marginal and maybe not even that. Maybe to the White Whale, Ahab doesn’t even exist and there’s just the threat of the harpoon. The whiteness also acts as a mirror on which the characters see reflected their dominant attitude: anger, fear and awe. It’s also like the glare of the whiteness obliterates distinctions between good and evil, humanity and nature and sanity and madness.

One frustrating element of my English course’s, and in fact the more popular, approach to the novel is that the long quasi-encyclopaedic sections on “cetology”, as Melville puts it, are padding and can be skipped, because to my mind at the time, and possibly still, they’re the best bit of the novel. All the protagonists, human ones at least, emotional realism, interaction and dialogue mercifully take a back seat and finally we get to read something interesting and engaging. Even so, I think they’re there for two reasons. One is to ensure the novel is whale-sized and the other is to show a different way of attempting to encompass the cetacean and metaphorically the newly scientifically analysed natural world. This also fails. I may find it superficially comforting through systematisation, as I often do, but it’s not deep in the way Melville wishes it to be, and he acknowledges his failure as something common to us all.

Then there’s the issue of Starbuck, which nowadays is more shocking to me than it was then. Starbuck is the Pequod’s first mate and a Quaker, the first to recognise that Ahab is insane. He says of Ahab’s monomanic quest, “Vengeance on a dumb brute, [. . .] that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”. Starbuck is the voice of reason, supposedly, and the moral compass. However, considering they’re out there murdering countless whales, it seems to me that the entire enterprise is operating in a moral vacuum. I don’t understand how a Quaker can be involved in something like this. I presume it isn’t supposed to be realistic but I do believe they were involved in whaling. They also owned slaves, and while I’m aware that the past is not like the present, I would also hope that there are certain values which would persist and the fact that this actually happened is almost enough to make me give up hope for humanity. Quakers, although I’m sure they acknowledge their failings, are supposed to be examples to others and carry the torch of progress. I also seem to recall that the ship is owned by Quakers: it’s a Quaker business. That’s enough to make me want to puke to be honest. Quakers as mass murderers, and that’s probably entirely realistic for the mid-nineteenth century CE.

I have to say that in spite of all this I found the names “Pequod” and “Queequeg” tantalising because they seem to betray a pattern of sound from the same language, possibly one spoken in Nantucket, and I wanted to know what that language was. It’s quite distinct from languages spoken elsewhere on the continent, unsurprisingly, which does at least show some respect for the distinct ethnicities the White people genocided and oppressed. Queequeg represents non-Western spiritual completeness, which is a bit like the noble savage myth but you can’t really expect English language literature from getting on for two centuries ago not to be racist, so unlike the rest I can look past that. Entertaining it, there is the well-known difference between the White men killing the buffalo and removing only small parts of their bodies and the more reverent and ecologically sound approach taken by their previous killers. It might be worth mentioning that Queequeg may be from a less homophobic culture than “Ishmael”, and therefore that the homoerotic overtones in their relationship might be less repressed for him, and there’s also the contrast between their friendship and Ahab’s animosity with the whale.

One notable feature of the book is that it purports to be the Great American Novel and is not set in America but on the ocean. It begins in North America but quickly leaves it, and there may be something about the idea that America actually is the world or aims to dominate it in that approach. The ocean is also the Wild West in a sense, unbounded, vast and full of potential. Twentieth century SF author Barry M Longyear also extended the notion of Manifest Destiny, this time into the cosmos, though in a manner conscious of colonialism, and in a way this novel is a precursor to that, although that potential is still quite nebulous at this point, perhaps reflecting the tabula rasa and projections made upon the whale. It makes the US feel like an infant nation looking forward to growing up and achieving great things.

As you can see, I haven’t got a lot to say about ‘Moby Dick’ and what I have said is highly contaminated by my own views and doesn’t seem germane to the novel. To me its role is probably as a whiteboard on which to discern what went wrong with my literary appreciation. I find that I can’t read it without being overcome with a kind of moral repulsion at its acceptance of the outrage against cetaceans as a backdrop to the story. This is partly admitted by Melville, but it also says something about me. You’d fail to appreciate Shakespeare if you couldn’t look past the fact that he wrote in an early modern Western society where Christianity was dominant, patriarchy and the monarchy were unquestioned and democracy was a minor detail of ancient Greek history. I do know someone who is in fact unable to appreciate him for these exact reasons, but I do enjoy his work. I encounter two basic problems with mainstream literary novels. One is that I tend to make too many associations and am unable to give them different weights, which is similar to my inability to recognise my own strengths and weaknesses. The other, though, is illustrated by my response to ‘Moby Dick’, namely that I can’t see past my moral outrage and am dominated by my immediate impressions of a piece of writing. Maybe in the end I am myself like Ahab and I can’t see past the white whale that is mainstream literary fiction. Maybe it’s a tabula rasa to me on which I end up projecting anything arbitrarily, or maybe it mirrors myself.

Expanding The Circle

I’m in the middle of writing a post about graph theory which has got rather bogged down, partly due to me not knowing that branch of maths as well as I’d like. It will probably see the light of day eventually. In a linked set of thoughts, I’ve become interested in the ways living things in general send signals through their own networks, or graphs in fact. Neural nets, biological ones.

This is not entirely new for this blog as I’ve discussed nervous systems before on here, but this time I want to make it broader and more focussed on their capabilities. There has recently been a movement adjacent to veganism which attempts to define bivalves as vegan because adherents see them as non-conscious by virtue of their neural anatomy. Before I launch into the scientific side of all this, I want to make an ethical point. The philosopher Peter Singer wrote a book called ‘The Expanding Circle’. I have a copy of it somewhere and it makes broad points about ethics, as his work usually does, focussing on the idea of increasing the range of entities which we should consider morally speaking. There’s been a general trend in this direction in the West which has led to such progress as the Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and so forth. Ethical vegetarianism begins to expand this horizon to other species, and veganism expands it further in the sense of the consideration given to those species. In general, it’s important to be suspicious of one’s biasses if they happen to support one’s own identity over others’.

So, there are several things needing to be addressed here. One is the nature of signalling systems in different organisms without regard to their consciousness or otherwise. Another is the “hard problem”, as it’s called, of consciousness. It might make more sense to deal with that bit first.

Okay, so there is a problem with consciousness because it seems to be impossible to explain. I was startlingly alerted to the shenanigans associated with this as a postgraduate when a particular academic, not Nick Land for once, informed me that they didn’t believe members of other species were conscious because they didn’t use language or some other sign-based system to communicate. This is an example of the logocentrism of continental philosophy, and actually even much analytical, and is again suspiciously convenient because it basically concludes that the voiceless have nothing to complain about. To be honest, this was one of the most disgusting things I’d ever heard. It means, for example, that nobody has any duties towards completely non-verbal adults because they’re simply not conscious. The turn of the ’80s and ’90s was quite a traumatic and also enlightening couple of years for me which led to disillusionment regarding academic philosophy, or at least how it’s practiced at Margaret Thatcher’s favourite university.

I could long-windedly plough through the whole thing but just to summarise:

• Psychophysical dualism is flawed because of the difficulty of interaction between physical and non-physical realms.
• Physicalism has the drawback that replacing a description of a physical state with one of a mental state doesn’t preserve the meaning of the description.
• Behaviourism denies the existence of the internal mental states which we all know we have.
• Functionalism would mean that a big committee room passing around bits of paper to replicate the behaviour of a person through carefully analysed internal brain activity would have to have its own individual consciousness.
• Anomalous monism is kind of okay but the problem for me here is that I’m too intimately involved with supervenience and lost control of the creative process.

So my solution, of course, is that consciousness is a property of matter similar to magnetism in that whereas all atoms, ions and charged particles have their own magnetic fields, actual ferromagnetism only occurs in a few specially arranged structures of atoms, so a magnet has to consist either of a lump of iron or an alloy including rare earths (and possibly some other arrangements I don’t know about), and likewise consciousness can only become manifest and produce observable phenomena in special arrangements such as a living, conscious human central nervous system. In other words, panpsychism. Nothing else makes any sense I’m afraid.

Given this, then, I have a problem. Living humans are conscious while awake. We have a certain kind of system or arrangement of the matter making up our bodies conferring consciousness. If you like, and you believe in souls in the sense of entities which exist in the same way as bodies do, maybe you can instead see this arrangement as like a radio transmitter/receiver. My own view of what a soul is differs from that. In any event, another arrangement of matter could serve the same purpose, just as there are iron magnets and also rare earth magnets. The fact that we know we’re conscious and have a particular kind of nervous system, and possibly other body parts such as our endocrine system which overlaps in structure and function, the nervous system in the intestines and the like, doesn’t mean that other systems and structures cannot be conscious. I’ll be considering those structures and systems here.

People say “I don’t eat anything with a face”. Well, something with a face is at least in that way a little like a human. That seems to me to be a form of prejudice, because not all animals have faces. Bivalves and sponges haven’t any. What we need to tease out here is whether there’s any reason to exclude some animals from consideration. I don’t think there is.

There are, first of all, important practical reasons for not eating bivalves. Shellfish allergies are common and can be caused by eating bad oysters. Being filter feeders, molluscs tend to concentrate both human pathogens and heavy metals. This last does make them nutritionally good sources of minerals, but it also makes them somewhat toxic. However, these are all practical considerations, not ethical, but it seems odd to pick on bivalves in particular when even carnists would be ill-advised to include them in their diets. I’ll start with them because they’re the animals most often quoted as possible exceptions for veganism.

Behaviourally, many bivalves clearly behave like other animals. Razor shells burrow deeper into sand to escape predators. Scallops swim away from predators by clapping their shells open and shut, shooting out jets of water. Some bivalves have eyes, up to ten apparently, and close when a shadow passes over them. Others monitor salinity and open and close accordingly, and they also open and close according to the tides, even if they’re in a tank hundreds of kilometres away from the sea, presumably because they can detect lunar gravity. They also close when exposed by the tide or receding waves to avoid desiccation, which they must therefore be able to detect. That’s at least four senses, and Aristotle said even humans only have five. Venus clams, cockles, trough shells, tellins and carpet shells all burrow into the sand and move down when the tide goes out. Tellins are not strictly filter feeders but vacuum the sand or mud around them to pick up microscopic food organisms. Razor shells and tellins can also detect vibration nearby, which warns them of approaching threats and to which they respond by burrowing very quickly downwards. Cuspidaria, which lives offshore, “hoovers” the sea bed like tellins but unlike them detects dead or dying animals to eat, which is once again active and purposeful behaviour. The nut shell only uses gills for breathing and drags itself across the sea bed. One species of scallop has tentacles permanently projecting from the shell and constructs an internal nest for their young, although this shouldn’t be taken to imply consciousness as it’s reminiscent of the build-up of endometrial tissue, i.e. not a conscious or intentional action. Piddocks and shipworms bore into clay, rock or wood, using their shells like drill bits, and piddocks squirt water when disturbed, even if just the rock nearby is tapped. One Venus clam also bores into rock. To be fair, plants also sometimes penetrate rock with their roots, so this may not indicate anything particularly mindful provided it’s also assumed that plants aren’t acting purposefully when they do that. Given all this, then, it doesn’t seem to me that bivalves as a class are just “plants”. They’re way more purposeful than we perceive plants to be, and they’re not passive, unlike say an arum lily or fig relying on trapped insects to get pollinated or pollinate others.

That’s all external stuff. It makes sense to infer that there are structures and systems in place which lead the animals to exhibit this quite sophisticated behaviour, and I’m tempted to suspect that those who advocate for the consumption of bivalves do so in ignorance of all this, maybe even wilful ignorance or assumption, and we all know what that does don’t we?

What, then, of the bivalve nervous system? I’m partly posting this out of interest but I should point out that this information, and probably much of the information I’m going to share later, was gained at a disturbingly high cost to the animals concerned, and just as we would show reverence and reticence at sharing information gained through torture and genocide, this should be taken with considerable seriousness. This isn’t just some casually interesting detail about bird migration or duckweed population dynamics gained in a non-invasive manner. However, we now have the information and what’s done is done, so it may as well be employed in a manner which helps as yet non-abused animals.

Zoologists categorise nervous systems into several categories according to their perceived complexity, but they are also substantially like each other. Studying the behaviour of a whole animal is by definition more holistic than considering the nervous system of that animal in isolation, which is quite an impoverished way of understanding the individual in question. There are also other control systems than just the nervous system, such as the endocrine system, and other forms of information storage. The basic principles of all nervous systems are the same. They involve the separation of internal and external environments by cell membranes which are elongated and along which electrical potentials occur due to differences in distribution of the same ions across the animal kingdom, usually sodium and potassium, which pass in and out of the cells involved. Sense organs pick up signals in the form of various types of energy which are converted into the same kind of information when transmitted along nerves, enabling information to be transmitted around the body. The signals are always “all or nothing”: they either happen or they don’t, and they don’t carry information through their strength but through the number and frequency of signals of the same level. In this way they’re basically digital rather than analogue in nature. The signal jumps between successive uninsulated points along the nerve fibre and is regenerated at those locations. Neurones always have elongated processes which are sometimes branched. They are supported by mechanically protective glial cells, and they communicate via synapses which release the contents of vesicles across these gaps contained in knobs at the ends of fibres. These are neurotransmitters chemically similar to each other in two classes. All of this is true across the animal kingdom and in those respects the human nervous system is similar to that of any other animal who actually possesses a nervous system. All that supports the notion that all animals with nervous systems are conscious, although there could be other reasons why they might not be.

The broad categories of nervous system are those consisting only of nerve nets and those with varying degrees of centralisation. However, and this is crucial, the brain itself is made up of nerve nets, which are of course more concentrated and centralised than in animals such as jellyfish whose nerve net ranges across the entire body. In the case of bivalves, most species have a pair of ganglia either – sorry, ganglia are usually swellings on nerves consisting of a number of neuronal bodies as opposed to their fibres – either side of the oesophagus, known as cerebropleural ganglia. One on each side is responsible for the sense organs and the other connects to the nerves for the mantle. There are also ganglia controlling the foot and there can be quite large ones for the viscera, particularly in swimming bivalves. If the animal also has siphons, these are also controlled by a set of ganglia. This is of course centralisation, and actually it reminds me of the basal ganglia of the human brain. All bivalves have light sensitive cells which can detect shadows falling on them and the eyes of scallops are based on retinae receiving light from dish mirrors like the mirror lenses used in astronomy and birdwatching photography. Hence the eyes can be quite complex. The ganglia around the oesophagus are also linked to each other in a ring, and this general arrangement is also found in the cephalopods such as the octopus.

I’ve realised that I haven’t spelt out the anatomy of molluscs in general and bivalves in particular, so here’s that. Molluscs tend to have various features, being primitively segmented but usually having lost that, unlike humans incidentally who are segmented, and their bodies are usually divided into five parts: the visceral hump, containing most of the organs; the mantle, a soft cover, often over the visceral hump and sometimes creating a body cavity which contains the gills; a foot, often used for locomotion (this is what snails slither on and forms tentacles in cephalopods including the cuttlefish, squid and octopus); the head and often a shell. As with most animals with heads, this has evolved because the animal moves in a particular direction and needs sense organs and a mouth at that end more than at the other, and this in turn leads to the development of a concentration of nervous tissue to analyse sense data and perform other tasks.

Bivalves are effectively squashed sideways, or “laterally compressed” as the term has it, like fleas and unlike head lice, and for that matter also like many fish. The sessile ones are lying on their sides, although as I’ve just talked about a lot of them are not sedentary at all, burrowing, boring or swimming.

Whether something is a brain or not is a judgement call. What we humans have in our heads is definitely a brain of course, although nowadays it’s actually kind of in the wrong place because we stand upright and our heads aren’t usually the first part of our bodies to enter an environment, but evolutionary commitments have been made. We have a bias because of our own anatomies. Bivalves don’t have heads, and consequently the centralisation of their nervous systems into a region which is close to specialised sense organs such as eyes, ears and tongues is unnecessary. Scallop eyes peep out through the gaps between the shell halves. The arrangement of nervous tissue in a bivalve is therefore less driven by such imperatives, and their nervous systems, although somewhat centralised near the mouth, are not primarily organised into a brain and nerve cords. However, they do have sophisticated nervous systems compared to many other animals such as jellyfish. Moreover, the same kinds of structures as are found in human brains are found more diffusely in bivalve nervous systems. Just because they aren’t gathered together in a head doesn’t mean they don’t work like a brain. The scallop eyes seem to be apt for some kind of sophisticated processing and to be honest they puzzle me a little because I can’t see what use they are to the animal. Human eyes begin to process vision in the retina, which is not just a projection screen, so maybe scallop eyes do the same. To what end I have no idea.

Given all that then, it really does seem like some form of denial that bivalves lack mental states. They’re certainly very different from vertebrates and even other molluscs, but that difference shouldn’t be taken to mean they aren’t worthy of respect. The measure is not how different we are but whether they can suffer.

A possible factor in other animals is symmetry. Vertebrates are bilaterally symmetrical and often have heads. However, there are at least five phyla which are not, namely porifera (sponges), placozoa, echinoderms and the two coelenterate phyla ctenophora and cnidaria. None of these animals really have heads because they can generally move in any direction, so they lack a front and a back. They’re radially symmetrical, and in the case of echinoderms pentaradiately so. The echinoderms, such as sea urchins, starfish, crinoids and sea cucumbers, are a lot more complex than the others and it shows in their nervous systems. Echinoderm nervous systems can do a lot more than those of the others, where they have them. Unlike bivalves, echinoderms can regenerate body parts when they’re severed, and in fact the severed part can sometimes regenerate the rest of the body, depending on how close to the centre the part extends. Consequently it might be slightly less unethical to experiment on starfish in certain ways, I suppose.

Anyway, these experiments have been done and it can be seen that starfish have unusual nervous systems. Their sensory nerves hardly move from the outer layer they form in. Human nerves are also ectodermal in origin but mainly end up further inside the body. The oral surface has motor neurones concerned with moving the arms and deploying, pacing and lifting the tube feet, which are coordinated with each other across the whole surface. Arms can also curl up and down, and a starfish can pull open a bivalve in this way to feast on the flesh within, so they’re extremely strong. There’s a central ring at the base of the arms. Signals seem to be sent both locally and across the body, so they’re a mixture of a simple neural net and a more centralised arrangement like vertebrate nervous systems. Echinoderms are in fact related to vertebrates, which explains the similar chemical composition of their neurones. This as such may be significant.

Like bivalves, echinoderms may lack brains but they also lack the need to have them. Sea urchins burrow, crawl and create latrines in their burrows to keep excreta out of their way. I’ve long thought that tribbles are like sea urchins, even to the extent of consisting substantially of reproductive organs by proportion. The crinoids, who are flower-like and may have stalks, are probably the closest relatives of the chordates, the stalk having possibly been ancestral to the tail. Whereas this has no bearing on the sophistication of the nervous system, there may be a chemical affinity due to the relatedness and this, depending on your view of consciousness, could be significant, because there is a controversial theory of consciousness called orchestrated reduction.

Within the prefrontal cortex in humans are pyramidal neurones, within which are microtubules made of a protein called tubulin. These are substantially composed of amino acids containing heterocyclic rings oriented in particular directions, including tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine. These rings are hexagonal arrangements of carbon atoms with alternating double and single electron bonds around the ring. One of the orbitals in these carbon atoms is a pi bond, i.e. a dumb bell shaped region of maximum probability of the electron’s rotation centred on the nucleus, and these are all lined up parallel to each other. This arrangement appears to be reliably disturbed by all general anaesthetics, i.e. anaesthetics which suspend consciousness, and for that reason some scientists and philosophers believe that this situation explains consciousness in a way which is linked to quantum phenomena. However, there are still problems with this. For instance, salva veritate is still impossible: this description, no matter how detailed, is clearly never going to be equivalent to a description of a conscious experience. They’re fundamentally different by nature. But suppose it is true. If so, perhaps consciousness can be confined to systems where this can occur. You may have noticed also that this description is incomplete. Other organs than nerves and brains also have microtubules, so the question arises of whether these are also conscious if this is true.

The mention of echinoderms brings up another point. So far, nervous systems are the only structures which have been considered, with the various characteristics mentioned earlier. However, nervous systems are not the only networks which can carry and process information, and echinoderm bodies contain another, unique, system which has that potential: the water vascular system. No other animals have this. It’s a system of tubes carrying fluid which can control the tube feet, move waste, food and respiratory gases around the body, in other words somewhat similar to the lymphatic and circulatory systems but different. Flow through the tubes is controlled by musculature. Just as a digital electric circuit or a nervous system can process and transmit information and signals, so can a water vascular system, in principle. The philosopher David Lewis, in his ‘Mad Pain And Martian Pain’, imagined two entities. One was a human whose pain was triggered by unusual stimuli, such as exercise on an empty stomach, and who found that pain made them concentrate on mathematics without showing the usual signs of pain such as wincing and writhing. The other was a “Martian” who had a water vascular system like that of a starfish and no nervous system, but on being injured would be liable to complain and avoid the damaging stimulus. Lewis claimed that both such entities would experience pain. For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the second, as the first is more to do with establishing the existence of qualia, which is interesting but not entirely germane to matters here.

Just to make it clear, there is no claim that echinoderms do experience pain in this way. They have nervous systems and their water vascular systems don’t primarily function in that way. However, there are other organisms who do have other kinds of signalling and control systems rather than nervous systems, and I want to cover several here: certain plants, forests, fungi and bacteria.

Plants move, and not just through growing or the wind, and they respond to events happening to them and around them. I’ll start with the most obvious examples among the flowering plants: active insectivorous plants and the plant Mimosa pudica. The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula is a classic example, whose traps only close after an object has touched one of the sensory hairs three times. I don’t actually know if this has to happen in quick succession, but it kind of means they can count up to three. Wikipedia says two, but I’ve heard three. This is an example of a plant doing arithmetic. The contact has to occur within about twenty seconds, so the plant can also time things. Moreover, the hairs have to be touched five times before digestion starts. It’s also claimed that thale cress converts less starch to glucose in darkness if it gets dark unusually early, but there are other possible explanations for this. Hence the Venus Flytrap is the interesting one here.

Mimosa pudica, the “Sensitive Plant”, is well-known for having leaves which collapse when touched, later recovering. I’m not sure it’s very good for the plant to do this a lot because I remember one dying after an enthusiastic class of pupils each tried it, but that may have been coincidence. Mimosas are in the bean family, like quite a few surprising plants such as broom, clover and laburnum. Like starfish, they have a local and a general reaction to being touched. They can just collapse individual leaves or the whole plant can “suffer”, although this may be more to do with the physical propagation of the vibrations than a whole plant signalling system. They’re sensitive to warmth as well as mechanical stimulation and as with animal nervous systems, the signal is transmitted as an action potential. In other words, Mimosa pudica is very close to having a nervous system and functionally speaking it basically has one.

Other rapidly-moving plants include the bladderworts and the waterwheel plant, all of which are carnivorous. Plants more generally also move more slowly than this, for instance opening and closing their flowers or moving their leaves at dawn and dusk. Some of the way we perceive plants as passive and stationary is based on how slowly they move, and this too could be seen as our bias. Just speaking on a personal level, and I don’t think I’m unusual here, if I haven’t watered a plant I’m concerned about, I feel thirsty out of sympathy and it really bothers me. Although this could simply be dismissed as silly, empathy is important generally and it seems good to extend it. I experienced a relationship with a pair of plants so intense recently it was like a companion animal – the Nepenthes pitcher plants I couldn’t take with me when I moved. Nepenthes are passively insectivorous, and in fact can even be herbivorous sometimes – they don’t move to capture insects but simply grow traps for them, like other pitcher plants. In a not very vegan move, under pressure from other people I bought two such plants a few years ago to keep the Drosophila (fruit flies) out of the kitchen. It worked quite well, and I imagine they generate a scent which attracts them. When I finally had to find them a new home, I’d grown very attached to them and it really felt like I was rehousing cats or some other placental mammals. I surprised myself, and it also bothered me somewhat because they were carnivorous and it felt like it was that which enabled me to bond with them.

This may all sound quite silly to you, but not only do I not think I’m unusual in feeling attached to house and garden plants, but on the larger scale of trees and forests I’m prepared to say this is actually how most people feel who are familiar with the countryside. Two incidents in particular spring to mind. One is the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall, who was felled by two people on 28th September 2023, causing widespread outrage and mourning. The other is an incident in Sevenoaks after the Great Storm of autumn 1987 blew down some of the oaks associated with the town’s name. The saplings planted to replace them were chopped down by some “friends” of mine who “wanted to piss off the middle class people in the town”. I haven’t reported them, but their attitude generally sucked at the time and was also, I think, quite childish, and reflected the idea that the world was ours to modify regardless of what else might be living in it. I fully expect most other people to be equally irate about this, never mind their economic position, and I might even go so far as to say that this is an element of instinctive altruism, although of course it might be social and cultural conditioning. If it’s true that the working class were less concerned about the situation than the elite, this may not mean that it’s not present in there somewhere but has been blunted by trauma. I freely admit that I can’t justify this claim though.

Plants also communicate with each other by chemical means. In some species, if one of them happens to be infested with insects, it will send chemical signals through the air to others nearby to prepare them to defend themselves against their parasites more effectively by changing the chemicals they produce and poisoning those insects. In others, particularly trees, an old dying adult will transfer nutrients via an underground network of fungal mycelium to young seedlings, sacrificing its life for the sake of the offspring. This is a symbiotic relationship between individuals of two different kingdoms. For this reason, I do tend to attribute consciousness to plants but to entire communities rather than individuals. It also makes sense to eat fruit on this basis as we are the means whereby they distibute their seeds.

It seems quite poetic that a forest could have a mind, particularly considering the resemblance between trees and brain cells. The mixture of species may not be a barrier either because our own cells include long-since assimilated microbes who release energy from glucose for us, and therefore we are ourselves collective consciousnesses. Speaking of microorganisms, there’s another level on which consciousness might be thought to operate among those too. There’s a process known as quorum signalling or quorum sensing which takes place within colonies of bacteria similar to paracrine signalling in multicellular organisms, which is similar to how hormones are passed around the body but between cells not specialised to produce them and not always at a distance. For instance, during a bacterial infection individual organisms might send signals to each other to hold back on the absorption of particular nutrients so as not to starve the host, as it’s not usually in their interests to kill them. The situation also occurs outside the context of pathology, as in the formation of biofilms, a good example of which is dental plaque. These are close to being multicellular organisms themselves. I have to admit to not knowing a huge amount about quorum signalling but I am aware that it does occur outside the bacterial kingdom too, for instance in ant nests.

All this is quite interesting but it’s unclear how much this connects to the initial issue of whether any of this indicates consciousness or its active expression. All of these things are signalling and control systems where responses are provoked from external events. That may or may not mean consciousness, but it’s worth considering that we may ourselves be chauvinistic about brains. Maybe our own consciousness is not just based in our brains, but in our guts, glands and muscles, well beyond the bone box in our heads, and maybe beyond even our own bodies out into society and the whole of humanity.