Gareth Young's Bohemian Lifestyle

The Kitchen Table

A colony of ants is a fascinating thing.  I was wiping the kitchen table clean just now, and trying to exercise great care, for there was a small army of ants scurrying around on it.  We had been away for several days, and had not cleaned up before leaving, and our insect invaders had taken advantage of this to explore – there were ant carcasses in a glass that had contained some kind of fruit juice, and a number chasing around some crumbs and a plate of grapes.

As I cleaned up, I did not have any desire to wipe up the ants – quite the contrary, I tried to avoid them.  I naively removed the dirty dishes and wiped up the crumbs, hoping that the ants will leave when they find no more easy food (Holly will come along behind me and accelerate their departure, I am sure). Nonetheless, despite some level of patience and care, I could not help decimating the insect army, and I reflected upon the impact of this from the perspective of consciousness.  What I found was striking.

I need to digress and set the stage for this first.  I don’t think you would look at an army of ants and doubt that the ants are alive, but let’s stop and examine what that means.  The riddle of life is one that modern science has grappled with – what defines life, and, for example, can a virus be considered to be alive?  The riddle was answered incrementally, and without fanfare, but is not largely believed solved, with the elusive élan vital declared a myth by a scientific community that has defined and answered the question in purely material and objective terms, coming up with a list – locomotion, metabolism, reproduction – of attributes that are taken as the defining traits of life today.

The answer seems to be at best ambivalent, since I still don’t know that it clearly tells us whether a virus is alive.  It also, despite the best efforts of the scientific community, has not equipped us to create anything that meets this definition of life.  However, I think the problem runs far deeper, for I believe the original question had more to do with consciousness than objectively defined parameters.  We are raised and taught this view throughout our schooling, and are so used to it that the perspective of the American Indians that everything is alive – even the rocks and rivers – is no longer accessible to us.  This traditional view is not dissimilar to the belief of Eastern religion and philosophy – Buddhism in particular, has a concept of the mind of grass and trees (known in Japan as mokurai), and of the teaching of the insentient. 

In considering my kitchen ants, I would like you to try to look at life from this perspective, and think of life not as something mechanical but as a consciousness.   Looking around, if I am conscious, then so, surely, is a chimpanzee, our pet dogs, my daughter’s cockatiel, and so on down the animal kingdom.  Where does it stop?  I believe from this viewpoint an ant must also be seen as conscious.  I suspect its individual consciousness will be a shadow of yours or mine, since I intuit that the level of consciousness has something to do with complexity, and my brain is vastly more complex than that of an ant.

Complexity aside, I see an ant as a fellow conscious being, but like any other such being, I can no more experience its consciousness than I can that of a bat or a dog, or even.  This should not in any way negate its consciousness, for equally I cannot, dear reader, know your conscious stat!  As fellow humans, we know something of each other’s conscious state, but only by extrapolating from our own; the mental tortures of childhood, physical conditions such as blindness and deafness, traumatic injuries, and so forth, are just a few of the more obvious examples of experiences that cannot transcend from one person to another.  We each have a very private consciousness.  This will become clearer by considering our ant friends.

So an ant is conscious.  But an ant cannot live alone.  (This exposes another problem with the scientific definition of life, for the vast majority of ants are sterile, so cannot reproduce.)  In face, an ant colony is a very complex entity, with thousands or even millions of ants each doing their part for the survival of the colony.  This is not attributing altruism and anthropomorphizing; from a cold, evolutionary perspective, each soldier ant propagates his (its) genes successfully, not by successfully wooing and mating, but by ensuring the survival of the queen, and by providing food to its cousins.  In a most simple, and yet profound way, an individual ant is simply a part of the colony; it has only a very short life without it, and its existence is only meaningful when considered as a part of the whole.  As such, wiping the table and erasing a few ants is more like scratching my arm and destroying a few cells than it is killing autonomous people. 

Since this is the case, then I see no alternative but to posit an ant-army consciousness.  Surely the real life is the colony?  Each ant can be compared to a human cell, interacting with others, not by passing chemicals directly through membranes, but by smell, touch and sight.  They can develop quite complex interactions among themselves – demonstrated, for example, by the orderly line coming from the window and up the leg of my kitchen table. 

A little bit of math will help put this in perspective; you and I each have a brain with perhaps 100 billion neurons – a staggering number of cells.  Each of these has maybe 1,000 connections to other brain cells, and communicates with them by releasing chemicals known as neurotransmitters (examples with familiar names are norepinephrin and seratonin – there are perhaps a few dozen of these).  An ant, on the other hand, has about 250,000 neurons in its brain – still far more than there are transistors in the most powerful pc, but a shadow of a human brain.  However, a typical mature ant colony has tens or hundreds of thousands of members, and thus a total neuron count comparable to that of a human (recently a super-colony of Argentinean ants was discovered running from Italy to Northwest Spain comprising billions of ants).  Further, each ant can interact with thousands of ants in its close proximity, through a variety of means including approximately 25 hydrocarbons that ants secrete, and to which their antennae are known to respond.  Thus the interactions between individual ants in a colony form an enormously complex web, which in my mind has parallels to connections between human brain cells or regions.

I hope that you can see how, from this, when I accidentally wipe up a few ants from my kitchen table, it feels to me that I am certainly erasing individual ant consciousnesses, but perhaps more interestingly and significantly I am impacting a larger consciousness, that of the larger interconnected colony of ants.  The idea of such a collective consciousness appears a little odd to you and I, but I think you have had a peek of this when at a large sporting event, or a political or religious rally, or even supporting the US army in Iraq.  This peek is only that – it is the limited view of a collective consciousness that can be attained by an individual – but it points at something greater that is not accessible.  The corollary is that your individual cells are alive in the same way that individual ants are – so surely each of them, too, has a discrete consciousness, that is not accessible to your ordinary human conscious experience.

In an earlier chapter I asked you to look closely at an insect on your arm, and I hope that you did so then, and continue to do so.  If you do, you will really began to experience the profound beauty and wonder of the insect, and see its consciousness.  Its consciousness is not accessible to ordinary human consciousness, but if you concentrate and open yourself up, you can begin to transcend this everyday existence, and participate in something far bigger.  If you really open yourself up in this way, the next time you see a colony of ants or bees, you may begin to feel the collective consciousness of the colony  - you can do this every bit as strongly as you can that of an individual insect. 

With continued practice and opening up, you can find greater levels of consciousness that are not ordinarily accessible.  The great British scientist and visionary, James Lovelock, has written extensively about the entire planet Earth as a living organism, with complex inter-relationships between systems, global chemical flows, and so forth.  I believe this argument to be correct, but limited in same way that the view of life as mechanical and objective is limited.  At a deeper level, I think the real truth of Lovelock’s views is to be found at the level of consciousness and experience, and find there to be a global consciousness, which is inaccessible to your everyday experience, but which you can begin to see and even participate in if you really begin to open up to the world around you.