In this second part of our journey to dump dualism, we peek at the ancient worldview of animism. Why this additional detour before getting to dualism itself? Two answers come to mind. First, it’s valuable to know what pervaded long before dualism swept in. Second, some aspects of animism might provide an appealing alternative—and in so doing might stave off the sense of nihilism and lack of meaning that can accompany the contemplated abandonment of an entrenched worldview. In other words, it’s nice to have another lifeboat at the ready—especially one as time-tested as animism—before asking someone to step off their current, familiar platform.
Rather than being a religion, animism is a mindset that had common purchase around the globe prior to modern times. Not only is it important to appreciate how we used to be when the planet’s ecological relationships were more “normal,” but it offers a worthy alternative to dualism that has much overlap with an astrophysical perspective.
Animism is contrasted with the prevalent scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, as fabricated by Greek philosophers during modernity’s early adolescence. This ladder-ranking schema places humans awkwardly straddling the domain of superior angels/gods and that of “lower” animals and plants. Note that this is an implicitly dualist framing, separating the heavenly from the earthly—humans of course having access to both at once: a foot in both camps.
A persuasive argument has it that this perceived separation from the earthly domain took root in agricultural practices, whereby cultures began to aggressively manipulate and control “lower” life, as its domesticating masters. Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions explicitly grant dominion of Earth and its lesser inhabitants to a culture of ordained human supremacists.
Eliminating Divisions
A white supremacist is a racist who believes “white” people to be superior to people of color. We might instantly think the opposite to be someone who is not racist at all. But in another sense, the opposite of a white supremacist might be a black (or other category) supremacist. I bring this up because I want to say that an animist is the opposite of a human supremacist. Yet the literal opposite might stack the asserted hierarchy the other way-around to put humans as the most inferior beings on Earth. Animists, however, are opposite human supremacists in the same sense as being the opposite to a racist: race (species) ceases to become a relevant factor or ranking criterion. To an animist, the imagined/asserted hierarchy is nonsense that needn’t be entertained.
Animists view the entire universe as an expression of Life, animated by spirits. Even entities that we deem to be “inanimate” acquire person-hood, like oceans, rivers, mountains, and rocks. While this practice drives the modernite mad, none of these entities are truly static objects, and all interact with Life in some way as integrated participants in the same great dance-of-the-whole.
In a very real sense, this blurring of the animate/inanimate distinction is backed up by physics. The entire universe is animated by the interactions shared between all matter: the same matter comprising rocks and bodies—in different proportions and arrangements, of course. Every particle in the universe senses to some degree every other particle that has existed in its past “light cone” (all particles that light-speed has had time to reach). Any division we attempt to make—like between animate and inanimate—is more an artificial mental construct rather than a real gap or boundary heeded by the actual universe.
Oneness: Not Dualness
The dissolution of artificial mental boundaries gives way to a “oneness” of the universe we are situated within. What does it take to constitute “you?” What goes into making you? Let’s start with gravity, which was necessary to collect gas into a star and ignite fusion. The energy from the sun is necessary not only for your biological heritage, but for your day-to-day metabolism—not to mention thermal comfort. Gravity is also responsible for accreting enough rock to hold an atmosphere for you to breathe. Every rock comprising Earth—molten or otherwise—plays a role in keeping you alive for more than a minute. You would not be you without previous stars cooking up elements heavier than lithium (all carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, iron, etc.) and then spewed by supernovae and other stellar death-throes. In fact, supernovae and neutron star mergers provide essential iodine. Obviously, you would not be you without atoms and their electromagnetic interactions, facilitating chemistry, proteins, DNA, etc.
As utterly dependent as your life is on a host of inanimate material, why even separate the two? You are inanimate material: atoms passing through in functional structures whose ancient blueprints emerged out of the inanimate muck by sheer persistence and feedback over unthinkable tracts of time. Outside of our mental models, it’s all one giant interconnected phenomenon that blithely ignores our notional partitions, allowing for all sorts of marvelous emergence. The sun is part of you, as a necessary “component.” Past supernovae are a part of you. The Big Bang is a part of you (and vice-versa for all these). Maybe think of yourself as one of many fruiting bodies of a spectacular, interconnected tree.
That our existence and experience might be viewed as one enormous (and enormously complicated) phenomenon gives an early clue as to how this perspective might differ from dualism. One and two are notably different. Dualism rests on the imposition of an ontological gap and a crisp line of division, while animism tends to seek unity.
Inheritance
You would also not be you without the first self-replicating molecules, or without the thousands of crucial mechanisms worked out in the ensuing billions of years by single-celled organisms. You are, in fact, a confederacy of single cells operating in cooperative alliance toward a shared goal. On a larger scale, you are a confederacy of organs that support each other in a systemic operation. At another scale, you are an organism whose species interacts with a greater ecology involving myriad undetected co-dependencies—cascading through the entire Community of Life. You are (part of) a phenomenon!
All of this relies on a convoluted path of inheritance. The human species (as an organism, let alone as an intellectual force) did not invent the heart, lungs, brain, limbs, muscles, eyes, or any other organ you care to identify. You yourself certainly didn’t work any of it out to make yourself. Before you ask, neither did your parents—lovely as they may be (or have been).
Not only is your physiological inheritance crucial to who you are, the experiences of all the organisms in your past lineage (and the experiences of those your lineage interacted with) inform the evolution of your lineage and why you do the things you do—based on what responses succeeded and fit well in relation to all the rest.
We are thus not only intimately connected to the entire world of the present, but to ancient history as well, for billions of years. While it it’s a piece of cake to imagine yourself as existing independent of this incomprehensible, interacting whole, that’s just the usual mental shortcut or simplification that has scant basis in reality. It’s the brain’s main trick, after all: constructing a manifestly partial and decontextualized model that tries to at least capture some semblance of reality, even if inherently incomplete or off-base. It’s the most we can ever expect brains to do, and it will never be enough. The question, then, becomes how to live gracefully within our limitations.
Kinship
The result of our deep inheritance is a sort of universality: all life on Earth is related in an enormous family tree. We recognize ourselves in others. Apes are a slam dunk, as are primates, mammals, and all vertebrates having relatable morphologies (e.g., head, eyes, mouth, limbs). Even all the way to the amoeba we can recognize equivalent cellular structures and functions—sharing a third of an amoeba’s 13,000 protein-coding genes, in fact.
Animists recognize and celebrate this pervasive kinship, extending to plants and beyond. We’re all in this together, all dependent on each other, all living by the same rules and experiencing the consequences of each others’ actions. We share many goals in common—all mutually benefiting from an ecologically-healthy home planet.
While some forms of Life are so alien as to make relating difficult, we still recognize a shared life-force. Animists are comfortable going beyond what modernists label as “life,” considering, for example, rivers to be alive as they are constantly changing, display moods, and form innumerable relationships and interdependencies with the rest of the Community of Life. The same goes for mountains and rocks, even if these change on much longer timescales. Anything that is integral to Life—having any relationship with it—is part of the animating force behind the phenomenon, and thus part of Life. It’s easy to exempt other entities out of ignorance, but that’s our stupid brain talking—not the broader universe, which is all one enormous, single phenomenon.
In this cosmology, it makes little sense to impose a hierarchy among species, when all domains, kingdoms, and phyla are necessary for the whole. Is your kidney better than your stomach or trachea? Does it make any sense to rank your vital organs? Animists therefore tend to view themselves and all others as humble participants in the great dance rather than masters or owners of the world.
Unimism?
Can we forge a modern animism that—at least temporarily for a few generations—accommodates the physical foundations we’ve learned about the universe, albeit by disastrous means? Well, by replacing a single leading vowel, unimism honors our universe and stresses oneness (explicitly not dualist). It applies a dyslexic phonetic twist to humanism, which is just as well, being that humanism is human-supremacist in constitution. At the risk of getting carried away with a neologism, one might say that every rock and tree is unimate (mated to the universe?); that all of us are unimated by the irrepressible vibrancy of matter in physical relationship; and might therefore call ourselves unimists.
Substantively, this outlook recognizes the interconnection and interdependence of the whole, the fallacy of mentally-imposed artificial divisions, and the pervasive kinship in constitution, heritage, and experience that binds everything together. The “spirits” of animism are still present but in different and more subtle guise—making ghostly appearances in physics texts.
Our Place in the Story
As indicated at the beginning of this post, the reason to explore animism is to establish where we were prior to the emergence of a dualistic mentality. Animism therefore serves as a landmark to which we might return, even if in modified form (unimism!). It’s at least one form of life raft ready to offer support should anyone decide to abandon the sinking dualism ship. Switching worldviews needn’t evoke a nihilistic (ni-jerk?) reaction. Plenty of meaning can be found from other perspectives if given half a chance. Next time, we’ll get to dualism more directly: its origins and expression.
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The interesting point is the trick (cognitive) or cultural adaptation, or myth, or abstract modeling.
Could hunter-gatherers "invent" an object of modernity? I think that much of what we have could be imagined in some form.
But the embodiment? The purpose? Why? What does it give in a wider time and context?
Avoiding diseases (or the possibility of treating them), easier access to food at a discount, mastering blacksmithing, smelting technologies, creating clothing. These are all peculiar tricks that, together with the language and ideology that will necessarily arise as a result of the realization of the benefits of "inventions and experiments", create a feedback loop of movement towards civilization, agriculture and modernity.
Animism may be fully recognized, but in addition there may be a cult or idea of development and human primacy (suprematism). As a result, new myths and models appear – sacrificial offerings, the emergence of shamans, warriors, stratification and inequality, etc.
Yes, this is not a one-time jump, reality will squeeze unstable models and myths to their original state, but in the end, conditions and diligence will bear fruit. Especially in conditions of climate stability and its comfortable habitats.
How can such a "special" species (man) maintain a fixation on community and unity, humility and respect? How to restrain discounting and cunning (thinking, reasoning, experimenting, etc.)?
Discounting means that in the case of obtaining large surpluses (food or materials in an easy way), the ancients always took the maximum, without thinking about the consequences (the example of megafauna). And this rather innate tendency is inherent in people even now (not all).
Ultimately, successful “civilizers” will always displace gatherers, and their populations will decline, and they will either take over the civilizational progress or disappear (or become marginalized).
How do we keep humility in focus? After all, once conditions allowed, agriculture was not long in coming, and hunter-gatherers and animists existed in regions poorly adapted to agriculture and civilization, and in the end, this way of life is not so much dominant as on the verge of extinction.
Thank you!
The conditions for agriculture were there at many times, but it was not practised. It's easy to say it was 'inevitable', once it happened. The fact is, humans lived for *millions* of years without agriculture. And 'cunning', psychpaths, narcicists etc *were* kept in check – they got slapped down (or killed) if they acted up.
Somewhere along the line though, they gained a foothold, created hierarchies, wealth gradients, control systems etc. and the rest is (depressing) history.
They can only maintain dominance while an energy/'resource' surplus exists though, and that will run out.
Tom, I really have to commend you on the way you have managed to take materialism (the “cold” scientific description of what reality is and how it works from the perspective of a detached, emotionless observer) and fashion it into an actual, useful worldview: “unimism”. You have distilled from materialism the important things it has to say about how we humans should most correctly view ourselves, specifically our minds, in relation to the rest of the world/universe. A worldview (at least the ones we all discuss the pros and cons of so much) is, afterall, a “view” of the world from the perspective of the mind/brain, an emotion-feeling entity. Presenting straight emotionless materialism to the masses and saying “there’s your worldview” will and does not work. It doesn’t make humans feel an emotional attachment to the world. But what you describe as “unimism” is something that the human mind can genuinely “hang its hat on” as a worldview, so kudos and many thanks to you for your Herculean efforts. It resonates with the mind on an emotional level, at least for many of us. That emotional response is required for the mind/us to genuinely care about the “external world”/environment, and for it to *desire* to live an ecologically sound existence.
Incidentally, this is ultimately why I think panpsychism might also have some real value in the fight against modernity, particularly for people that simply won’t give up on the idea that mind can’t come from purely physical matter. By representing the external world as a conscious, feeling, responsive entity that we can engage with on our level (mind level), panpsychism – specifically the version called “living cosmopsychism” – can get many of us to feel an emotional connection with the world, and genuinely want/desire to care for it. It may ultimately be a shadow form of dualism, but perhaps a useful stepping stone for many of us modernites, especially given the lousy starting-point state that most of us find ourselves in: dopamine hit-addicted, left-brain-dominated, mind-fixated slaves of the modernity machine (essentially miserable mind narcissists, kept so by the system).
As more of a pragmatist than a purist, I won't push back against belief systems that encourage actually good behavior, including religious or pseudo-religious belief systems. Though would argue the Abrahamic religions are net negative, and tend to be against them.
In Tehran, at the Imamzadeh Saleh Shrine, they're praying for rain after a long drought, in the midst of a water crisis. When their prayers to their Sky-God are inevitably not answered (I won't go at length in criticizing Islam, but look into Muhammad's wives), will these people dig deeper into their existing beliefs, or will they give them up and look for something else? Probably a mixture of both? But, with the conditions on the ground caused by the polycrisis changing, the new 'infrastructure' should hypothetically create possibilities for new superstructure belief systems to take hold (Marvin Harris). – And if that's the case, it would be nice if people had something constructive to turn towards. Why not Unimism?
In the Western view, the mind is matter with thoughts and an ego
seen as phenomena that arise within its consciousness. Consciousness
is usually thought of as phenomenologial. It is a first-person
direct experience.
With the western view on mind and consciousness, answers to your
question is Yes, No
The Hindus add to western consciousness a spiritual aspect, where
the eternal individual consciousness, the soul, is a part of the
eternal universal consciousness. In this model, the eternal
consciousness is the cause for the physical world we see.
The Hindus also see the mind as filled with thoughts and usually
living in the past and future, pulling us away from the present
moment. The mental chatter creates delusions that veil the true
nature of reality.
Hindus use meditation practice to quiet the mind, observe thoughts
without attachment, center in the present moment, and dissolve the
sense of separation between soul and universal consciousness. The
teachings are not just knowledge, but they are to be experienced
for ourselves.
If this is the case, then the answers is No, Yes
In either case, physics predicts the physical universe as it always
has. An argument for the Hindu model is it can explain the universe
contemplating itself.
Hi Tom, this post has stimulated a lot of random burblings:
Animism is alive and well. We give storms names. James Lovelock ('The Gaia Hypothesis') says Earth is a living organism.
Biologists talk of a 'hierarchy of life' and they do not mean scala naturae; they mean how life is classified into 'nested hierarchies' (kingdom, phylum, class, etc. all the way down to species and sub-species). A sub-species is not inferior to a species! I know you know this, but still.
Biologists draw the line between living and non-living at the cell, usually. Consciousness may be at the level of the cell nucleus, though. It does depend how you define consciousness, obviously.
Death is simply rearrangement of your molecules!
Every living thing is successful, it's made it! Its adaptive complexity has come through eons of changing environments. Well done, you! A woodlouse is not superior or inferior to a squirrel, in this sense.
As an amateur life enthusiast, I would say that a living thing is more interesting than a rock. But I acknowledge that to an animist there is no real distinction. And to a physicist, they're both 'bodies' made of particles.
Burbling over!
Eric
Tom – You might want to just shortcut all the stumblings and bumblings towards an updated version of The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) or The Tao of Physics (1975). Just become a Sufi.
This is somewhat tangential to the topic of dualism, but relates to concepts that still sometimes leave me in knots when it comes to discussions about mind and matter and the apparent boundary between them… (I wonder how much animists of old pondered the origin of the color red, in addition to admiring it? My left-brain seems to be obsessed with making sense of it, although I'm gradually making peace with the fact that I will never truly will)….
Something I find interesting is that, through the emergence/evolution of conscious lifeforms, the universe has effectively found ways of (partially) looking at and contemplating itself from different perspectives. But even more amazing to me is the fact that the universe created entirely new phenomena, such as the sensation of the color red (or just “red”), as part of the process of figuring out how to be able look at itself in this conscious fashion (forgive me speaking as though the universe did this in a purposeful fashion). Not only did the universe not have the apparatus to see red before the emergence of life, but the color red didn’t even exist before this (am I wrong here?). In effect, the universe came up with *ways of seeing* that enabled it to look at itself. I know this is all kind of obvious (how could it be any other way?), but it still blows my mind!
I also still find it interesting/disconcerting that these sensations only exist in the mind of the beholder. They do not exist in the real world “outside” the mind, e.g. a tomato is not really red… even though the mind is not really separate to the “outside” world… One day I may make genuine peace with all of this 🙂
So, yes, what our mind experiences as "the world out there, and the world in here" (or, rather, what the mind actually is) is a representation or model of (part of) reality, from the perspective of a "self", characterized by it’s select set of sensing and cognitive capabilities, and its unique position in space and time. The model is obviously a limited representation of reality in many ways. But in order to create a model of itself, out of itself, the matter of reality had to extend on what hitherto comprised the whole of reality, in extremely novel ways. There wasn't red, and then there was! So maybe thinking of the mind as just a crude model of reality is not entirely fair or accurate. By virtue of the model (mind) including the experience of phenomena that do not exist “outside” the model (color, smell, etc.), and that are, in some sense, an extension on base reality, the model might be regarded as being *more* than the “outside” world in some ways (an "enhanced" version of a limited segment of reality).
I'll get to this in later installments, but to me it seems you're tied in knots because of a reification of "mind" and its products (an understandable impulse). Of course a tomato was red before brains (or if not tomato, something that had already evolved and we would call red). The distribution of wavelengths reflecting off the skin are peaked toward the red end, whether eyes behold or not (this is a lot like a tree falling in a forest without anyone to hear it). What I'd say our perception of red is: a pattern of neural firings that is distinct from that stimulated (spatially, temporally) by other colors. If we couldn't differentiate red (perceive it in some way) then it would be like infrared or whatever: fails to register neurally, but still very much exists.
As for the universe contemplating itself through us, I've never been impressed by that, but many people are. I guess I don't share the sense of grandeur that is the human mind as some divine transcendent "arrival" the universe eagerly awaited, or in any substantive way changing the course of the universe. Neat, maybe, but not central—just another thing that *can* happen.
Thanks Tom. Very good points. Sorry for the premature interjection. I’m glad I got to put the above into words though and very much appreciate getting the helpful feedback. Definitely stuff to still dig out.
Ok, yes, red did very much exist prior to the mind, as light of a certain wavelength. No doubt about this. But, the “red” we experience (our perception of red) is something “additional”/“different” to that red, made possible by the physical matter of the brain. I guess that was one of the points that I was sometime clumsily trying to make, without necessarily over-reifying the mind. I hope that in some ways it is a rather a reification of matter, in that it is an acknowledgment of what amazing things it can create. But I agree that I needed setting straight that whilst perception of red is a neat trick, it is not really that amazing when considered in comparison to everything else that matter achieves. It’s not just the faculties we possess that are amazing. I also agree that the “consciousness is the universe looking at itself” stuff is overblown, though I think it is still right in some much less grandiose sense than the statement might be taken to suggest.
I don't want to downplay the sophistication involved in color detection and neural representation, but if it did *nothing* in the brain it wouldn't be on our radar at all (lots of things like this), and if it's going to do something, it had better be distinctive enough to differentiate red from the smell of cinnamon—each creating its own pattern of neural activity in distinct portions of the brain. In other words, red had better feel like *something* or we can't detect it at all. That we can experience a unique sensation seems like a given for anything we can sense at all. Neat trick and all, but hardly a basis for "mind can't be matter" as many try to use the sensation to imply, through the fancy word "qualia."
Thanks Tom. My first response when experiencing and reflecting on the sensation of color is always simply “How amazingly amazing is color!!!”, which I think is fine and healthy. I am initially just in awe of the sensation, without having any thoughts about what its origin or explanation is.
But then my left brain does it thing of asking/demanding, “How does the universe manage to pull this off? I want/wish I could understand! Let’s start trying to work it out!”, which I am increasingly realising is not heathy at all. I am very slowly learning to accept that I won’t and can’t understand how the universe does it, because of my limitations. I am happy to accept that physical matter can pull the “trick” off, and I am in awe of it for being able to do so.
I think the source of my earlier confusion with regards to the supposed “fact” that the sensation only exists “in the mind” and not in the “outside world” (yet somehow still manages to somehow be part of the whole of reality) is to do with me again making the error of thinking that that there really is a separate “inside” and “outside”. The mind is something inside the universe that often makes the mistake of thinking that it is somehow simultaneously inside and outside the universe at the same time. But it’s all just inside the universe, everything! There are no views of the universe /reality other than those from within, and those views are only partial views of the universe that “parts” of the universe itself (like us) are viewing. I need to keep reminding myself of this!
I know I have really jumped the gun and overdone my comments over the last weeks, Tom. Sorry everyone! I will try to shut up a bit.
I wonder whether the language we use complicates the subject. Bim uses the term "matter achieves," which I'm sure was meant in a neutral way but it kind of implies that "matter" is sentient, with aims and purpose. Language is just an invention of brain activity and that is just interactions of matter, with no purpose. It is what it is.
Maybe it is too difficult to avoid imparting human-like activity to matter, but it would be nice if we could achieve that.
I wholeheartedly agree, Mike. I should try to be more careful in the way I express things to avoid the suggestion that anything that appears in the universe is a result of there being a purpose/goal in mind.
A deep problem with language is that once we start to try and correct it in earnest (so as to be able to “speak only truths”), it starts to feel like pretty much the whole thing is a house of cards, which it may well be. There is no real subject-object split, and there is no free will (or may not be), which lays waste to vast swathes of words and their meanings. So many are based on falsehoods or half-truths (that said, the very existence and persistence of life seems to be based on life forms necessarily having a perceived/imagined sense of separation and autonomy, so perhaps our language is just a reflection of that to some degree? We are not separate, but we must act as if we are *to some degree* to persist).
Someone commented in an earlier post that there are also no nouns, only verbs. I kind of go along with this. The universe/fundamental particles are the things that qualify as the nearest things to being actual nouns (they comprise the fundamental “substance”). However, the universe is also itself a process (there is always the inseparable element of time), with the particles forever buzzing and grabbing (to borrow Tom’s terms), producing all the other “apparent nouns”. So even these fundamental “nouns” are always “verbing” and can never be pinned down as just nouns!
Every sentence may just collapse to something like “the universe is universing” if we go the whole hog 😂
I guess we all need to be more careful/vigilant with our language, but also acutely aware that *anything* we say is likely to be never more than half-truth at best. Our default should be to not take language literally, while at the same time striving to speak in a more humble manner that is at least metaphorically true. Perhaps we also need to get better at identifying when people are essentially saying the same thing as us, but just via a very different metaphor (this will not always be the case of course!).