There’s a little fish called the bluestreak cleaner wrasse. It’s as cute as it sounds. It’s small, a touch bigger than a river minnow, with a brain about the size of few grains of rice.
And yet, incredibly, it can recognize itself in mirrors. When researchers put a mark on its body, it’ll try to scrub it off after seeing its reflection, a hint that it knows it’s looking at itself, not just another fish. Which may mean they’re self-aware.
This begs the question: What in the electric hell is going on?
Consciousness is this parlor trick we evolved to make sense of things. There’s a reason other animals get by fine without the level of self-awareness we have. It’s risky (babies take longer to develop). It’s expensive (torches calories). It’s heavy (weighs more). It’s often existentially futile (makes you worry about your existence, like this). Frankly, it’s a disadvantage.
Surely other animals have evolved toward consciousness, or gotten there, then slammed the brakes when it seemed like a drawback.
But here you are. A cursory assembly of senses that strives to build its credibility through a remembered history, a sense of continuous identity. It’s convincing enough that you buy into it most of the time. But not always.
I don’t know what to do with this.
Language probably added to the utility of this sense of self. Boredom kind of pushes you toward unwinding the constructed nature of the self (which can be unsettling). But it can also remind you just how wonderfully unlikely life is. How, taken too seriously, life just evaporates.
“Aesthetics seem to require self-awareness — it might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful it makes you shiver, that’s your limbic reward circuitry kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose. It’s a hack, in other words; your brain has learned to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us.”
~Peter Watts, Blindside (Book)
“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”
~Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
“There is a version of us inside of our minds that does not correspond to our actuality, an idea of who we are that is unaffected by time or reality. Then, one day, you are confronted by the person you really are, the you you have become, the one who exists in the world, the one that breathes and shits and screams. And you realize: the people we think we are may never have existed. You were an idea, steam or smoke or wax. You destroyed the man you remember and in his place is you.”
~Sam Tallent, Running the Light (Book)
