Three Essays

QUALIA

Many of the animals have always been in lockdown. It's all they've ever known. A peacock stares back from the other side of the fence, a lone sea lion pokes its nose up from its island, and, though you can't see them, you know they're there, pacing the interior: baboons, wallabies, prairie dogs. The peacock has gotten loose and has the run of the area near the fence, and as you stare into each other's eyes, you feel there's consciousness behind the feathers, though you know that expression of longing might only be something you're imagining. The peacock is just looking for food, but now a few people with children have found this part of the fence where you can look in, and the animals look back at you, and we talk to them as if they have consciousness, aware of their surroundings, and aware of why so few people are visiting them. All big social animals—primates, elephants, dolphins—have the capacity to reconcile after conflict as a way to reduce tension, so the idea that there's someone in there behind their eyes seems viable. There's an experiment, the rouge test, intended to solve the question of whether or not some animals can identify themselves in a mirror. They go through stages of recognition, at first behaving as if the reflection is another animal, hitting, knocking the glass, then realizing when they raise arm or trunk that the reflection does as well, hey, that must be me, making faces, opening my mouth and looking inside (elephants), blowing bubbles (dolphins), scratching (magpie). You put a red dot on the forehead of chimps, elephants, or the bodies of dolphins, magpies, and watch them touch the mark on themselves, try to wipe or peck it away. These are animals that possess neurological substrates where consciousness resides.

Do slime molds, as single-celled creatures massing and clumping together, happily growing over a food source, have consciousness? Their networks of branches and hubs as they sit on forest floors or garbage dumps—those deliberate patterns of tendrils and intersections—have been used as models to design systems of underground trains. They have primitive responses to stimuli, are more than just reactive, but they don't have brains, so do they have consciousness? Okay, say they don't, take molds off the list. What creature has the tiniest brain? Ping another tine on the evolutionary cladogram. Ants have very small ones, even in proportion to their little exoskeletonized tri-part bodies. Individually, their brains are too small to function very well, but collectively, they're bigger than the sum of their neurons. Here, folks: swarm intelligence. As a mob, they can find food, fight aggressive ant interlopers from other colonies, pile on top of one another to form bridges over precipices between leaf and rock. Just like us, they protect plants they ultimately have eyes on consuming. But do they have swarm consciousness? And if so, can it be manipulated? Slime mold consciousness could be one step ahead of zombies who have no consciousness.

But then, what about viruses? Without brains or consciousness, they are said to invade, populate, destroy their hosts, and, when their work is done, to die. A virus isn't like a micro-organism, a bacterium, a single-celled whatever, but when it parasitizes, you can say, as Dr. Frankenstein said of his monster, yes, it's alive. A micro-demon, described in words associated with monstrosity, and like a thing but not that particular thing itself. Not exactly alive, not inert either, and like Frankenstein, viruses can't reproduce on their own, only in the cells of their hosts.

In 1823 Mary Shelley attended a staged version of Frankenstein, Presumption or the Fate of Frank, but in the playbill, the monster was not named. Where a name would appear there were only hyphens, which made the unnameable creature that much more frightening. She wrote to a friend, "This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good." Viruses are named by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses according to their genetic...