I read Tim Bayne’s essay in Scientific American and kept nodding along; then I noticed I was nodding for the opposite reason from the one he probably intended.
Bayne asks whether “consciousness” is even a good scientific concept. He wonders whether the word carves nature at its joints, or whether it bundles together things that do not belong together and leaves out things that do. He points to the philosopher Kathleen Wilkes, who showed decades ago that phenomenal consciousness, the private what-it-is-like glow that so much of the debate turns on, has no clean equivalent in ancient Greek, in Mandarin, in Croatian, or in English before the seventeenth century. His conclusion is careful and a little unsettling. Maybe, he says, the question itself needs replacing.
I think he is onto something real. I just think the trouble with the word runs the other way. The problem with “consciousness,” as most of us use it, is not that it names too much. It is that it names too little.
For most of my life I would have located consciousness where nearly everyone in my culture locates it: somewhere behind the eyes, a lit room at the top of the stairs, the place where I did my thinking and kept my self. I had a graduate education. I was good at the lit room. And it nearly cost me everything. What got me sober, and then kept me there for a long time, was not another good idea in that room. It was learning, slowly and against every habit I had, to feel my way rather than think my way. The most important things I have ever known I did not reason toward. I felt them arrive, in the body, before I had words for any of them.
That is the experience I keep bringing to the word “consciousness,” and finding the word too small to hold it.
Here is what the body kept insisting, long before I had any language to argue with it. The capacity to sense, to respond, to register what kind of world you are in and lean toward it or away from it, did not begin with brains. It is billions of years old. A single cell senses and responds. A slime mold can navigate a maze with no neurons at all. Plants and fungi participate in complex exchanges below ground, although researchers continue to debate how broadly those exchanges should be described as communication, warning, or cooperation. None of that is metaphor. It is in the soil and in the peer-reviewed literature both. Whatever consciousness is, it did not switch on when the cortex arrived. The cortex is a late and gorgeous elaboration of something the living body was already doing.
So when someone asks me what consciousness means to me, I do not start behind the eyes. I start with the whole organism, with what I have come to call, in the book I am writing, the Whole Mind: the mind of the whole body in relationship, in which the brain takes part but does not preside. It is not a thing you have. It is something a living body does. It is a process, not a possession, and it does not stop at the skin. It happens between bodies as much as within them, which is why a steady hand on your shoulder at the right moment can reach you when an hour of good argument cannot.
This is where Wilkes and her missing translations stop being a threat and start being a gift, and Bayne himself hands over the sharpest example. Writing from the Santiago region, he notes that the Mapuche language, Mapudungun, meets these questions with the word rakizuam, which covers much of what we mean by consciousness but folds in something our word cannot hold: a reflexive awareness of one’s interdependence with other people and with the natural world. He wonders, almost in passing, what the debate about other minds would have looked like had Mapudungun rather than English become the language of science. I would put it less gently. That is not a quirk of vocabulary. It is the language of a people noticing something about the mind that our own language has quietly trained us not to see.
I met the same lesson in a different classroom. I spent years on a reservation in South Dakota learning a little of a language built on relationship, from teachers who located mind and spirit in the between: in the land, in what moves among people and places rather than inside one head. They were not failing to find our word. They had carved the territory differently, and in some ways they may have carved it better. Bayne is right that our concept is provincial. He may be too quick to assume that ours is the sophisticated version and that the others simply lacked it. When a language keeps insisting that mind and world and other people belong in the same breath, the humble possibility is that it is reporting something, not missing it.
I want to be honest about the edges of this. I am not claiming to have solved the hard problem, or to know the metaphysics of how felt experience arises from matter. Nobody does, and I am wary of anyone selling that certainty, in a lab coat or in a robe. The careful science in front of us supports something more modest than my full claim: that bodies and nervous systems shape one another, deeply and continuously. The further step, that mind is not merely influenced by the body and its relationships but made of them, I hold on experiential and philosophical grounds, and I try to say so plainly rather than dress it up as a finding. Same neighborhood, not the same address.
So, what does consciousness mean to me? Not a glow to be explained away, and not a private possession to be defended. It is the body’s own knowing, older than thought, wider than the skull, alive in the space between us. It is what is already there, reporting steadily, before the words arrive. For most of my life I was talking over it. Consciousness, to me, is what I finally stopped talking over.