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SPEAKER: It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Professor Edelman. Shimon Edelman holds degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell. He is the author of over 170 scientific papers and book chapters on topics ranging from motor control, visual perception, and the evolution and acquisition of language to artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, the sociology of cooperation, and computational theories of consciousness.
His monographs include Computing the Mind-- How the Mind Really Works, billed as the only book that explains how the mind works that also contains a usable map of the London tube; The Happiness of Pursuit, a Kirkus Reviews starred selection and must read; "Beginnings," a psychological, philosophical science fiction-- psy-phi sci-fi, if you will-- novella; Life, Death, or Other Inconvenient Truths, an abecedary take on the human condition in 38 short chapters; and most recently, in 2023, The Consciousness Revolutions-- From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation. This book is about all things consciousness, with chapters such as Selfless Consciousness, Self Consciousness, Self and Society, and Self Care. Edelman challenges readers to join forces and develop a critical consciousness of our collective historical and socioeconomic predicaments.
Shimon likes to read, backpack, bike, swim, and teach undergraduate seminars on interdisciplinary topics such as mind and reality and science fiction, inequality, and power and happiness and varieties of freedom. He is presently working to shift both his research and his teaching focus to the socioeconomic dimensions of the climate catastrophe and climate justice.
So just a few housekeeping, this talk is being recorded for later distribution via our website library.cornell.edu/booktalks. In deference to our speaker and everyone in the audience, I'd like to ask everyone to silence your phones. And Professor Edelman will be happy to answer questions during the Q&A period following his talk. I will have a microphone, and I ask that you wait for the microphone when I come. And we will also welcome questions at that time from our online audience via the chat box. Thank you. And join me in welcoming Professor Shimon Edelman.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Wendy, really happy to be here. Here we go. We have this read to us, this land acknowledgment. I just want to add to this one little thing that is not maybe known as widely here in the Cornell community and should be, the dispossession of other Native peoples, not just the local Native people, by the Morrill Act of 1862, which is one of the sources of Cornell's so-called land grant endowment. So that land grant has come-- the money has come from stealing land from other Native peoples elsewhere on this continent.
So I could have started and wrapped up the talk on this slide because consciousness is complicated, many tiered and many faceted thing. And if we were to go for a short summary of the talk, this would have been it. My picture here is a Tower of Babel, and it corresponds roughly to the different stages or tiers of consciousness. People typically think of consciousness as one thing-- this is me, myself, I am what I am.
And yet, consciousness has several levels below the one on which selves emerge. And these are what I call minimal phenomenal awareness, the discernibles. And I'll go into details with regard to each of those, this as opposed to that, red as opposed to green, very basic. You don't need a self for that. Feelings, as well, basic, scary, or tasty. You don't have to be human or vertebrate even. You can be a bacterium. You have proto feelings.
Then the components of the self on top of that, kind of an onion. There is no strict hierarchy here. None is implied, but there are somewhat distinct levels. Self-awareness comes here, and then on top of that, selves in societies. And the little icon that shows a person asleep is here to remind me to tell us that the tower is built every time we get awakened. We become awake.
The virtual self, a computational entity which is virtual in its entirety, comes online. It disappears as we go to sleep, dreamless sleep. And if we happen to slid into a dream, the tower is erected in an entirely different universe, which might have some connections to ours, but not very clear ones and not necessary ones, so different tower. Imagine dismantling the Tower of Babel and erecting it all over again, I guess risking, incurring the wrath of the big man in the sky. That's consciousness in a nutshell.
This is the cover of the book on which the talk is based. And these are the seven revolutions that I will touch upon briefly, I hope briefly enough not to run over time. The last time I tried to give this talk, it ran over an hour and 40 minutes, and the audience was gracious enough not to run away after one hour. I hope I'll fit within 40 or so minutes.
So I was hell-bent, when I started writing this book, on having the word "revolution" in the title. And I guess in that I succeeded. So we have successive levels, again, now running from the top to the bottom-- selfless sentience, minimal selves, self-consciousness, speech and sign. This is where language comes online; selves and societies, self-care, and then finally, critical consciousness for a better world.
So the very first level, the most basic level of phenomenal awareness, is telling apart this from that, as in telling apart green from red. And I call this system minimally aware or minimally conscious-- again, this is not a strict definition, just a way to attach some kind of an explanation to a label-- when its state changes over time in one of several intrinsically distinct ways. So it has to be intrinsic to the system. Because, of course, a system's consciousness cannot be up to any external entity or agent.
So it's not enough to interpret, say, the layout of this desk as being aware of some configuration out in the world, just because the arrangement of objects on the desk is interpreted by me in this manner. it has to be up to the objects themselves. That's what I mean by intrinsic.
An example that I use here has to do with terrain. Actually, one of my favorite parts of this Earth, which is a part of Death Valley-- here's a map of Death Valley, which has two canyon systems, one the Cottonwood Canyon and one the Marble Canyon, running from a common point, which happens to be a saddle point. So if you put a bowl here, it will be precariously balanced. And if it starts running in one direction, it will end up running all the way down the Marble Canyon to the confluence. And if you push it, give it a tiny little push, in the other direction, it will roll down the other, Cottonwood Canyon, to the same confluence point.
My point here is that the terrain does not allow the bowl to cross. Even a human would find it difficult, at least human my age, find it difficult to cross from one canyon to another. So the distinction between Marble and Cottonwood is intrinsic in the topography and the layout of the system.
And so we can liken or explain the distinction, this basic distinction between two phenomenal qualities, two aspects, two states of awareness. We can give that the interpretation of a system undergoing either this transition or that one. And the distinction is inherent in the structure of the system. It's not up to an external observer. So I actually tested this out with a full moon on the day I was there last time. And the moon rolled from the saddle point to the confluence, just as predicted by my theory of consciousness.
So I keep saying. I think I said several times. I said the system. So what do I mean? This system, Am I allowed to attach a definite article to the word "system." Something becomes a system when there is a mechanism, again, intrinsic to the collection of parts in question, when there is a mechanism like that that distinguishes between the system and the rest of the world.
So we actually know of a phenomenon like that in biology. The minimal configuration of a bunch of molecules of a particular type, phospholipids, essentially, fatty molecules, when you place a bunch of them in water, they arrange themselves because of the forces, the molecular forces, which differ on the two sides of this molecule, this type of molecule. They arrange themselves into what's called a bilayer. And if a bilayer happens to close on itself, you have an inside, and you have an outside, and you have all that's needed for what's called abiogenesis, the emergence of life from something that's not yet life.
First, cells started like that. And then on the inside, there is a mechanism, can be a mechanism, that's protected from the elements that can give rise to those discernments, can take note of what's going on outside the system, what's going on inside the system. And now am allowed to say the system because it is delineated by the membrane. What's inside is the system. So the membrane imposes an intrinsic to the system distinction between self and non-self. This is a key prerequisite for what I call the minimal self.
Now, if you take mechanisms for sensing and acting-- and these can be really minimal, very, very simple. You enclose them in a membrane. You apply natural selection, wait a couple million years, and what you get is basic feelings. So in fact, the title of the talk mentioned, amoebas, single-celled animals, like E coli bacteria, sense the environment. They sense the amount of oxygen in the environment. They sense the concentration of glucose and also a gradient.
If there's a change over space in the concentration of glucose, like in this little contraption, more glucose here than here, the bacteria will swim in the direction of more glucose. And that's a basic distinction distinguishing good from bad. So no apple tree, no Garden of Eden, it's enough to have these basic components of this really minimally aware system, which does not yet have a cell, so no cells as yet; but minimal consciousness, minimal awareness, yes.
And we can observe some of those little creatures in action, this little guy, this microscope image, which means glass slide, some liquid, another glass slide. And this bacterium's flagellum has been trapped between the two slides. It cannot get away, which is why it's trying to go in circles. A big one crosses the field of view.
So this is definitely not just life, but life that is aware of what's going on. I mean, how can you say that a bacterium is not aware in some sense when it senses, decides, and acts on what it senses? So minimal selfhood, without yet self-awareness is persisting by sensing and feeling and acting.
So now we are-- I didn't count so far, but now we are up to the third revolution, which is self-consciousness. How does a system become self-conscious? When it augments its minimal self with what we call a virtual model of the world. And that has to include the system itself and then using that model to take control of the future.
So let me explain what's going on here. This is the beginnings of self-reference. So this should sound familiar to creatures like us who are-- when we are in a fully conscious state, are aware of our selves, not just of the environment. And I will use a picture, series of pictures, of a bacterium to make the point. This doesn't mean that the model of the world, which will appear here in the second in a bacterium, is in any way sophisticated. But it's a minimal model. But it's a model enough for the bacterium.
So steps to self-consciousness, the first thing to do is to minimize surprise. The best strategy to survive is to anticipate what's going to happen, so to predict the world. And if a system monitors its inputs and controls its outputs, it can minimize surprise and can maximize its chances of survival. So surprise minimization. I mean, how can you not be surprised by what's going on outside you? If you have some model of the world, then you can anticipate what is about to happen.
So a model of the world means something like this. The circle of arrows is here to remind us that it's a runnable. It's an executable model. You can turn the crank, and the model will churn out predictions. It's not just a passive bunch of information sitting there.
So a model of the world, let's now put it where it belongs, inside the system. And there is an interesting thing happening between the previous step and the next one, which is a system such as this bacterium or an embodied brain, like ours, is necessarily part of the world. So a system stands to gain if it contains a model of at least some aspects of the world and the model of itself.
So here is where things become kind of mind boggling because we, at all times, try to figure out for ourselves, while interpreting this stuff, How can this happen? And invariably, we end up being in some kind of an infinite regress, which does not have to happen. There are ways of preventing that bad outcome. But definitely, this is something to keep in mind while trying to understand a system which entertains a model of the world on its inside, as represented by the system itself.
So here, now we have the bacterium that serves as my example, with the runnable or executable model of the world. Now it's in here and self-reference, the snake, the proverbial snake, biting its tail. Except bad outcomes can be forestalled by proper computational steps being taken. And such a system is self-conscious in a manner, in a sense, that I hope is somewhat clear. It literally embodies a little model of itself inside itself.
It's difficult to speak about this in English because we use words that end with self while talking about selves, which is kind of complicated. Other languages actually have it worse because they don't have words for self as such, and they have to resort to roundabout ways of talking about it. So let's peek ahead at what happens when there are multiple selves, like a colony of bacteria or maybe a group of people.
So there is the world in one self and another and another one. And this is society. By the way, bacteria are really into it. Some bacteria socialize, form films in which they interact with one another and send messages, and so on. So bacteria are not as unsophisticated as some of us think.
So we can now do this and put an entire model of a society inside the cell. And this, just to anticipate what will come a bit later in the talk, is the computational nature of what we call conscience. This is the representation of society's interests and information about society.
On the right-hand side is a poster from one of the Zapatista caracoles in Mexico. This is an illustration of the concept that's becoming better known in anthropology and in cultural studies, which is the concept of a pluriverse. Here, it says "another world is possible."
[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH]
A world that includes all worlds-- in what sense? Well, this sounds-- this looks beautiful, doesn't it? But it also sounds nice. But it's more than nice because it can be given a computational interpretation. And that puts it on par with much better founded theories in psychology and in sociology and anthropology.
So now up to or next, onward to the fourth revolution speech, which is a kind of magic, if you think about you can make things happen by magic. You do a movement with your hand. An object appears, a rabbit out of thin air or a top hat. Or you can tell someone, ask someone to do something for you, and then they do it. Isn't it kind of magic? So that's what I mean. Maybe that's what Borges meant when he gave this guest lecture at Harvard, that words begin, in some sense, as magic.
And if you don't believe that mean, don't take Borges's word for it. Look at what can happen when language is unleashed in a society, or society unleashes language on itself. We get very, very far from home. This is home. It's a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft. This is looming large in the picture. It's a wide angle camera, the rings of Saturn. And without language, you can't reach that far and look back on yourself. This is why the little satellite icon is there. Of course, the Cassini spacecraft is much farther reaching and more sophisticated than just low Earth orbit satellite.
So what language makes possible is cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, in which heredity goes from parents to offspring. Here, because of language, we can learn cultural information and cultural practices and cultural knowledges from peers, from the society at large, from parents, from kin, from non-kin. And this is the offspring. Of course, the kids talk to themselves, whether or not you like it. And that's what makes us really different from our close cousins, who maybe because the lack of language, they resolve disputes by violence. So chimpanzees are a notoriously violent species.
And David Graeber remarked once that violence is the simplest mode of interacting with people. You don't have to know anything about them. You don't have to connect to them on any level, just want to enforce your will on them. You just use violence. That's the easiest way out, the easiest way to manipulate people, or even just to push them in some direction.
But in language, of course, in language, we can organize for mass violence. But we can also organize for things that are just out of this world, including in the sense that the Cassini example demonstrated. So we have a language which is-- well, all of human languages are unique in that they allow reciprocal persuasion, not just persuasion that works one way. Of course, someone who is very eloquent can persuade people.
But if they are-- should I dare to say, if they are fully human, they also open themselves, should at least open themselves, to persuasion. And that's what reciprocity means here. So this serves cooperation in the forging of agreements. And this allows us to cultivate several special varieties of consciousness. This is the link between language and consciousness.
We can get a feeling of belonging together while respecting everyone's individuality. So people don't need to be lost in a society or diluted or in some way disappearing into the collective. We can have a recognition of shared destiny, which we can all shape together. And we can have a desire. We can cultivate a desire for achieving widespread agreement, ideally consensus.
And in fact, we do have examples, not enough. But we have some examples of societies that run on all of their discussions on the consensus principle, like in this illustration in the badge from that Zapatista poster in the caracoles in Chiapas in Mexico. And a couple of other places on this planet, things are run by collectives that employ consensus as their mode of operation.
Now, the fifth revolution, selves in societies, I mean, this sounds very maybe rosy. And maybe it's time for a reality check. And the big question that poses the challenge for a reality check comes from this book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the late David Graeber, whom I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, The Dawn of Everything. They write why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treating each other badly, the reasons for war and greed and exploitation, systematic indifference to others suffering.
Were we always like that, or did something at some point go terribly wrong? So just to maybe offer a teaser, if you haven't discovered yet this book, the answer to the first part, Were we always like that? no, definitely not. Not all of us are like that at this moment either. And Graeber and Wengrow offer a blueprint for creating an answer to that all-important question. Because we really need to know what happened, what went wrong, if we are to hope to fix it.
So here's one thing that seems wrong right now. The cartoon is from 1911. And it depicts extremely well, all too well, the society that we exist, a part of, as we know it. So 99% of the people in this country and, I think, most of the people in this room are here. We work for all.
Even if we do what seems to be non-menial and therefore, maybe not difficult work-- I mean, what I'm doing right now, for me, it's difficult work. I definitely feel like I belong to the working class. And this is actually one thing that we can dispute or agree on later.
And then we have one class above it. And you know the expression "upper classes." We have the people who preserve the status quo with the force of arms. Here, we eat for you. We shoot at you. The organized religion is here. The rulers, in our case-- well, not many kings left over, but definitely the corporate oligarchs and money rules at the top. And this seems wrong.
And in fact, don't take my word for it. There are any number of analysis out there by sociologists and other social scientists. This list here, which is too long to be read in its entirety, is from Harry Brighouse's recent write-up the problems with capitalism. The first one is that capitalist class relations perpetuate eliminable forms of human suffering.
I mean, how many of us pause at all to think about different varieties of suffering and trying to distinguish between those that are unavoidable from those that are avoidable? So, of course, we all know about the unavoidable kinds of suffering. This is inherent in what consciousness is.
Unfortunately, if you haven't discovered it as yet, this is my bad news for you. If you are conscious, you suffer. One way to ceasefire suffering in that regard is to throw the switch or at least, go into dreamless sleep. And that cannot be managed in a different way. This is why it's called unavoidable. The causes include old age and the knowledge of impending death. So we are all mortal.
But then there are the avoidable kinds of suffering caused by societal dynamics that bring about wars and poverty and hunger and illnesses that can be cured, political oppression, and the climate catastrophe. So actually, this relates to the other point from Brighouse's list, that I highlighted. Capitalism is environmentally destructive, arguably much more so than alternatives. And again, this is something we can discuss later. I'll return to the climate question a bit later.
Another thing that seems wrong, this level here, the people who preserve by force of arms the status quo-- let me just quote Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite authors on this matter. "The individual cannot bargain with the state"-- this is the armed force of the state-- because "the state recognizes no coinage but power, and it issues the coins itself." So let me sketch a historical process or a reconstruction, a hypothetical reconstruction, of the historical process that led us to the point we are at.
First of all, following the insights in the data from Graeber and Wengrow, we know that at all times, in every part of the world, many different types of social organization could be found, including some that were more centralized and some that were very egalitarian and not centralized at all. Now, synergy, synergy happened among upper class interests, upper class in whatever sense you attach to this concept here, one really bad thing, the invention of money, which allowed people to recruit a force that did not answer to the people, but rather, answered to those nascent upper classes.
If you want a contemporary example how a force that is answerable to the state behaves, rather than force that's answerable to the citizens, consider that most of the cops in New York live on Long island. So they police a part of the city that they actually don't live in, which is why they can behave the way they do. That's one tiny example here.
And then the ruling class found ways to increase its power through enclosures, essentially taking over the commons, common lands and common resources; the dispossession of its own people at home and then the imperial expansions abroad. Again, we all can think of examples, and those would be all appropriate here from different parts of the world. This was followed by the institution of markets for goods and for money, and that paved the way for this political economic system that now dominates the world.
And this is what happened as a result, I guess, because of that domination to people's consciousness. People's consciousness, our consciousness, has been subverted. We are now made to believe that self-interest and competitiveness and aggression are both parts of true human nature and even maybe worse than that, are normatively good or the right properties or the right properties to have or the right ways to behave.
So in the face of all this suffering, another revolution happened. Of course, we needed a way to cope. And one set of ways to cope is being offered by religion. And here is a well-known take on suffering from Buddhism. Life is suffering all the aspects. Some of them are listed here.
And of course, there is a well-known way out of that, which is on the face of it, extremely individualistic. It's not society oriented at all. Although, there is within Buddhism, this notion of a community, a Sangha, should not be downplayed. But still, the journey to liberation in Buddhism is extremely personal, which is why I call it here. I put it under the rubric of self-care.
And maybe it's a little moderation on this saying by the Buddha. Here's a saying from Jorge Luis Borges. "Happy are those who know that suffering is not a crown of glory." So put a damper on the notion that life necessarily is just suffering, which, by the way, is why this is an apocryphal gospel, not a real one. Borges invented it out of whole cloth.
So we know what some famous people have said about religion, a very well-known quote from Marx. "Religion is the opium of the people." There is, actually, the full version of the quote, which not many people have come across. If you read Marx, of course, you do come across that. And these days, Marx has been reissued in any number of recent new translations. It's actually a good idea to pick up some of his works.
If you have a cat, there's a book, Marx for Cats, actually available. So you can equip your cat with the proper means of understanding the human or maybe, also, the feline condition. So here's the full quote. "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
So this makes you think. I think this sheds some new light-- new, I mean, this is an original quote-- on Marx's take on religion. We need some opium, not in the literal sense; in the face of all this suffering. And I think there is a lot of surprisingly-- I mean, a lot of surprisingly much compassion to people who suffer on Marx's part here.
So this has led to relatively recently, maybe 50 years ago, a long time after Marx, to the emergence of this conception of liberation theology. And I want to put a bit of a damper on that as well. Here's a quote which is very well-known from Jesus. This is from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus said unto his disciples, "a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
The disciples were all flustered. But that's OK, because Jesus immediately backtracked, literally the next passage. This is 23-24. This is 25-26. "Jesus beheld them and said unto them, with men, this is impossible"-- putting a camel through the eye of the needle-- "but with God, all things are possible."
So this is what led some people-- I think it was Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher, who said about bourgeois freedom, that its more bourgeois than freedom. So one can say about liberation theology, it's more about theology than about liberation. And yet in adjacent fields, there is a concept, has been a concept for a while of liberation in my own field, psychology.
This is a cover of a book by Ignacio Martin-Baro, Writings For A Liberation Psychology. Martin-Baro was murdered by some guerrillas funded by the CIA while teaching in Central America, I think maybe in Mexico-- I forget-- in 1979 or so. So here's what he wrote about psychology.
"Psychology offers an alternative solution to social conflicts. It tries to change the individual by preserving the social order, or, in the best of cases, generating the illusion that, perhaps, as the individual changes, so will the social order-- as if society were a summation of individuals." Needless to say, but I'll say it nevertheless it's not so. Almost as a follow up to that, there comes this sentiment from another thinker/educator from those parts of the world.
This is the Brazilian Paulo Freire, who came up with this concept of conscientization, raising the consciousness of his pupils, people whom he taught to read and write. He wrote that this process "preserves the focus on the personal, but not the people as opposed to or foreign to the social." And then very powerful, very powerful passage here, "There is no person without family, no learning without culture, no madness, without social order; and therefore neither can there be an I without a We, a knowing without a symbolic system, a disorder that does not have reference to moral and social norms." So this, in my book, goes under the rubric of social consciousness and how the development of that, this word in Portuguese, again coined by Freire, the development of proper social consciousness is an antidote to alienation.
And now we are down to the seventh and the last revolution, which is in progress because the goals certainly haven't been achieved. And I want to share this slogan written on a bridge in Paris in 1968. "Be realist. Demand the impossible." I mean, it seems like the dismantling of the capitalist world order is impossible. That's what it seems like now, but if we don't aim for that, we definitely will not achieve that.
So I want to augment that-- May '68, a student and worker uprising in Paris, with this one, Murray Bookchin, a well-known ecologist and anarchist thinker. "What the '60s should teach us is that there is no substitute for consciousness." That's my excuse for inflicting the May '68 slogan on you.
So I want really to support that with the views of some people who have experience in working with people and getting to know people. And there are few persons better positioned than that than Chloe Zhao, who was the director of Nomadland. If you haven't seen that movie, very highly recommended. So let me just allow her to speak for herself on the consciousness of hope about human nature.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Thank you. Thank you to the Academy. Thank you to my brilliant, brilliant nominees, final nominees. Thank you. My entire Nomadland company, what a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime journey we went on together. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to you.
I've been thinking a lot lately of how I keep going when things get hard. And I think it goes back to something I learned when I was a kid. When I was growing up in China, my dad and I used to play this game. We would memorize classic Chinese poems and texts, and we would recite it together and try to finish each other's sentences.
And there's one that I remember so dearly. It's called "The Three Character Classics." And the first phrase goes [SPEAKING CHINESE]. People at birth are inherently good. And those six letters had such a great impact on me when I was a kid, and I still truly believe them today, even though sometimes, it might seem like the opposite is true. But I have always found goodness in the people I met everywhere I went in the world.
So this is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. And this is for you. You inspire me to keep going.
[END PLAYBACK]
So more hope now from the side of science, a book that Pyotr Kropotkin published in 1903, Mutual Aid, subtitled A Factor of Evolution, recently reissued by, I think, the PM Press, down here in town. And the point is that evolution is better described not as survival of the fittest, this terrible expression, which Darwin himself did not stress at all and was taken over and publicized by people like-- really bad people, like Herbert Spencer, the Social Darwinists. Mutual Aid-- A Factor in Evolution and a recent revisiting of that topic, Mutual Aid-- The Other Law of the Jungle, written by two biologists and plenty of data in support of that notion. By the way, Kropotkin himself was a geographer and a scientist before he became a full-time political activist.
So a catalyst for cooperation is conscience, which is a kind of consciousness. "The 'first-person plural perspective' is the origin," arguably. This is from Chris Frith and Thomas Metzinger, "the origin of moral cognition and moral behavior." And "conscience is the representation of group preferences in the brains of individual organisms"; and just to remind you, my drawing of a bacterium with the representation of bacterial society inside it as a representation of group interests and the Zapatista badge reminding us of the pluriverse.
So what needs to happen is we need to change the world, and this has to be done one conscience at a time. And I want to quote just from the introduction of this other book by Kropotkin, An Appeal to the Young. And here it is. I think it's very appropriate. I wish this quote, just to whet the listeners' appetite, were read to all incoming Cornell students or, in general, students because it's aimed at the young.
So Kropotkin writes, "if abstract science is a luxury and practice of medicine mere chicane, if law spells injustice, and mechanical invention is but the means of robbery"-- does this sound familiar at all? "If the school at variance with the wisdom of the practical man is sure to be overcome; and art without the revolutionary idea can only degenerate, what remains for me to do." A young person asks.
And Kropotkin replies. "Well, I will tell you. A vast and most enthralling task in which your actions will be in complete harmony with your conscience." Some work for you to do. And you ask, What work? And Kropotkin tells you-- of course, I'm not going to go into any kind of detail here, but just rather leave you with this phrase. It's up to your conscience to make for a better world, if it is possible.
I want now to very briefly describe the epilogue to my book, The Way Out. The epigraph is from this old delta blues. "If it keeps on raining, levee's going to break." And this actually describes my experience a couple of years ago in Death Valley, when I hiked. I camped out, had a beautiful hike in this huge basin. It's about 25 or 30 square miles of plains surrounded by mountains. It was raining all day there, so presumably a lot of water has been gathered in that basin.
And then in the evening, almost like a biblical setting, a rainbow appeared. This is my car here, and my tent cannot be seen next to the car. And it looked good. So I ate dinner, and I went into the tent to sleep. And the last peek at the setting was even more beautiful than the rainbow.
And then night comes, and a rain starts again. And then the rain turns to sleet and hail and what not. And this is what was happening to me. I woke in complete darkness, and I felt that something really bad is going on weather-wise on the outside. And what should I do? Should I just stay put? I mean, I'm still dry inside my tent, inside this cozy sleeping bag that I have.
And then it dawned on me-- and this is a description of a real experience. I didn't invent it. I have photo documentation, although not at the critical moments in what's about to happen here, because I was too busy, trying not to get drowned, to take pictures. So I perceived my mental set, this warm glow of privilege of being well-equipped against the elements, the reluctance to leave the comfort of the tent for what it was, a delusional cover-up of a sunk cost.
My emotional investment in the warm bubble of the tent was keeping me from acting on the situation that was growing more and more dire by the minute. Should I stay put, I would most probably survive the coming of the flash flood, but it would have been extremely-- even if didn't drown, extremely embarrassing to have to call for a satellite link call for help. My wife would then never give me permission to go out into the desert again, for one thing.
So with that realization that I was acting out on a sunk cost came a change of consciousness. And this is my excuse to the including of this story in the book. And hoping that the way out from that valley was still passable, I decided to act. And of course, happy end because I'm here. I didn't drown. All was well.
Well, all is not well with the planet. And a flash flood actually is only one of the things that we have to keep in mind in terms of what awaits us in the near future, all of us-- flash floods, fires, smoke, species extinction, agriculture, going down the drain, what not. Just one slide on this, surface air temperature from the Copernicus source, long-term averages, annual averages. And then last year is in red. And it should be in red.
And this year, up to April 1st, even higher up, temperature is rising. The planet looks like this if you mark temperature anomalies this is 12 degrees Celsius over the normal. This is a full-blown crisis. This cannot be. If we ignore that, we are heading towards not just the extinction of many species we share the planet with, but maybe the extinction of our own species as well.
Which is why some of us have organized and trying to organize other people not to go on with business as usual. This is not a viable way to a future that's survivable. No more business as usual.
Walter Benjamin wrote a wonderful thing about how the things, our status quo, is the catastrophe. So right now, we are in the business as usual mindset. Most of us are. And this is the catastrophe. If you want to find out more about us, the QR code is on this slide, which is my last.
And I just want to go, again, over the ground that I have covered, from selfless sentience, minimal selves, self-consciousness, language, societies, self-care, and then finally, critical consciousness for a better world. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: Is this working? Excellent. So, questions? Wonderful. Let me get you a microphone.
AUDIENCE: Thanks very much. That was really enlightening.
SHIMON EDELMAN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Given that we are, say, conservatively, 96% chimpanzees, and their fundamental reaction to lots of things is you step on my territory, I tear off your face, that's kind of a standard knee jerk reaction. How can we expect our prefrontal cortex to really overcome that and give us enough time and thoughtful space to avoid the catastrophe of ripping off our neighbor's faces?
SHIMON EDELMAN: Yeah, well, one way of looking at it is to deny this kind of brain determinism. We are not even our own brains in terms of the anatomy and the physiology. We are more than that in ways and by means, some of which I hinted at. What we are definitely also not is we are not chimpanzees. And the couple of percent of genetic difference happens to have concentrated in places in the brain that allow, I guess, most importantly, education.
You can educate young people, young humans, into being cooperative. You can also educate them into being really nasty to each other. Unfortunately, some popular notions out there follow fictional examples. The Lord of the Flies, a society just of boys, an ad hoc society, who are really nasty to each other, written by a man. I mean, the book written by a man, which-- well, we don't have to be like that.
And if you look at the huge and growing corpus of data on human development-- so this echoes, actually, the name of one-half of my department. Psychology now incorporates human development, I think very appropriately. You see that there is definitely a ready-made substrate for education, for good, for societal good, for being good to each other.
I actually, sometimes, don't believe that I'm saying those things, because I was, for most of my life, I was a strict individualist. And gradually, things changed inside my head. And I think if things could change inside my head, they can also change inside many other people's heads.
Definitely, when you start young, when education starts properly at a young age, the outcome-- and this has been known and documented, but also known on another level. Throughout the world in many, not all, but many, maybe most Indigenous societies, people grow up to be good citizens. That's possible, and we should strive towards that instead of making excuses on the basis of genes or brains for our bad angels of our nature. We can do better than that.
SPEAKER 1: Oh, excuse me.
AUDIENCE: I have a question. I think it's a question. It's still sort of formulated. But it seems to me that what you've described is that a growing self-awareness will lead to a critical consciousness. If that is true, is one of the things about the climate change crisis and what's being is-- a lot of it is what's going on out there. Look, the Earth is warming. All these things are happening.
Is, perhaps, a better or at least, an equally important investment might be, essentially, in self-awareness workshops, just to work on people seeing the good and recognizing the good in themselves and recognizing their potential. Is that something that you would stand by, that comment?
SHIMON EDELMAN: No really. I mean, this is not the worst approach to the crisis. Because the worst is acceptance. There's actually a variety of therapy, the acceptance and whatever is the name for that.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SHIMON EDELMAN: Yeah, yeah, I mean, come on. Come on. I mean, all the suffering that's optional, you opt for accepting that and then just trying to be happy? We know who pushes that line. One of the big names in that-- there are books about that published by whom? Say, people like Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute. We follow the money. You see who are on that side.
So with climate change, personal awareness is important. But it's not as important as establishing links with your neighbor, literal neighbors, and then virtual links, preferably virtual, because you don't want to travel halfway around the world and burn carbon, release carbon in the atmosphere, just to meet people of a different mindset. Virtual links, you can, these days, study with the elders of societies that are geographically remote.
For instance, the Zapatista, the caracoles, they have been at it for 40 years. So two entire generations of people, young people, have come through that educational system. A core part of their effort is educational, and they are different from us, from people like me, who had to paint over some really bad stuff to get to that point.
And yeah, I mean, working with individuals as individuals is better than nothing. But as Martin-Baro pointed out, a society is not just a set of just a combination of individuals. It's more than that. And we have to take advantage of that. Because only as a society we can survive. We cannot survive as individuals.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. On the concept of radical acceptance, I actually think it could be useful. Because many people, when they hear the science telling us what is happening, cannot accept what it's saying. It's too far from anything they've ever experienced. And their first response is skepticism. Who said that? Are you sure?
Their first response is not How can I help? So radical acceptance means accepting the truth. But that doesn't preclude acting on it.
SHIMON EDELMAN: Thank you, Bethany. Thank you for the distinction. That's absolutely-- I mean, how can one champion the non-acceptance of truth? So acceptance of truth, fine, but not the acceptance of a predetermined future, absolutely not. And I suspect that most of those therapies out there, therapists actually engaging in those approaches with their clients aim not at having the clients accept the scientific truth.
I mean, I don't know, but how many therapists discuss scientific truths with their clients? I mean, maybe in Ithaca, some proportion. But there is. Do you agree there's a distinction between-- right, OK. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: So I also have a question. So for about a year, I was thinking about a special issue on highlighting all of the real contributions psychology has made to the climate crisis struggle. And I emailed people, and I tried to get people, and I tried to get evidence for how psychology had actually measurably changed the situation. And I wonder what you would say. What would your answer be? What is the most powerful contribution psychology can make to helping us shift the consciousness around this?
SHIMON EDELMAN: I think we have-- we, I speak now, I guess, for my discipline, which is funny, because I've not been trained as a psychologist-- a separate conversation. We have to open up our discipline, first of all, to neighboring disciplines. So psychology, just like Martin-Baro and Freire pointed out, they pointed out individuals are not individual and separate from one another. So psychology, doing psychology in separation from sociology and from anthropology and from history is ridiculous.
I think these days, even though it's definitely possible, it's not recommended to teach psychology in disconnection from not just those neighboring disciplines, but also, from the so-called hard science of climate. And I'm trying to acclimatize all of my courses by including literally in every lecture and not in the direction of climate science and ways to cope and to overcome. But also, one thing that I want to mention is we have to connect to Indigenous knowledges, people like us, just like us, who have been doing psychology.
We all have been doing not what got to be called folk psychology, just ways of being, each cultural tradition being what it is, with the traditions being passed on, education of the young by the elders being part of the equation. We have to open up to that. And thereby, the discipline will become more complete. And it should cease to be a separate discipline.
While I'm not a great believer in very disciplinary sciences, in general, but definitely not for psychology. I mean, you don't want maybe astrophysics to learn from history. Probably not. But not to have psychology draw on all those sources of knowledge, and I use the plural knowingly, is, I think, not excusable anymore.
SPEAKER 1: We have time for one more question. Any questions? Oh, OK. Hang on one second.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I study language and cultural evolution, so I guess I just wanted to hear you talk more about that, particularly in regard to with language taking up one of these consciousness revolutions with-- I think it was four, with speech and sign. How can we change the way that we speak about the climate crisis in a way that-- how can we change our language to then bring these higher levels of consciousness to focus more on the climate crisis?
SHIMON EDELMAN: Yeah, so there is any number of great examples. Some of them, I tried to round up and share in the chapter on language in the book. But climate crisis as a phrase is already an advance over semi-euphemisms from the past. But I just want maybe, if I can off the top of my head, share several expressions that are extremely pernicious, starting with very basic ones like health care industry. Pause for a second.
Health care industry as in business? Or the cost of living, the cost of living, so you have to-- or a living wage. You have to work for someone to keep yourself alive? Well, Orwell has written about that, the Newspeak. But we think the Newspeak was either back in 1984 or hasn't come about yet.
All of our mainstream media is chock full of Newspeak like that. All of Cornell's official communications are chock full of-- should I use the B word? Well, you get my meaning, right? A big revision is due. And this sounds like, what, language policing? Well, our language is being policed by our police even these days. You can get arrested in some states of this great Union for saying inappropriate things.
Say, in a setting like this, in New York state, I can still do this talk and not get arrested. But who knows in Florida, if I were to give this talk, or in Kansas or Kentucky? So an actual revolution in language use still has to happen. And it's up to all of us.
Just every time you hear an expression that sounds off-- qualified immunity for the police, qualified immunity, all kinds. I mean, I can go on and on and on, use up the remainder of my time just on that.
SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE]. Join me in another round of applause. And thank you for--
SHIMON EDELMAN: Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you.
How it is that we share some aspects of consciousness with bacteria? How can consciousness arise in artificial machines? And what does consciousness have to do with our survival in the face of the unfolding climate catastrophe? These, and many other fundamental questions about consciousness are explored in Cornell professor of psychology Shimon Edelman’s new book “The Consciousness Revolutions: From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation” (Springer Nature, 2023).In a Chats in the Stacks book talk presented at Mann Library in April 2024 Edelman discusses how consciousness is fundamentally a kind of computation and how through the understanding of human consciousness we can develop better insights into the nature of our lived experience, our problems, our social dynamics, and our shared future.
