The Container Does Not Know It Contains
There are approximately 37 trillion cells in a human body. Each one of them is doing something. Metabolising, dividing, signalling, dying, being replaced. Not one of them knows you exist. Not one carries a representation of the whole that it helps to constitute.
The liver cell processes toxins with no awareness that there is a creature whose life depends on this processing, no sense that the processing is taking place inside something, no relationship to the project of being human beyond the immediate chemistry of its own ongoing activity. You are the sum of an enormous number of processes that do not know they are summing to you. You are what it looks like, from far enough away, when all of that activity happens in one place at one time. The cell does not know this. The mitochondrion does not know this. The bacterium—and you contain more bacterial cells than human ones—almost certainly does not know this, and the question of what bacterial knowing would even mean is a question we have barely begun to form, let alone answer.
This is the starting point that the smugness of human beingness never quite reaches. We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as containers for experience—as the subjects who have thoughts, feelings, perceptions, the entities for whom things matter and to whom things happen. We accept, in principle, that we are made of smaller things. Biology teaches this readily enough. But we tend to treat the smaller things as components serving the whole, as though the bacterium in the gut exists for the sake of the organism that houses it, as though the cell divides in order to keep the person alive. The directionality runs downward—from the intentional human subject to the merely mechanical substrate. The person is real. The components are infrastructure.
Reverse this. The bacterium is not infrastructure for you. You are, from the bacterium’s perspective—if perspective is a word that can be stretched this far, and the stretching is worth attempting—a convenient environment. A large, warm, resource-rich habitat that happens to move around and make decisions, most of which are entirely irrelevant to the bacterium’s chemical concerns. The bacterium was here, in evolutionary terms, long before you. It will be here after. It does not require your existence to continue, though it currently exploits the conditions your existence provides. You are not the point of the bacterium’s existence. You are the neighbourhood.
And then go further out. The human being who contains 37 trillion cells and more bacteria than that is itself contained. By air—not metaphorically but materially, in the sense that without the particular chemical composition of the atmosphere that currently surrounds this planet, the human organism cannot continue its activity for more than a few minutes. The air does not know you are breathing it. The atmosphere did not evolve to support human respiration; human respiration evolved to exploit an atmospheric composition that photosynthesising organisms had spent billions of years producing for their own purposes, entirely indifferent to what would eventually take advantage of the results. You breathe what the plants exhaled. The plants did not intend this. The word intend does not apply to photosynthesis.
And further. The planet that maintains the atmosphere, the star that energises the photosynthesis, the gravitational relations between bodies that keep the planet at the distance from the star that makes liquid water possible, the initial conditions of a universe that produced the elements without which none of this occurs—none of this was arranged for you. The carbon in your body was synthesised in stars that exploded before the solar system formed. The calcium in your bones was not put there for you by anyone or anything. It was made available by a sequence of physical and chemical processes spanning billions of years, processes that did not know you were coming and do not know you are here.
To have a centre is one improbability among many such centres. Every entity, looking outward from wherever it finds itself, can arrange the surrounding world as if it were the reference point—as if everything else were at various distances from the position it currently occupies. The duck, if we allow ourselves the liberty of speculating about duck topology, does not experience itself as peripheral to a world centred on the human observer watching from the bank. The duck is where it is. The pond organises itself around the duck’s current position, in the sense that what matters to the duck, the surfaces and temperatures and food sources that constitute the duck’s world, radiates from the duck outward. Every entity constructs a local centre. No entity’s local centre is the actual centre, because there is no actual centre, because a centre requires an edge, and the relational field that constitutes what is does not have an edge any more than the universe has an outside.
The word creation carries the same problem at a different scale. To have a creation is to have a creator, or to have an event that precedes itself—a beginning before which there was something capable of not-yet-beginning, a first moment that implies a before which undermines the firstness. Cosmology does not solve this problem. It restates it at higher temperatures and shorter timescales. The question of why there is something rather than nothing is not answered by an account of what the something did in its first microseconds. The question of what existed before the conditions that produced the universe existed is not answered by noting that time itself may have begun with the universe—since that answer simply relocates the improbability rather than dissolving it. We call it the birth of the universe because birth is a word we have for beginnings, and we need a word, and we have this one. But birth presupposes a process already underway, parents already constituted, a biology already operating. It presupposes more than it explains.
We are proud of our brains. We should perhaps be more astonished by them, and less proud, and these are not the same orientation. Astonishment keeps the strangeness alive—the improbability that matter arranged in this particular way produces the experience of reading, of grief, of recognising a face, of not being able to remember a word and then suddenly finding it three hours later in an unrelated context. Pride domesticates the strangeness. Pride says: yes, this remarkable thing is mine, is characteristic of my kind, is evidence of my kind’s superiority in the relational field. Astonishment says: this remarkable thing is happening, and the happening is stranger than any account of it, and the account of it is itself part of the happening, which makes the strangeness recursive and therefore deeper than pride can reach.
The neuron fires. The signal propagates. Something that we call experience arises—though experience arising from the propagation of electrochemical signals is not something that any current account of the neuron makes comprehensible. The hard problem of consciousness, as it gets called in philosophy and neuroscience, is hard precisely because no account of mechanism explains why mechanism should produce experience at all, why it should feel like anything to be a brain processing information, why there is a what-it-is-like rather than simply a what-happens. We can map the neural correlates of every experience we can induce. We cannot explain why the correlation exists rather than the neural activity simply occurring in the dark of its own functioning, with no experience attached, no inside, no witness.
This is where the human being meets the bacterium. The bacterium processes. We do not know what, if anything, the processing is like from the inside. We assume there is no inside—that the bacterium is mechanism all the way down, computation without experience, signal without witness. But this assumption may be smug beingness of a different kind. It may be the assumption that experience, inside-ness, the what-it-is-likeness of things, is a special property of the complex nervous systems that organisms like us possess—that it appeared at some point in evolutionary history when complexity crossed a threshold, and before that threshold, darkness. The difficulty is that we have no way of locating the threshold. We have no account of what complexity needs to do, or how much of it there needs to be, in order for experience to begin. We simply assume it begins somewhere around the nervous system and does not extend to the bacterium or the forest or the river or the stone. We assume this because we cannot imagine it otherwise. The inability to imagine is not evidence.
Somapatheia, in this context, is not a human achievement or a human condition. It is a description of how relating occurs at every scale. The bacterium relates to the chemical gradient it inhabits. The relating shapes the bacterium’s activity, orients it, in some sense informs it—not through consciousness, not through language or symbol, but through the direct and continuous modification of what the bacterium does by what it encounters. Call this somapatheia at the bacterial scale, and the word acquires a scope it perhaps always needed. The body’s knowing is not exclusively the knowing of bodies with nervous systems. It is the knowing of bodies in the displacement sense—of anything that enters a field of relations and is modified by what it encounters while it modifies what it encounters. The tree knows the light in this sense. Not as a fact stored and retrieved, but as an orientation continuously produced by the encounter.
We are parts of a different sum, and so on without end. What this means, if it means anything precise, is that the level at which we identify ourselves—the level at which we say I, or human, or organism—is a choice of scale, a decision about where to draw the boundary, which boundary to take as the relevant one. Draw it at the cell and the human disappears into community. Draw it at the species and the individual disappears into type. Draw it at the ecosystem and the species disappears into participant. Draw it at the solar system and the ecosystem disappears into surface phenomenon. There is no scale at which the boundary-drawing stops being arbitrary, because the relational field does not have natural joints—it does not divide itself into the correct units and invite us to discover them. We carve. The carving is our contribution, not our discovery.
This does not mean that the carvings are wrong or that the human being is an illusion. The human being is real. The cell is also real. The bacterium is also real. The ecosystem is also real. They are real at different scales, in different registers, and none of these registers has priority over the others simply because one kind of entity has found a way to privilege its own level of organisation and call it the truth.
And the ideas that arise in a human mind—the thought being thought at this moment, the concept assembling itself across these sentences—are not the exclusive products of the individual mind that thinks them. They are products of language, which is collective. Of a cultural history that produced this vocabulary and not some other. Of the biological substrate that makes human cognition possible at all, which is the product of an evolutionary history that could not have anticipated this thought and did not aim at it. Of everything the thinker has read, heard, been changed by, forgotten and been changed by anyway. The idea that seems most individual, most interior, most purely one’s own, is the meeting point of a dozen histories that pre-exist the individual and will outlast them.
If these ideas are ours, they are ours in the way that the exhalation of the plant is ours when we breathe it in. We did not make it. We did not request it. We arrived into a world that had been producing it for billions of years before we existed, and we take it in with every breath and we do not think about it, and we call it air as if naming it explains our relationship to it, and we continue.
The river does not know it is in a world. Perhaps the world is in the river.
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