Other minds

Ask me, and I'll tell you that diversity matters. Divergence matters. Celebrate heterogeneity! Celebrate difference! Celebrate the wild variety of ways of being.

I am resistant to the idea of a universal consciousness that we all dip into. Why not one universal life that we all dip into? It seems to me that if there is one life, then it no longer matters who is living; I feel the same about consciousness. The contents of consciousness are what the world is to us, but that does not mean that us and the world are the same thing. It means that the UV vision and magnetoreceptor world of many birds is not the same as my world, yet we all live in the one world. That is the one-ness I will acknowledge: there is one world which different body-minds have different access to and the variety of different body-minds increases the variety in that one world. Flowers have UV markings, and plumage too.

Differences - sometimes leading to competition or adaptation to escape predators/catch prey or collaboration - all work to create more differences. That my contents-of-consciousness are different to yours offers us a reason to have a conversation. Were we identical, all one, there would be no relationship.... aside from narcissism.

That you are other, radically different, allows for the emergence of relationship - co-operative or combative and that is the fuel to the flow of existence rather than the stasis of somnolence.

I watch the last-year's cygnet groom.

I can position myself at a place that this particular person does not regard as threatening. I am not tapping into their consciousness, I am watching for the differences of behaviour that communicate their sense of comfort vs threat. Carrying on vs looking at me. This is a person who acknowledges me as another living being, but I do not believe they have access to my mind apart from what my body and behaviour expresses. Through that, they can learn that I am not dangerous

They see me as someone other than they are.

For the horses, lined up in synchronicity, for a spell, this time of togetherness as bodies matters because this behaviour expresses something in their mood. They are not one body-mind; they are three body-minds operating together for that period and expressing through that something about the nature of relationship.

Soon after, the dark horse walked off, and the other two followed, some horse lengths behind. This said something new about their relationship.

Tane has a better sense of who I am then the cygnet, but he watches the movements of my body and my eyes, because those matter. They express to him more than I know.

And he is aware too of what signs and sounds and posture and position tell him about all the other people in the area: his children, his mate, any predators. The world bears a language for him that it does not bear for me. Even in the precious resonant moments of subsong, there are expects of both of us that are uniquely our own.