The following is a report on a
scientific discovery. I was provoked to write it because of a
recent article by the neurologist Oliver Sacks entitled "In The
River of Consciousness" (January 15, 2004, issue of The New
York Review of Books), which is yet more evidence that we
live near the end of one of those great historical periods when
an idea is 'in the air,' awaiting a finalizing, defining
statement, some concise, potent metaphor or analogy by which to
summarize it and thus think about it and integrate it into the
main body of human knowledge. The idea has to do with conscious
awareness, what it is, and how it correlates with the brain and
neurons and, ultimately, with material reality itself.
Part of what I discovered was a creature that weighs about a
thousand tons and has a maximum dimension of about ten
kilometers. It has eyes and it is conscious -- and it can
understand English! That it lacks such organs as hands makes it
inept at something as simple as a game of checkers, and it
doesn't have the kind of eyes and mind by which it could see and
follow a movie. But the nature of this creature's consciousness
is relevant to understanding consciousness generally and its
relationship to neurons and their interconnections.
My discovery of this unusual being happened in the early
afternoon of Sunday September 22, 2002, which coincidently was
the day of the equinox. It happened on Interstate 81, a few tens
of miles north of Roanoke, Virginia.
On that day, my friend Berle Cherney and I had driven from
Washington, D.C., to Roanoke to retrieve his daughter Shane's
big, blond, dog Randy. Roanoke is midway between Memphis, where
Shane and Randy live, and the Maryland suburbs of Washington
where Berle and I live.
---
The handoff of Randy happened on schedule in the parking lot
of a Wendy's restaurant. Then Berle and Randy and I headed north
on Interstate 81. Berle was driving.
About 30 minutes into the trip we came to the back end of a
traffic jam. From the vantage of high points in the road we
could see an endless line of cars and trucks. I put my seat into
a recline and began reading the Sunday paper.
When next I looked up I noticed the trucks in front of us had
all moved into the right lane. Shortly thereafter the traffic in
the left lane thinned down until it was empty. I told Berle he
should pull into the left lane so we could get ahead. He said,
No, and he gave a reason which must have seemed adequate even if
I can't remember it. So I went back to reading.
That the trucks were in the right lane reminded me of another
traffic slowdown about a year previous when the woman in my life,
Joan Wathen, and I were on an Interstate leg in Pennsylvania.
Both traffic lanes were open, but the trucks were all in the
right lane. The right road shoulder was open, and no one was
using it to get ahead -- until a single car drove by fast on the
shoulder. I was irritated -- till I saw, not far ahead, a large
tractor semi-trailer pull partly onto the shoulder to block the
guy. I was glad to see the large truck block the shoulder like
that. No doubt all the other drivers were happy too. At that
time I thought the truck driver's action was spontaneous: he had
seen the approaching car in his rear-view mirror and then just
pulled into its path to block it.
I told Berle about that earlier incident. He said he hoped
the trucks would do the same if anyone tried to sneak past this
time, since both the shoulder and the left lane were empty of
traffic.
 I wondered if, somehow, within the culture of
highway truckers, there might have developed over the past few
decades of Interstate truck transport an understanding that
truckers would individually take the initiative in managing slow-
traffic situations so that nobody could sneak ahead and traffic
could move efficiently during a traffic jam. It seemed to me
that truckers might learned such a collective behavior simply
because of being on the road a lot and having to deal with such
things. They would learn the behavior from one another by seeing
it happen and by talking at truck stops, similar to the way
people imitate each other when, say, the columnist George Will
uses the verb "to exacerbate" and within a few weeks it's popular
from coast to coast, or when J. K. Galbraith refers to
"conventional wisdom" which then drifts into common usage, or the
way that clothing styles of teenagers spread geographically.
Fashions seem to spread mostly because of unexamined imitation
rather than because of rational discussion and conscious intent;
the truckers' efforts to control traffic flow in congested
situations may have become "fashionable" in a tacit and
spontaneous way, a new tradition within the culture of highway
mass transport.
I was thinking about this and wondering if there might there
be some way for a given truck driver to be warned that a car was
approaching fast and needed to be blocked, which is when I
remembered that CB radios had been fashionable in passenger
vehicles in the 1970s, and that truckers use them.
I asked Berle if he supposed the trucks were talking to each
other on CB radios. He reached behind his seat and pulled out a
black plastic zipper pouch. "Here, see if this still works."
It was an old CB radio. I hooked up the antenna and the
power line to the cigarette lighter, and Berle set the antenna
with its magnetized base on the car's roof near his window. He
said to tune to channel 19. Sure enough: voices, with the
strengths of the signals varying according to the distance we
were from each transmitting truck.
Immediately obvious was that the truck drivers, all strangers
to one another, had formed an ad hoc society. They addressed
each other as "driver" or "trucker" or "truck driver." The CB
conversation made it apparent that the trucks behind us were
blocking traffic from the left-most lane and from the road
shoulder. It was a CB-coordinated effort, aided by south-bound
trucks who were radioing the cause of the blockage ahead:
construction work, with only a single open lane of traffic. In
the minutes before Berle and I had set up the CB receiver, the
truckers had created a single lane of traffic by blocking the
cheaters and controlling the traffic flow.
The conversation among the truck drivers included discussions
of the previous day's sports scores, the national economy and the
then-anticipated war with Iraq. Several drivers cussed out the
President and several complained about the delay caused by the
construction work. An ad hoc CB culture existed within
the traffic jam. Several drivers made comments about the
benefits of toll roads versus the Interstate, and other drivers
mentioned the amounts of road taxes paid per mile by large
trucks, and that the government should keep the goddam traffic
flowing smoothly, given the high road taxes. The drivers all
seemed to use that ol'-buddy dialect of truckers portrayed in
movies and in country music -- a linguistic fashion trend also
arrived at without conscious intent, i.e., by imitation, the way
airplane pilots used to imitate the laid-back drawl of the
glamorous 1950s test pilot Chuck Yaeger.
On the CB radio, the truck drivers behind us mentioned every
now and then somebody was trying to get ahead, and measures were
taken. It was just a bunch of individual drivers talking to one
another and then moving their trucks accordingly.
So here is my main insight from that day: The trucks were, in
the collective, a single rolling entity, a kind of organism
having the power to move itself in ways that influenced its
environment by controlling the traffic flow. Because of the CB
nervous system, the collection of trucks was able to communicate
with south-bound traffic and thereby see over the far hills
beyond the traffic jam, in effect to "see" the problem,
anticipate it and know it!
---
That perspective -- of the trucks as a self-coordinated
collective, and with apparent consciousness! -- grabbed my
imagination: the voices on the CB were the thoughts of an ad hoc
organism, a "truck organism" that was aware of its surroundings
and able to interact with it and control it, just like any
creature that senses its world. But this "truck organism" could
see with dozens of eyes and then move its "body" to influence its
world in ways that benefitted itself as well as, in a symbiotic
way, all the other vehicles. The CB radio made me feel like I
was listening to the thoughts of not just an analog for an
organism but an actual rolling creature made of metal, plastic,
glass and conscious subcomponents meshed into a coherent "meta-
truck creature" having senses, reason, mind, and
intent.
This insight -- 'seeing' that something a lot like a conscious
organism, even if not an organism in the usual sense, can arise
spontaneously out of a gathering of communicating individuals,
and that conscious, intention-driven behavior can coalesce out of
it -- might come to anyone who connects CB radios with the
behavior of the trucks.
Related to this was an incident on the evening of June 28,
2002 (several months prior to the traffic jam on Interstate 81;
I've been keeping notes), while I was lying in bed on the edge of
sleep -- which is when many vivid insights and mental images
happen (typically being lost by morning if not written down) -- I
had had a mental image of people all across the U.S. talking
about and reading about and viewing on TV some topic of national
interest, and I conceived of or felt an understanding or
comprehension or knowing of a national consciousness as being
embodied somehow within, or by, or even as, the national
conversation. It was an uncomfortable insight because it
seemed illogical -- i.e., it is clearly not possible for
information exchange, for conversation, among groups of
people, or among individually conscious entities, which seems so
ordinary, so non-mysterious, to be related to, intimately linked
to, a thing as mysterious as consciousness.
And yet . . .
---
I can't, at this time, say any more about that feeling of the
relatedness of conversation to consciousness; I can say only that
I had that feeling, and it seemed real in the way I
imagine Ben Franklin might have responded to seeing television:
he'd see it, but he'd have no understanding of how flat images
could move and even talk, and yet TV images do move and talk, and
there are people who understand that particular mystery.
As I lay in bed on that June evening, turning in my mind the
idea and feeling that national consciousness is somehow embodied
in conversation, I examined that idea in relation to my
individual consciousness; i.e., maybe my awareness or
consciousness is embodied in an internal, cellular-level, or
organ-level, exchange of, or flow of, information in an internal,
nervous-system linked, conversation.
Whether or not my epiphany or insight about consciousness and
conversation stands as a basis for anything enduring is not yet
apparent, but I had the same feeling about conversation and
consciousness while Berle and I were listening to the CB
"thoughts" of the "truck organism." In the case of my semi-
dream, I managed to record that I had had that feeling about
consciousness and conversation. So it was in my mind and I was
prepared for the perspective on the conversation among the truck
drivers as being the thoughts of the truck organism that Berle
and I encountered for a few minutes on that day and time.
This insight into consciousness and conversation, with the
CB-linked trucks and the TV-linked national or cultural mind,
might have no utility, i.e., it might be utterly wrong and
foolish. There are no words by which to convey to myself or to
others the nature of the relationship of conversation, of
information flow, to consciousness. But the idea persists.
Consider this: If there had been no CB radios, the trucks would
not have been able to coordinate their actions in a coherent way,
and the apparent consciousness could not have existed. Likewise,
if no signals could move between the cells of my body, then
probably I would not be conscious -- I would not
exist.
The "truck creature" had an additional property associated
with living things: the turnover of material of which its "body"
was made -- i.e., trucks that were leaving from the front of the
traffic jam were also leaving the ad hoc organism, while
new trucks arriving at the rear were merging into it. That
process of turnover, of "new" trucks arriving at the rear and
replacing "old" trucks at the front, is similar to the way matter
flows through our bodies during our lives.
---
In his essay, The Value of Science, the physicist
Richard Feynman comments on a finding that phosphorus in a rat's
brain has a half-life of two weeks. "Now what does this mean?"
he asks. "It means that phosphorous that is in the brain of a
rat -- and also in mine, and yours -- is not the same phosphorous
as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the
brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have
gone away. So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms
with consciousness: Last week's potatoes? They now can
remember what was going on in my mind a year ago . . . "
The trucks arriving at the rear of the traffic jam, by
participating in the CB conversation, were acquiring and assuming
the knowledge -- the culture, the mind -- of the
"creature" they were becoming part of. The topics of sports
scores, road taxes, and politics probably got repeated every half
hour or so, with new variations and 'thoughts' constantly being
generated and reiterated in always different sets of words --
words and thoughts having already been said before Berle and
Randy and I passed through the thing. And the conversants, being
as they were anonymous to one another, were freer to talk than
are, say, people standing in a ticket line at a theater. If all
cars were equipped with short-range two-way radios, then urban
drivers waiting for traffic lights to change from red to green
would be able to exchange anonymous random thoughts; pedestrians
inclined toward self-consciousness in public would have good
reason to be uncomfortable when crossing the street in front of
stopped cars conversing with one another. ("Jesus, look at that
fat slob." "His tie doesn't go with his coat." "Moron!" And so
on; the mind of humanity, thinking.)
The idea or notion, certainly not a theory, that
consciousness might be embodied within exchanges of information,
within conversation (a dynamic and distributed process), is
repellant because it is so simple yet also so ungraspable; How
can that be, How can consciousness derive from conversation? The
feeling of such a relationship persists, though, at least to this
moment it does . . .
There is an analogy worth considering in this context: When
waves move across the surface of water, the only "thing" that
moves at the speed of the wave is its shape -- only the
shape moves; there is no material thing that moves at the speed
of the wave; the water simply rises and falls as the wave passes.
There is also the or analogy of culture itself: People are
born into it, acquire it, and participate in its conversations,
while others die out of it, having affected it, directed it and
been affected by and directed by it. The cultural conversation
endures through time, moving from topic to topic, just as each
person's individual thinking moves associatively from topic to
topic, changing, being affected by the world and culture's
interaction with the world, while the participants, we people,
are born into it and then die out of it. We are participants in
a flow of matter though time and culture.
We don't think of culture as conscious, even though it is
comprised of a flux of individuals who feel themselves to be
conscious. At the least, this account of the trucks stands as a
perspective on culture as a conversing and conscious organism
enduring through time. At most, the conversation among the
trucks really does correspond to an existence of conscious
awareness. Either way, it's something to think about, maybe even
something to talk about . . . which is also thinking . . .
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