How We Create Ourselves

Our dog Stella is over ten years old and it seems like she's still learning new tricks. In the past couple years, she seems to have taken more than passing interest in how humans use their voices and has been experimenting with her own.

She's always barked, of course, but not long ago, she started howling joyfully whenever we have guests over to the house. I reckon she's noticed that everyone's voices jump up in intensity and volume as we greet one another. I've read that dog's can hear our heart beats. I imagine that she's responding to the excitement or nervousness we all feel about the evening to come. We've taught her not to be reactive to other dogs when we're out walking, but lately I've noticed that as we say "Good morning" to people with their leashed dogs, she's started "talking" as well. It might sound like a kind of whine -- and maybe that's all it is -- but it sure feels like she's also using her voice to greet those we pass. For years, when she wanted something -- to be fed, to go outside -- she would just sit and stare at us, but lately she's added a low rumbling voice to her repertoire. And sometimes, when my wife and I are engaged in a long conversation, she joins us in a way that seems, well, conversational.

We're warned against andromorphizing animal behavior (e.g., attributing human traits, feelings, and behaviors to non-humans) but the more I learn about animals, and plants for that matter, the more I'm convinced that we don't andromorphize enough. 

By now, Stella knows that we're not big fans of wild barking, lurching toward other dogs, and other "unruly" behavior. These are, however, natural ways for canines to connect with the world. My theory is that with those things off the table, she's figuring out new, approved ways of creating relationships with the world around her. Traditional animal behaviorists might insist that it's all some sort of Skinnerian conditioning and that she's really motivated by instincts to, say, dominate or control territory or secure food. But as one of her most constant companions, I see the same thing I see in young children: everything is about relationships, and our voices are a key way that humans do this.

From the moment we're born, we begin creating relationships with people, places, and things. Our voices, a baby's cry, for instance, is one of the first ways we begin to entangle ourselves in the world. We tend to think of our voices as something ephemeral because they lack substance, but from the very beginning of life, we use our voices to move the world. Our cry brings us food, snuggles, and responding voices: connection. This is what lets us know we're alive, that we're safe, that we're real. Maybe I am andromorphizing, but it sure seems to be that this is what Stella has figured out and she wants a little of that for herself.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli, who I've written about on this blog many times before and whose books I enjoy reading and re-reading, has a gift for "andromorphizing" physics. But that doesn't mean he isn't a serious scientist, it's just that he's capable of using, say, the poetry of Dante to communicate about the nature of the universe.

Rovelli argues that the physical world is nothing more than a web of relations. He writes that we live in "a world of happenings, not of things," drawing his conclusions from the study of quantum mechanics where time and space are not objective things, but rather relationships between something and something else. "There is no longer space that 'contains' the world, and there is no longer time 'in which' events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with one another. The illusion of space and time that continues round us is a blurred vision of this swarming of elementary processes."  In this understanding of the universe, there is no cause and effect, just relationships between things and the stories we tell about them. As science writer George Musser puts it in his new book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, "Not only does a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it make no sound, but it doesn’t even exist."

It sounds fantastical, but these are logical conclusion based on the language of logic: math. Obviously, these kinds of conclusions may very well simply point to flaws in our theories and there are many physicists who think Rovelli and others who think like him are wrong. Still, this notion that even such fundamental things as gravity and magnetism have no properties in isolation, but rather only acquire them through entanglement with other things is one that has parallels in the world outside those ivory towers.

We know, for instance, that humans kept in isolation lose their minds. Their brains literally shrink. They hallucinate, they lose their sense of self. Indeed, when a person is kept in isolation long enough, they come to believe they no longer exist. Babies who are not held roll over and die. Just as the tree in the forest doesn't exist without relationships, we ourselves do not exist without them.

As Musser writes, "By analogy, consider a famous optical illusion by the German psychologist Walter Ehrenstein, in which lines converge on a point but never actually meet, like a wheel with spokes but no hub. We still see a hub, because the brain fills it in. Similarly, we see relations in the world, and our Brians presume those relations must be anchored in concrete objects, but maybe those objects are illusory."

One of the most mysterious things in quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in which two or more particles (e.g., electrons, photons) are connected and their properties are dependent on one another, even when separated by large distances. They are in entangled with one another in a way the defies our day-to-day experience of space and time, suggesting to me that relationship is everything, something our babies know, something Stella knows.

"Children," writes Rovelli, "grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same." At the end of the day, learning is about creating entanglements, or rather playing, with people, places, and things. When we do this, we are not simply seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or hearing what is there, but rather creating what is there through the relationship we forge beyond the metaphorical four walls of ourselves. This is likewise how we create ourselves.

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