The Reality of the Inner World - Cave of Bones
by Asa Boxer
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A while back, I watched a documentary called Unknown: Cave of Bones, which I can’t recommend enough. It’s about a group of hominins called Homo naledi who lived in South Africa about 250,000 years ago and who practiced sophisticated burial rites. The cave in question is elaborate, involving several stages, leading toward the burial area. Three challenges along the way are striking: the first is a ten-inch high passage, the second is a steep climb, and the third is an exceedingly narrow and steep descent. Ultimately, they reached the final chamber where they buried their dead. It appears they may also have developed some form of writing. The journey would have taken several days, and could not have been completed alone, since one would have needed help carrying the body through such difficult terrain. It follows that they would have had to bring further supplies, such as food and wood for fire. In other words, the burial of their dead was a ritual journey to the underworld and back.
The main point of interest for me is what we might call the objective reality of the inner world. Last time I wrote about this subject, I made the point that we share certain kinds of experiences: things like melancholy upon seeing autumn leaves or upon hearing minor notes in music. We share ideas about myths and symbols. I asked how we might account for the fact that we understand foreign cultures or that we at least find them relatable.
In the case of Homo naledi, my argument is augmented because we’re not talking about other humans: same species perhaps, but different enough to expect something entirely alien. Instead, what we get is a cave that resembles our conceptions of Hades or some sort of underworld so much as to be uncanny. Of course, it seems natural to us that death should elicit lamentation. But this is a whole other level of response. The cave of bones is a manifestation of the inner world projected into the outer world. And to my mind it confirms the proposition that the inner world is not an accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity; it’s a shared experience that has a substance outside of ourselves. If our inner lives were accidental and insubstantial fantasies, we’d see much more surprising diversity in the things we think, feel, and imagine. That we can relate to an extinct group of hominins from 250,000 years ago is revealing about the contours of the collective psyche. Moreover, it pushes back against the notion of social constructs. Sure, much of culture is socially constructed, but these constructs aren’t pure invention; they’re grounded in a shared inner world that even Homo naledi would have recognised.
A further observation is that naledi, being an all round smaller creature than ourselves, had a smaller brain. In our cerebramantic culture this is striking, since we generally believe that small brains indicate low intelligence. It’s worth reminding you here of philosopher Henri Bergson’s proposition on this matter:
The lower we descend in the animal series, the more the nervous centres are simplified, and the more, too, they separate from each other, till finally the nervous elements disappear, merged in the mass of a less differentiated organism. But it is the same with all the other apparatus, with all the other anatomical elements; and it would be as absurd to refuse consciousness to an animal because it has no brain as to declare it incapable of nourishing itself because it has no stomach. (Creative Evolution, 1907)
I can see many a naturalist spewing their coffee at this suggestion, finding it too ridiculous a stretch, but interestingly enough, there are some X-Files-type examples bearing this out. In his A Secret History of Consciousness, historian of the occult, Gary Lachman, relays David Darling’s reports on cases of normally-functioning hydrocephalic individuals—essentially brainless people—in his After Life: In Search of Cosmic Consciousness. Here’s Lachman on this subject:
Darling speaks of two children born in the 1960s who “had fluid where their cerebrums should have been. . . . Although neither child showed any evidence of having a cerebral cortex, the mental development of each appeared perfectly normal.” In another case, a man with an IQ of 126, a graduate of the University of Sheffield with a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and by all accounts bright and perfectly ordinary, had no detectable brain. Identical twin girls with advanced hydrocephalus enjoyed above average IQs. In one case, an autopsy performed on a young man who had died suddenly revealed “only the most paltry rind of brain tissue.” When the coroner expressed sympathy for the parents’ loss, but offered that at least now their severely retarded son had found peace, the parents were dumbfounded, informing him that their bright son had been at his job only days before. Although the paper reporting these cases received some attention at the time, it was subsequently forgotten, its findings just too contrary to the reigning scientific orthodoxy.
Were we living in an honest society, these “freak” instances would be perceived as falsifying nearly the entire field of neurobiology.
Be that as it may, one of our basic understandings regarding the brain as the centre of our nervous system is that it causes a delay between stimulus and response. Unlike a reflex situation, the more the brain steps in, the more choice we have regarding our responses. Perhaps this has something to do with a certain kind of creativity. Rather than just fight of flight, for instance, we may develop other options.
So the brain mediates and consequently interferes with direct experience. It dulls instinct and intuition. No one teaches a spider to spin its elaborate webs that not only span enormous distances relative to the size of the spider, but that require adaptations to each locale. Despite every cell in our bodies having the same DNA, we still have no idea how a cell knows to develop as skin or kidney or blood vessel or whateverhaveyou.
A fascinating, recent study posits that the brain acts as a psi inhibitor. According to the article I’ve linked to, “Psi is a phenomenon that includes telepathy (mind-mind connections), clairvoyance (perception of distant objects or events), precognition (perception of future events), and mind-matter interactions (psychokinesis).” Apparently, researchers “used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to temporarily inhibit the left medial middle frontal region in healthy individuals, observing significant psi effects as a result.”
So who’s to say where that sweet spot is between intelligence and being too clever by half?—so smart indeed that we lose touch with our fundamental connections to consciousness. In short, it’s far from surprising that Homo naledi had smaller brains. As a result, they may very well have enjoyed a more direct connection with and a fuller experience of the inner world.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
Very engaging material, new to me as your topics tend to be. I am always interested to hear somebody described as a "big brain," since to me that would suggest a big head also, although I am being overly literal here, I realize. But I've never heard of people, successful or otherwise, who have no brain, as per your examples. There again your post brings a smile. It turns out that "big brain" is not a compliment and "no brain" not necessarily an insult.
It's kind of pathetic, Asa, that the most prominent leaders of the scientific establishment are too clever by more than half and dismiss consciousness as something not worth exploring. Materialist science can't explain it, so "[sentience] might as well not exist," says Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: "the mystery [of consciousness] remains a mystery, a topic not for science . . . but for late-night dorm room sessions." Your latest insights into the "objective reality of the inner world," however, have me wondering about the relationship between the individual and collective consciousness. If Bergson was on to something and consciousness doesn't reside in the brain, then where are our memories 'contained'? And how does an individual mind merge with that collective inner reality? Bergson said, for example, that there's no clear division between instinct and intelligence but instead they exist on a sort of continuum, that there are no stable states in the organized world, per se, but only continuous transitions. I wonder if the same idea might apply to the relations between individual and collective consciousness.