Do our experiences have a shape?
Src: Joel Filipe @joelfilip Unsplash
As I French braid my 3-year-old granddaughter‘s hair, she’s watching a NASA YouTube video having graduated from panda and puppy cams while I untangle her mane. Three to four minutes is all I need. This time she’s watching SpaceX take off with the Europa Clipper from earlier this week. Afterwards we go upstairs to the play area outside her bedroom to color in planets on printouts I brought.
“Your name is on its way to space.”
My granddaughter tilts her head and picks up an red pencil that needs sharpening. I proceed to sharpen the red one and a dozen or so other colors.
“You know that rocket you watched blasting off into space? It has people’s names on it, including yours and mine.”
She continued coloring the red spot on Jupiter we heard about on the video.
“The spaceship is going to one of Jupiter’s moons. Did you know Jupiter is my favorite planet.”
“What’s Mama’s favorite planet?”
I smile, “We’ll have to ask her when she gets home.”
We all have experiences. Do our experiences have a shape? What’s the difference between individual and group experiences?
what is experience?
We all carry around experiences as invisible layers. They drape over us as they become our memories. I imagine a teetering pile of old luggage, some open with photographs spilling out, caught in a frozen moment. We take snapshot moments in our personal history and hold them up as complete by themselves. That would be like cutting out someone’s heart and saying that represents the total person. We’re more complex than that. So too, if we unpack our experiences too much, we can miss appreciating the whole of the experience.
In this month’s thought echoes podcast, I spoke with Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, a philosopher of mind and metaphysics, and author of Modes of Sentience: Psychedelics, Metaphysics, Panpsychism. We talked about consciousness as experience, which he says at a fundamental level is a feeling, and more akin to sentience.
Dr. Peter wrote of Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process philosophy, holding the view that “everything is a process, an event. And we humans conceptualize events as things. but actually, everything is flowing constantly.” He goes on to say that our experience takes in not only what our brain and body does, but everything around us.
“Feeling is out there. And we kind of breathe it in.”
— Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
A reference I loved reading in Dr. Peter’s book from Whitehead called out “drops of experience” and how our perceptions become part of the perceiver. He also talked about consciousness and experience from an octopus's perspective. An interesting fact: two-thirds of an octopus's brain lies in its arms. A human brain may be necessary for human consciousness, but not other consciousnesses.
After coloring planets, I rocked in one of the chairs my husband made from a walnut tree in our backyard. All three daughters have one. Each chair has an inscription from The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein – “and the tree was happy.” My granddaughter reached for a copy of the lime-green book in a secret cubby under the seat. She didn’t ask me to read the book today, she seemed to be making sure the secret was safe before she climbed up on the window seat facing west.
“The moon’s waking up.”
As I crouched down by her, she pointed at the fading moon. I didn’t tell her the moon was setting.
“You know how Earth has a moon?”
My granddaughter nodded.
“Jupiter has a bunch of moons and your name is on its way to one of them.”
Turns out that not only are there over 2 million other names going up to Europa besides my granddaughter’s and mine, but a poem by Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate. “In Praise of Mystery” is inscribed on the vault plate inside the clipper
alongside visual representations of “water” in 103 languages, plus the symbol representing the word in American Sign Language.
do our experiences have different shapes?
On a recent trip I read PHI, a voyage from brain to soul, by Giuolio Tononi. A delightful trip through time and hypothetical conversations about consciousness between Galileo and people like Alan Turing and Darwin. Tononi presented consciousness as experience, with every experience having a shape. That struck me.
What’s the shape of experience? It’s not static like a photograph representing a moment. It’s more kinetic, experience moves around. There’s an element of time wrapped around our moments. Some experience shapes may solidify like ice, as in a cooling relationship. Or melt like chocolate in a sweet friend exchange. Or fossilize over time like grief.
If experiences have shapes, they are the shape of our emotions. Gratitude for my granddaughters and daughters when they were little, has the shape of a slow smile warming up from my heart in my chest.
When I read to my granddaughter as part of her bedtime routine. We had a little back and forth over making choices getting ready which included crocodile tears in those dark, blue eyes. She did not want the planets pjs which surprised me, she wanted the penguins. Her pajamas, her choice.
Once snuggled into her toddler bed, fairy lights winked at us from her closet. As I grabbed from a dozen or so books in a basket by her bed, an image of a fish, the size of a salad plate with lots of different colored scales eyed me. I smile and took a pause. I opened Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister who I met on social media earlier in the week. I’d mentioned to Marcus I thought my granddaughter had his book and would look for it when I got to Seattle. The book found me.
As I read Rainbow Fish to my granddaughter. The shape of that experience, that experience of coincidence, felt like seeing a shooting star. Rare.
And the Octopus’s advice in the story: share what you have excess of, share your plenty. As I cuddled up next to my granddaughter, I thought of my plenty to share with her. My gratitude. My energy. My time.
how does personal experience differ from group experience?
After reading PHI I imagined not only consciousness as a personal experience, but experimented with what is the shape of the experience of a group. An image of a flock of birds moving in unison popped to mind from visiting the Oregon coast. Hundreds of birds appeared to dance above the water, back and forth as if choreographed ahead of time. I recorded them for a long while before the organic flock structure scattered into individual birds all going their own way.
That lead to a question for Dr. Peter.
Does a flock of birds moving together (or any group e.g. common experiences at sports events or concerts) have a consciousness that disseminates once the flock (or group) disperses?
Dr. Peter said, “Group minds is a very interesting topic and it demands more research. And so, what I will say is purely speculative. But you notice, certain jazz bands often talk about this kind of jazz mind, as it were, this group mind and just knowing what will come next somehow when you're in the flow of it.”
I first started reading Modes of Sentience on a plane back to Wisconsin when we suspected Mom was dying and waiting for all of her girls to arrive. When I imagine Mom’s consciousness as experience becoming memory fragments, I simmered in the concept that when we die, our fragments of experiences are left behind like ingredients, setting sail on the breeze of time. Those fragments of our experiences live on through our children and whatever artifacts we might leave behind (photos, works of art, traditions).
###
The Europa Clipper should reach Jupiter’s orbit sometime in 2030, when my granddaughter turns ten. After traveling 1.8 billion miles to Europa, Jupiter’s second moon where it will search for watery life during 49 flybys. And as one scientist said, if everything we believe is there for life and we find no existence of life, that’ll be important too.
Both my granddaughter’s name and mine are on their way to Europa. Mom loved the moon, so before she died, I signed her up too.
Last April during Poetry Month, my husband and I were in Joshua Tree. We’re back for our fall trip, enjoying the dark skies during during a new moon and hoping to catch a glimpse of the comet A3 before she finishes orbiting earth until the next time 80,000 years from now. Seemed appropriate to write another poem acknowledging the connectedness of this universe we live in and will die in, to acknowledge all who have come before and who will come after us.
oh, to launch
a whisper into space
breathe in the stardust
WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT SHAPES DOES YOUR EXPERIENCE HAVE?
If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my thought echoes newsletter below.