Personhood as the Pinnacle of Alienation

From animal to human consciousness: the levels of sensory and cognitive detachment

Alienation is supposed to be a bad thing.

There’s a minority of people who are especially alienated. They may be anxious, paranoid, or depressed, perhaps because of a neurological imbalance. They may have a hard time making friends and fitting into society. There are subcultures that crop up around these unbalanced outsiders.

All of which is ironic because our species is the alienated one in the overall biosphere. Due to what we call mental health, which is the imbalance of personhood that alienates us from animals, from nature, and from everything that’s different from us, we stand apart — not we, the counterculture, but we humans. Sure, melancholy individuals feel detached from mainstream society, but mainstream society is in turn estranged from the cosmic wilderness, that is, from the reality that will long outlast our species.

We therefore ostracize alienated individuals while practicing a much greater alienation, which makes this so-called mental failing something of a taboo topic.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that alienation is inherent in the structure of conscious experience. I’ll elaborate on that here by comparing animal and human modes of experience. First, though, let’s contrast them both with an inanimate object such as a rock. The rock experiences nothing because it lacks a mental control center and any distinctive way of filtering the world such as by gathering information with sense organs.

The simplest organisms all have a control center, even if it’s just the DNA program in their cells’ nuclei or nucleoids, or senses for gathering information. Even unicellular organisms can sense temperature changes, chemical gradients, and the difference between light and dark environments. More complex animals, though, have a brain for processing information, in addition to their genetic inclinations and more powerful sense organs.

In any case, this control center that’s armed with senses provides a necessarily limited viewpoint, and it’s this viewpoint which is inherently alienating. Consider, for instance, perception by sight. A squirrel might see a large threat approaching, which causes the animal to scurry up a tree. But in seeing the threat, the squirrel sees only one side of it, taking in light rays that reflect into the animal’s eyes. The squirrel may see the front but not the back of the threat, and never both sides at once.

Likewise, animals may have a dominant sense organ which distinguishes their mode of experience. Humans, for instance, rely mostly on sight, whereas dogs rely more on scent, while bats favour their hearing or echolocation.

Due to this partiality of perception, are animals alienated, as opposed to being comfortable in their way of life? They’re not especially alienated because that partiality is balanced by an equally limited set of motivations and conceptions. Most animals’ brains are dedicated to presenting a sensory map of their environment, not to understanding the intricacies of what’s occurring in the world.

People and some other “higher” animals differ, then, in having a brain within a brain, a higher-order control center for processing not just stimuli but models of those stimuli. We perceive the world from a human vantage point, producing only an incomplete, skewed picture. But we also think about what we perceive, with concepts which are categories (judgments of relevant similarities) that help us manage our experience and understand things in greater depth. “Understanding things in greater depth” means imposing human concerns onto the inhuman environment with greater urgency and sophistication.

Concepts add a layer of alienation to perception since an animal that understands its world, as opposed to relying just on rudimentary impressions and instinctive reflexes, is twice removed from reality: once by the sensory perspective and again by the more abstract mentality. Concepts provide a mental world you can lose yourself in, as when we say a person is “living in his head.”

But that’s not where human alienation ends since there’s a third level to consider. Rather than being on a short genetic leash, primates are social animals that have the freedom to learn how they should behave. Humans are the freest of all in that respect, as is evident from our wide variety of cultures. We don’t just guide ourselves but are guided by society. Culture amounts to another control system, an extended, collective mind that thinks largely in fictions and mass hallucinations. And we can lose ourselves in society too.

Thus, a person is inherently thrice removed from reality:

• First, our senses are humanizing filters, providing us with the human perspective on stimuli. We perceive the world not as it really is but as our kind’s sensorium deems it.
• Second, our cerebral cortex, imagination, reason, emotions, and all the rest of our cognitive apparatus generate conceptual models of what we perceive and thus an abstract interface which is useful just to the extent that its inputs aren’t perfectly realistic.
• Third, there’s culture, the output of human society which is a collective processing of experience, and which includes institutions and social roles that further remove us from the broader reality by providing a virtual world in which we can immerse ourselves.

People as such are therefore drastically alienated from how things are. We try to reacquaint ourselves with the facts, with the aid of logical deductions, scientific experiments, and more harebrained schemes such as religious rituals. But our body structure is itself alienating since there’s reality on the one hand, and there’s the filtering of the facts by the layers of our personhood, on the other. The results of that filtering never equal unfiltered reality.

Of course, we presume that the more sophisticated the modes of perception and of cognition, the more penetrating the access to reality. And indeed, compared with an inanimate object, an animal has selective access to parts of reality. But the mode of access is simultaneously a process of alienation.

Animals don’t realize that their senses isolate them, or they don’t care about that fact because they’re too busy obeying their genetic imperatives by surviving, feeding, reproducing, and the like. But people are more self-conscious. Our mind models both the natural and the social environments as well as ourselves, including the sides of our personality, memories, skills, aspirations, and so on. These mental and social maps enable us to thrive in the world, but only by thereby alienating us from it.

To live as a squirrel, for instance, is to be alienated from, say, the snake’s way of life, because their modes differ. And to live as a person is to be detached from animality and from nature in general, to be drawn to our cultural by-products and to the virtual world of our cognitive abstractions. Compared to animals, people are constantly “high,” not because we’ve all ingested psychoactive drugs, but because the mind and society function like drugs in warping our experience.

There is no perception or conception which isn’t a warping of reality.

Perhaps the inhuman, noumenal reality warps itself by evolving life in the first place, as is apparent from our scientific understanding of how we got here and of how natural processes work. And we twist ourselves, in turn, in seeking to reunite with the unperceived and with the unconceived totality of what there is. Or more likely, we’re twisted — or “fallen,” as Christians would put it — in relishing our collective alienation, in ignoring these philosophical issues and in distracting ourselves with our models and social games which we easily mistake for the modelled terrains.

We’re so high on our cognitive supply that we ostracise the hyper-alienated individuals who are thereby only more quintessentially human, and we set ourselves the quest of replacing the inhuman wilderness with the civilized, artificial paradise we construct even if doing so threatens all life, including us.

The charge of “collective alienation,” then, is no idle semantic trick. Alienation has real-world consequences, so it’s important to understand the source of this existential condition. Why are we all relatively alienated? Because billions of years ago the universe wrenched itself in developing living things on Earth, and those organisms eventually twisted themselves into the pithiest of pretzels that we call the human mind-brain, which is the seat of our personhood.

We’re all relatively alienated because personhood itself is a form of detachment, and we understand all-too well how removed we are — from our fellow animals, from nature at large, from foreign societies, and from our personality’s dark side.

The universe built a mountain. The mountain’s made of life. We stand on its summit, Far from the valley below.