The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

soul once and for all. The theory of evolution didn’t allow for the concept of an unchangeable soul, since it posits that all life, and all parts of it, are changeable. The human became an animal among other animals. And in time, as modern science developed, the animals of the world have, conversely, become a bit more like us. They’ve been given if not a soul then at least awareness. We know today that animals can possess considerably more complex states of consciousness than previously thought. Research shows that most animals, including fish, can feel pain. Signs point to animals being able to experience fear, grief, parental feelings, shame, regret, gratitude, and something we might call love.

There are also animals, such as primates and crows, that can perform advanced mental tasks, that can learn to communicate and interact both with members of their own species and with others, that can imagine the future, that can decline a reward in the present in exchange for a promise of a greater reward later on. All the criteria that we have throughout history postulated as pivotal to separating humans from animals—awareness, personality, the use of tools, a concept of the future, abstract thinking, problem solving, language, play, culture, the ability to feel grief or loss, fear or love—all these criteria have been shown to be at the very least disputed, often insufficient, sometimes completely erroneous. The difference has, to some degree, in fact been erased. A crow placed in front of a mirror knows that it’s looking at itself, which means it’s aware of its own existence. It knows that it is, regardless of whether it can be said to know what it is.

SO THE EEL HAS AWARENESS, AT LEAST AT SOME LEVEL. BUT IS IT aware of its own existence? And if so, what does an eel feel? How does it experience its many metamorphoses, its long wait, and its migrations? Can it feel boredom? Impatience? Loneliness? What does the eel feel when that final autumn comes and its body changes, growing strong and turning silvery gray, and something profound and unfathomable urges it out into the Atlantic Ocean? Is it longing? A sense of incompleteness? A fear of death? What is it actually like to be an eel?

Rachel Carson anthropomorphized the eel in order to help us understand it better, to let us imagine the experience of the eel and better comprehend its behavior. But does that mean we really understand what the eel itself experiences?

That question has become increasingly key over the past few decades. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous article in 1974 about the philosophy of mind. He entitled it “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” And his answer to this seemingly simple question is succinct: We really can’t ever know.

All animals have consciousness, Nagel posits. Consciousness is above all a state of mind. It’s the subjective experience of the world, a narrative told by our senses about the things around us. But even so, a human can never fully comprehend what it’s like to be a bat, or an eel, or an imagined extraterrestrial, for that matter. Our experiences as humans limit our ability to imagine the consciousness of other species.

A bat, for instance, is clearly in a completely different state of consciousness from a human. It perceives the world primarily through echoes. We know this thanks to, among others, Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani, the man who aside from sharing his name with the mysterious professor in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” also unsuccessfully sought the truth about the eel’s reproduction. In the early 1790s, Spallanzani conducted a number of groundbreaking experiments on bats, which, among other things, allowed him to conclude that they could fly without hindrance or collisions through completely darkened rooms. He also captured a large number of bats and removed their eyes before releasing them back into the wild. When he managed to recapture some of the blind bats a few days later, he dissected them and found freshly caught insects in their stomachs. In other words, the bats could both hunt and navigate without the use of their eyes. It followed, Spallanzani argued, that they must be using their ears.

So a bat flies over a river at night, seeing virtually nothing but sending out rapid, high-frequency noises that bounce back against the objects and creatures that surround it. The echoes of these sounds are processed and interpreted by the bat in order to build an extremely detailed picture of the world. Thanks to this ability, a bat can fly at full speed in complete darkness through the branches of a tree without crashing. It can even tell one type of moth from another by the way sound bounces off their wings. Everything the bat encounters has its own pattern of echoes, and this is how it understands its surroundings. Its perception of the world consists of a constant stream of echoes, and these echoes, of course, shape how the bat feels about the world.

Human consciousness is fundamentally different, and if we try to imagine what it’s like to be a bat, it is that human consciousness that, according to Nagel, limits our ability to do so.

It’s not enough that I try to imagine what it’s like to have wings and terrible eyesight, what it’s like to fly over a river at night and catch bugs with my mouth, or to imagine what it’s like to emit audio signals and pick up their echo. “In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far),” Nagel writes, “it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind.”

Nor is the problem, Nagel claims, limited to the relationship between humans and animals.