consciousness

American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are, he writes, “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

It’s a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, an uplink to universal consciousness—the notion, first advanced by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 480 BC, of sharing an intelligence that animates and organizes all life. The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the “collective unconsc

The human brain, for instance, is organized into four different lobes, each associated with different functions. An octopus brain, depending on the species and how you count them, has as many as 50 to 75 different lobes.