Being here

Ruth Aylett

It’s not all in the head
though it feels like that

probing the brain’s electrics
or the magic cap 
that sees what lights up

when you think what you’re told
never nets the you-ness of you

your body’s secret murmurs
touch of hands and voices

the world’s clang and batter 
onto eyes, ears or skin      
you respond

an acrobat whose airy shapes
are thoughts that muscles 
encode back into your brain.

As particles of water, air
going nowhere in particular
come together: tornado!

The Science

For some researchers, consciousness is wholly located in the brain, and analysis of its responses to stimuli ought to be able to – eventually – locate the areas that produce it. This approach derives from the Cartesian tradition in which mind and body are two very different things, and often applies a ‘computer’ analogy in which the brain is like a computer controlling the body, and brain activity is like a piece of running software.

This poem draws on a very different approach, identified with the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela, and with the programme of embodied cognition pursued by researchers like neuroscientist Alberto Damasio. Maturana and Varela pioneered the concept of autopoiesis, in which living things can be represented as bundles of interlocked and interacting processes, self-organising within and across a boundary (the surface of the body, for example). When this dynamic interplay collapses, the living thing dies. Autopoiesis produces dynamic emergent structures, just as the interaction of heat, air and water produces tornados that are born, self-organise for a while, and then die.

So consciousness can be viewed as an emergent property of autopoiesis based on interaction within and across boundaries: within-body processes, in which the brain is directly involved as a more specialised part of the nervous system; physical across-boundary interactions via a sensory apparatus that includes not only the five usual senses but proprioception (knowing where the body is via data from its joints and balance information); and social interaction with other people (without which humans do not develop language).

The Poet

Ruth Aylett lives and works in Edinburgh and has researched AI and Robotics for 30 years. Her poems are widely published in magazines and anthologies, and her pamphlets Pretty in Pink (4Word) and Queen of Infinite Space (Maytree), came out in 2021. For more see https://ruthaylett.org

Next poem: Bring Me a Dream by Ping Yi Yee