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Who is There?

​ Susan Lahey begins a recent Popular Mechanics article with a wonderfully destabilizing possibility: we may be surrounded by trillions of conscious beings and simply have failed to notice them. She means plants. The evidence she surveys is fascinating. Plants respond to their environments in ways considerably more complicated than we once imagined. Some communicate chemically. Some appear capable of habituation. A Mimosa pudica , repeatedly subjected to a harmless disturbance, may eventually cease its defensive response. Plants respond to anesthetics. Trees under attack can release chemical signals that alter the behavior of neighboring trees. Beneath a forest floor, roots, fungi, microorganisms, water, and nutrients participate in networks of extraordinary complexity. From such observations, some researchers have begun asking whether words such as learning , memory , cognition , and even consciousness might properly apply to plants. A still more adventurous proposal asks whether...
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Drawing Water

In his recent Atlantic essay, “What Were My Dreams Trying to Tell Me?,” Akhtar remembers becoming aware, at twenty years old, of an emptiness somewhere within himself. The sensation was sufficiently concrete that he sought medical explanations for it, but physicians could find nothing physically wrong. Akhtar knew that he was experiencing something. What he lacked was a language adequate to describe what that something was. That problem eventually becomes more important than the dreams announced in the essay’s title. Akhtar begins recording his dreams and discovers an interior world considerably richer than he had imagined. Freud offers one vocabulary for understanding it, Jung another. He reads widely and eclectically: psychology and philosophy, Sufi and Jewish mystical traditions, Vedanta and Meister Eckhart. He meditates. He attends more closely to Shakespeare. Eventually an old word begins to seem useful again. Soul. Akhtar does not offer an argument for the existence of an imm...
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If Relation Goes All the Way Down

​ A curious thing happens when physicists begin sounding like metaphysicians. In a recent New Scientist review of Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy , Karmela Padavic-Callaghan describes a world that seems almost designed to attract the attention of a process theologian. Rovelli argues that the revolution accomplished by quantum physics has not yet been fully absorbed by philosophy. Physics has changed its picture of reality more radically than many of our inherited philosophical categories acknowledge. There is, on Rovelli’s account, no fundamental world of little self-contained things sitting in space and moving through time. At the deepest level are processes, interactions, relations. Space and time themselves belong to the world that emerges from these relations rather than providing the container in which they occur. Anyone who has spent time with Alfred North Whitehead may feel the temptation to smile. Whitehead spent much of the first half...
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The Grace of Being Wrong.

Public life has lately offered a familiar spectacle: leaders making sweeping claims, supporters defending them, and facts becoming secondary to loyalty. Commentators have examined this dynamic not only for what it reveals about politics but also for what it reveals about us. Why can acknowledging a leader’s error feel like acknowledging our own? The longer we have defended a position, the more expensive changing our minds becomes. We have argued with friends. We have spoken publicly. We have defended people whose behavior made us uncomfortable. Perhaps relationships have been strained or broken. Eventually we are no longer reconsidering a proposition. We are reconsidering ourselves. People often rationalize their decisions rather than endure the discomfort of saying, “I was wrong.” Political identity intensifies the difficulty when changing one’s mind also seems to vindicate people one has regarded as opponents. Christians recognize the problem. We have another name for the practic...
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