You are the Elephant!

1400 words, 6 minute read

You’ve heard the story a million times and you enjoy it every time. Sometimes you nod in quiet appreciation, sometimes you smugly snicker:

Long ago, a group of blind scientists (or monks or travelers) on tour encountered an elephant for the first time. Curious, they approached the willing subject and they each satisfied their curiosity by petting the pachyderm.

One felt the trunk and declared, “An elephant is like a thick snake." Another touched the ear and said, "No, it's like a large fan." A third put his hands on a leg and insisted, "You're both wrong — it's like a tree trunk." A fourth felt the side of the elephant and said, "It's like a wall." A fifth grabbed the tail and argued, "It's like a rope." A sixth touched the tusk and said, "It's a spear."

Each was certain they’d grasped the true nature of the elephant, and each thought the others were either mistaken or lying. They were scientists after all, empiricists by trade; they trusted their powers of observation, and they were trained to doubt the unverified testimony of others.

Ever eager to broker peace, the tour’s leader and her assistant, both also blind, listened to the various reports and suggested possible syntheses. One thought they were dealing with Proteus, a shape shifter from Greek mythology. The other went further: “The elephant is God!” And so it is that in some cultures even today, elephants are considered sacred.

This story can be understood in several ways - as documentation of the dangers of dogmatism or, more commonly, as a demonstration of the risks we take when we mistake a part for the whole or, similarly, when we generalize based on limited data. We are all looking at one world, the same world (e.g. the elephant), but each of us sees that world differently, and none of us is wrong.

These are great life lessons taught gently and with good humor, but they are not what’s important about this fable!

When you hear this story, you probably identify with the scientists…as you should. You’ve imagined your intrepid self, reaching out timidly to pet the colossus before you. You don’t think at all about the elephant; for example, you didn’t even notice that the elephant was also blind. Shameful anthrocentricity!

But what if you’re not just the scientist in this story; what if you’re the elephant too? Our aspiring ‘elephantologists’ think they’re probing the pachyderm for the benefit of the world; they are, but they are also probing the world for the benefit of the pachyderm. Our scientists are the probes and their probing goes both ways.

The number of scientists probing the elephant is potentially unlimited. But there is just one elephant, experiencing its world anew through each individual touch. Each touchpoint is a portal connecting the otherwise solipsistic animal to its universe.  

Compare the relationship between the elephant and its world with that of an octopus and the sea. As an octopus uses its tenacles to probe its world, so the world uses its scientists to probe the elephant. But unbeknownst to us, the elephant is also probing back, using the very same scientists as its instruments.

Essentially, the elephant is turning the tenacles inside out. The probed becomes the prober with the scientists as the probes. That is why the elephant is such a willing subject; it craves human touch because it is through that touch that it learns about its world.

The octopus analogy goes even deeper. Each pachyderm-scientist interface is its own data processing center. Our elephant’s intelligence, like that of an octopus, is distributed; think blockchain. Each tentacle   is the site of a unique experience of the world.

So how come we experience the world probing the elephant but not the elephant probing the world? We do!In fact, it’s just about the most fundamental experience we have; we just don’t recognize it.

What we call our ‘body’, complete with brain and nervous system, is what probes the elephant; what we call ‘mind’, i.e. consciousness itself, is what probes the world. Consciousness is recursive. It’s how the universe learns about itself: it’s how we experience the elephant probing.

Note: 20^th century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre went beyond this body/mind dichotomy. He divided the entirety, Universe itself, into en soi, being-in-itself (body), and pour soi, being-for-itself (mind). Our bodies are part of the world, en soi; consciousness is pour soi.

Body is the world probing the elephant; consciousness is the elephant probing the world. A reciprocal relationship? Not quite. There is one elephant, one consciousness, but there are many scientists, many bodies. While there is only one elephant, one universal consciousness, the contents of mind are ‘scientist specific’, i.e. local. Consciousness does not emerge independently in multiple bodies, as we have supposed, but consciousness is spread across multiple bodies, each with its own ‘local’ mind.

Just as each scientist probes a different part of the elephant for the world, so each probes a different aspect of the world for the elephant. We may choose to assume that the elephant somehow processes the inputs of the individual scientists into a unified picture of the external world…or not. You can’t know. You only have access to what the elephant experiences at one location…and that location is you! You and I are ‘of two minds’ – always – but we share one consciousness. (Good thing too because there is only one consciousness to spread around!)

Thought experiment: If you are reading this article, you are probably not 8 years old anymore. Almost nothing about you resembles your 8 year old self; most of your body’s cells have recycled several times. Your only tangible connection to that 8 year old is in the form of imperfect and elusive memories.

But the experience of you-being-you has not changed. When you think back on an experience you had as an 8 year old, you can hardly imagine yourself in such a situation; but you have no doubt that it’s you experiencing it. The experience is different but the act of experiencing is the same.

The contents of your mind change moment by moment but your consciousness, your awareness of yourself, never changes. As Gertrude Stein wrote, “We are all always in our own minds young men and young women;” in other words, our perception of ourselves as ourselves never changes.

Now apply this to the person sitting next to you. You are certainly ‘of two minds’ and you have no memory of your companion’s prior subjective experiences, but your sense of being yourself is exactly the same as his sense of being himself. You share consciousness in common. That consciousness is what gives you your sense of being ‘you’ and him his sense of being ‘him’. You are of two minds but you have in common ‘the sense of you being you’: one noumenon, two phenomena.

In fact, you share consciousness with every entity in Universe that experiences itself as conscious. How far that extends beyond humans is a matter of intense debate: primates and sea mammals, probably, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that you share consciousness with single celled bacteria and/or with each of the 30 trillion cells that make up your organic body.

Farther afield, and not a topic for today, is whether you do or could in the future share consciousness with an artificial life form, a bot, e.g. your new best friend, Claude. But rest assured, if little ‘Claudius’ (only his mother calls him that) is or ever does become conscious, he will share that consciousness with you. ‘Consciousness’ has no plural.

So what are we to make of this consciousness? God, spirit, atman, chi? Why do we insist on putting a label on it? Any such a label would be meaningless anyway. Almost by definition, labels concern parts; you cannot pin a label on the whole. The whole transcends its parts; it is ineffable!