The answer to how the pigeon finds its way home is that a portion of the pigeon’s mind is already home and never left home. We, gazing at this, assume that pigeons, monarch butterflies, and so forth, are simpler systems than ourselves, when in fact, our assumption of the unknowability of the future creates a problem where there is no problem. It’s only in the domain of language, and perhaps only the domain of certain languages, that this becomes a problem.
To put it simply, if you had the consciousness of a pigeon, you would not have a diminutive form of human consciousness. You would have a consciousness that we can barely conceive of. The consciousness of the pigeon is a continual awareness extending from birth to death and the particular moment in space and time in which an English-speaking person confronts a pigeon is, for the pigeon, not noticeably distinct from all the other serial moments of its life. The problem is in the way the question is asked, and in the way human beings interpret the data that is deployed in front of them. After all, in the animal world, the future is always rather like the past, because novelty tends to be suppressed. Most things that happen have happened before and will happen again. My expectation would be that what we’re seeing when we confront these kinds of edge phenomena in biology is a set of phenomena which, when correctly interpreted, will bring the idea of quantum mechanical biology out from the realm of charge transfer, intracellular and subcellular activity, and into the domain of the whole organism. I’m not sure this is the solution, but it does cause the problem to disappear.
RA: Are you saying that the entire life history of the pigeon is more or less determined at the outset, including the trip away from the loft and the trip back?
TM: It never went anywhere. It’s only when you’ve laid over this a three-dimensional grid imposed by language that there appears to be a problem. In other words, there’s some kind of a totality involved, but we section and deny it and then come up with a dilemma.
RS: What about the pigeons that get picked off by sparrow hawks on the way home?
TM: They doubtless see that as well. The real question I’m raising is to what degree does language create the assumption of an unknown future? To what degree does it dampen a sense of the future that I imagine to be very highly evolved in the absence of language?
RS: It’s hard for me to grasp. Do you mean that when a pigeon is released, part of its mind is still at home, in the future, and this in some sense helps it to get back to the loft?
TM: You and I have talked about this before. You’ve always implied that the morphogenetic fields drive, push from behind.
RS: No, I’ve always said they pulled from in front.
TM: Then they’re attractors. I am partly saying that, and partly that the consciousness of the organism is distributed in time in a way that makes it capable of doing miracles from our point of view. From its own point of view, there’s nothing unusual going on at all.
RA: You wouldn’t be at all surprised if, as a matter of fact, the race was won by a clever pigeon that actually vanished at the point of release and simultaneously appeared back in the loft.
TM: You’re seeing it as some kind of virtual tunneling, as an amplified quantum mechanical effect. Perhaps this is the solution to the spontaneous combustion mystery. We pay great lip service to the idea that quantum mechanics is very important for life. Well, the mechanical nature of things at a quantum physical level suggests that if life is an application of those processes, then our apparent entrapment in three-dimensional space with an unknown temporal dimension is almost, you would say, habitual, not intrinsic. This seems very reasonable to me.
RA: I think your idea is good. I like it. If consciousness extends over a certain span of time, even a few days, it would explain a lot of things in the pigeon world. I still think it’s important to know whether the future is totally determined, or if the consciousness of the future includes several alternatives. In the case of several alternatives, sooner or later the pigeon is presented by a fork in the road and has to decide which way to go. I think we’re still missing here some kind of mechanism for the pigeon to follow the stretched rubber band of its own consciousness, occupying an extended region of space and time, so that its ordinary physical body ends up back where its consciousness ends. How does it do it?
TM: An analogy would be when you run a cartoon or a film backwards, and there’s a spectacle of wild confusion, but miraculously, everything manages to end up in the right place. It isn’t that there really are choices for a pigeon when it comes into awareness, but that it comes into all the awareness it will ever have. It’s like having your deathbed memories handed to you at the moment of birth. Essentially, for the pigeon, it’s a kind of play. It knows what’s going to happen, its life unfolds as anticipated, but it doesn’t even know that it knows. The pigeon doesn’t have the concept “anticipated.” It’s we who are observing that have that concept, and we alone are tormented by an anxiety of the unknowable future, an artifact of culture and language. Things like monarch butterflies, pigeon homing, and some of these other phenomena are clues to us that imputing our consciousness into nature creates problems in our understanding.
RA: That means that except for ignorance caused by the power of language, we would have the consciousness of a pigeon and therefore see our entire lifetime. According to this view, the baby pigeon chick, upon pecking out the shell, is waking from a dream, looking around and realizing that, “Oh damn, I’m the one that’s going to have to race three years from now and they’re going to put this other jerk in there with my mate.”
TM: You use language to portray the state of mind of the pigeon. That immediately collapses its four-dimensional vector into three dimensions and it becomes no longer a pigeon, but a person talking like a pigeon.
RA: Is the pigeon then aware or unaware of its entire history from birth until death?
TM: It’s aware, but it’s not aware that it’s a history.
RA: Experienced as one timeless moment.
TM: We could go further with this and say this explains our own curious relationship to the prophetic and anticipated. Instead of, like the pigeon, having a 95 percent clear view of the full spectrum of our existence, by opting into language we have perhaps a five percent view of the future. We’re tormented by messiahs and prophecies, and we lean toward astrology and computer modeling and all of these advanced tools that give us a very weak and wavering map of the future which we pay great credence to and worry a great deal about. I’m suggesting that if we could step away from language that we’d fall into a timeless realm where darkness holds no threat and all things are seen with a kind of great leveling and all anxiety leaves the circuits. Perhaps this is what Zen masters do and teach.
I’m suggesting one more version of The Fall. From the fourth dimensional world of nature, complete in time, we fell into the limited world of language and an unclear future and hence into great anxiety and conundrums like how do the pigeons find their way home.
RA: This suggests that we should stop talking and writing books and just hum.
TM: I’ve always felt that. Rather like a pigeon.
RA: Is this a polite way of saying that Rupert’s homing pigeon experiment is a total waste of time?
TM: I think all experiments as currently understood are futile, because all, including I assume the experiments in Rupert’s book, make the assumption that time is unvarying, and I don’t believe that time is unvarying. I didn’t intend to open this up on a general frontal attack of the epistemic methods of modern science, but in fact the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience and is merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business.
RA: I believe that we have a case here of multiple personality in action and now I’m going to undertake to prove it. You are now suffering from hay fever. Suppose that Rupert did an experiment with homeopathic medicine, and the outcome of it was that a flower power was discovered which absolutely and instantly cures hay fever. Would you then be interested in
the result?
TM: Sure, but as a practical matter, I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses. You see, I would like to redefine science as the study of phenomena so crude that the time in which they are imbedded is without consequence. I suppose ball bearings rolling down slopes fall into this category. The things which really interest us; love affairs, the fall of empires, the formation of political movements, happen on a different scale, and there’s no theory for much of what happens in the human world. In the human world the invariance of time forces itself upon us, so we create categories of human knowledge outside of time, like psychology or advertising or political theory, that address the variable time that we experience. Then we hypothesize a theoretical kind of time, which is invariant, and that’s where we do all the science that leads us into these incredibly alienating abstractions.
This goes back to Newton, who said time is pure duration. He visualized time as an absolutely featureless surface. Now take note that Plato’s effort to describe nature with perfect mathematical solids was abandoned long ago, because nowhere do we meet perfect mathematical forms in nature. The only perfect mathematical form that has been retained in modern scientific theory is the utterly unsupported belief that time, no matter at what scale you magnify it, will be found to be utterly featureless. There is absolutely no reason to assume this is true, since all experiential evidence is to the contrary. The problem is, if we ever admit that time is a variable medium, a thousand years of scientific experiments will be swept away in an instant. It’s simply a house of cards that’s better left where it stands.
RS: This seems to go a little bit beyond the problem of pigeon homing.
TM: It addresses the problem of experiments as a notion.
RS: If we take what you are saying down to the level of pigeons again, it turns out to be an elaborate version of the rubber band theory; “the rubber filigree,” or something like that. Let’s say we perform the experiment of moving the loft; it could show us something that goes beyond anything contemporary science would expect. It might or might not fit with your all-time theory.
TM: It does fit.
RS: Nevertheless, here we have an experiment, crude though it is, which would show that the existing scientific model is very inadequate. The rubber band theory involves a kind of attraction to the home and in that sense involves a pull in time, so it does raise all these questions about the nature of time.
TM: Do you have a theory about how it works? I don’t see how morphogenetic fields are particularly helpful here.
RS: Yes. I think the morphogenetic field would include both the pigeon and its loft. You can separate them by moving the loft or by moving the pigeon. Either way, they’re part of a single system. The pigeon’s world includes its loft, its home, its mate, and all the rest of it. When you move them, they’re now separated parts of a single system, linked by a field. The pigeon is attracted within this field, back toward the home that functions as an attractor. This is where Ralph and I have a different view of attractors. The pigeon is pulled back toward the field, not needing a road map of the whole of Britain. A road map is irrelevant. It just feels a pull in a particular direction.
RA: It’s like the angel theory; that when I come to a fork in the road, a guiding angel appears from behind a tree and tells me which way to go.
RS: Roughly speaking, it is. You just feel a pull in a particular direction. You don’t even think about it. I think that’s how the pigeon does it, subjectively. I don’t think it necessarily needs to see the whole of its future from egg to grave. I think it feels a pull towards home by this kind of invisible rubber band, which is actually like a gradient within the field towards an attractor, which is its home. That’s how you’d model it mathematically. You wouldn’t have to bring in the whole of the rest of Britain and a road map. If it did, however, need a road map to the whole of Britain or Europe, we’d have to ask the question how would it get it? It might tune into the collective memory of all the other pigeons that have ever gone on homing races. If a pigeon could access the collective pigeon psyche, or the collective memory of other species, if all birds could link up to what all other birds could see; then they would indeed have access to a global map of the world. I think that’s probably going further than we need in this rather limited case.
In the case of young cuckoos migrating in the autumn from Britain to South Africa, independent of the parents that they leave a month earlier, they must be tuning in at least to a kind of collective cuckoo memory that includes features of the landscape over which they fly. The rubber band theory wouldn’t necessitate even that.
RA: There still seems to be a mathematical or cognitive problem, when the loft is moved. The dynamical system, which extends essentially over the whole of the planet, wherever the pigeon may be released, has to receive the feeling of which direction to go. The question arises, how does the attractor, the loft, extend its field and directional instructions all over the planet? I don’t think that the idea of morphic resonance helps here, because in the case of the moving loft, no other pigeon has flown to it.
RS: I’m not talking about morphic resonance, I’m talking about the field itself. Morphic resonance is a memory. Say you have a pile of iron filings and a magnet. The filings are drawn toward the magnet and you see lines of force between them. When you move the magnet, you see an immediate response.
RA: The loft itself simply functions as a magnet in another field that is not an electromagnetic field—a sort of emotional field.
RS: When you move the loft, it’s just like moving a magnet. The iron filings or whatever responds automatically. That’s basically the model I’m suggesting.
RA: And the reason that I can’t find my car in the parking garage is because I’m not emotionally attached to it and I’ve never been in love with it. I should get an Italian car.
RS: In the human realm it could apply to finding people. My wife Jill does an experiment in her workshop where people form pairs and they first find each other by humming with their eyes closed. After they’ve got that, they find their partner just by feeling where they are and heading in that direction. I’ve tried doing this experiment with our children on the assumption that with children this effect might be very strong, and it turned out one of them was extremely good at finding me. Then I discovered he was peeping.
Maybe bonds between pigeons and their homes are comparable to the bonds between people and other people. Indeed, they may be related to the kind of social bonds that hold society together. When we say the bonds between people, we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. Perhaps there is an actual connection. We have many examples from the human realm, as when a child falls ill miles away and its mother immediately starts worrying and rings up to find out what’s happening. This may be another manifestation of the same kind of rubber band effect. It may be an aspect of social bonding. The motive of pigeons to go home is social, not merely geographical. If it hasn’t got mates, it doesn’t bother.
There are cases reported by naturalists that when packs of wolves go out hunting, a wolf may be injured, and stay behind in a kind of lair. The pack goes on and kills an animal, quite silently, no baying. Then the wounded wolf takes the shortest line from where it was to the place of the kill and joins the rest of the pack for its meal. The tracks show that it goes in a straight line without following scents, because it can do this when the wind is blowing the wrong way. This kind of social bond and linkage may be fundamental.
RA: There’s a kind of agreement here that there is a sixth sense that’s a field phenomenon, like the quantum field. It’s a social field, involved with the flocking of birds, the schooling of fish, and with herds of animals and packs of wolves. To answer the question you posed when you started us off; what would this teach us, or mean to us in terms of our future? It could be that humans are somehow divorced from the significance of this field, so whenever their guardian angel speaks, they always do the opposite. If we want to understand the population
explosion, the demise of the planet, all these wars, the manifestation of hatred and sources of evil, a candidate for the disharmony in the human species would be its disconnection with this field. Here’s where Terence’s idea comes in, that somehow to submit to language is to lose our connection with the field. We’ve all done experiments in not speaking, for example meditation and dreaming, where the antitheses of language have an opportunity to come forward and reconnect us to this field. For people like Americans, who watch television seven hours a day, there may somehow not be enough time away from language.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 8
