If this talk of bypassing symbols and managing with a very austere substitute for perception strikes you as a bit blurry, then consider the following questions. Is a toilet aware, no matter how slightly, of its water level? Is a thermostat aware, albeit extremely feebly, of the temperature it is controlling? Is a heat-seeking missile aware, be it ever so minimally, of the heat emanating from the airplane that it is pursuing? Is the Exploratorium’s jovially jumping red spot aware, though only terribly rudimentarily, of the people from whom it is forever so gaily darting away? If you answered “no” to these questions, then imagine similarly unaware mechanisms inside a mosquito’s head, enabling it to find blood and to avoid getting bashed, yet to accomplish these feats without using any
Mosquito Selves
Having considered mosquito symbols, we now inch closer to the core of our quest. What is the nature of a mosquito’s interiority? That is, what is a mosquito’s experience of “I”-ness? How rich a sense of self is a mosquito endowed with? These questions are very ambitious, so let’s try something a little simpler. Does a mosquito have a visual image of how it looks? I hope you share my skepticism on this score. Does a mosquito know that it has wings or legs or a head? Where on earth would it get ideas like “wings” or “head”? Does it know that it has eyes or a proboscis? The mere suggestion seems ludicrous. How would it ever find such things out? Let’s instead speculate a bit about our mosquito’s knowledge of its own
Well then, how about more basic things like “in pain” and “not in pain”? I am still skeptical. On the other hand, I can easily imagine signals sent from a mosquito’s eye to its brain and causing other signals to bounce back to its wings, amounting to a reflex verbalizable to us humans as “Flee threat on left” or simply “Outta here!” — but putting it into telegraphic English words in this fashion
Does a mosquito have even the tiniest glimmering of itself as being a moving part in a vast world? Once again, I suspect not, because this would require all sorts of abstract symbols to reside in its microscopic brain — symbols for such notions as “big”, “small”, “part”, “place”, “move”, and so on, not to mention “myself ”. Why would a mosquito need such luxuries? How would they help it find blood or a mate more efficiently? A hypothetical mosquito that had enough brainpower to house fancy symbols like these would be an egghead with a lot more neurons to carry around than its more streamlined and simpleminded cousins, and it would thereby be heavier and slower than they are, meaning that it wouldn’t be able to compete with them in the quests for blood and reproduction, and so it would lose out in the evolutionary race.
My intuition, at any rate, is that a mosquito’s very efficient teeny little nervous system lacks perceptual categories (and hence symbols) altogether. If I am not mistaken, this reduces the kind of self-perception loops that can exist in a mosquito’s brain to an exceedingly low level, thus rendering a mosquito a very “small-souled man” indeed. I hope it doesn’t sound too blasphemous or crazy if I suggest that a mosquito’s “soul” might be roughly the same “size” as that of the little red spot of light that bounces around on the wall at the Exploratorium — let’s say, one ten-billionth of one huneker (
