Wonderment at Being Alive: How Strange It Is to Be Anything at All
Every once in a while I am struck with a moment of insight, a sense of wonderment and amazement that I am alive at all, that I am conscious, that I am a self-aware and sentient being amidst the countless inanimate objects in the world around me. Somehow this lump of grey matter in my head is conscious. I didn’t exist for billions of years of cosmic history, or for thousands of years of recorded human history, and yet I am here, if only for a little while before I again blink out of existence once again for the remainder of human and cosmic future history yet to come.
The mere fact that anything at all is conscious, grey matter or otherwise, should itself be surprising. The problem of explaining exactly how and why consciousness seems to emerge out of unconscious grey matter (or from any other kind of physical system, for that matter) is called the “hard problem” of consciousness by David Chalmers. And yet, even if we were to answer this hard problem of consciousness with a full understanding of why and how the grey matter in our brains produces it, would we find it any less startling, amazing, and surprising that we are here, alive and within the cosmos, somehow conscious of ourselves and of the cosmos as a whole, looking at the universe through our own potentially insignificant human keyhole, and our own tiny windows into cosmic reality?
These moments of wonderment and amazement at my own self-awareness of my existence in the cosmos, which appears extremely unlikely, even arbitrary, seldom last long before I am again drawn back into the human sphere with all my petty day-to-day concerns. I blink, and the moment is gone (as in the song Dust in the Wind by Kansas: And I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone.), sometimes before I am even able to formulate a single coherent thought in response to the sensation. It strikes me that this must be the meaning, or at least a partial meaning, of the term “ineffability” so favored by transcendentalist philosophers: a feeling, sensation, or experience unable to be captured adequately in words, unable to be properly tyrannized by our rationality with its vast ability to colonize almost every other aspect of human experience, converting all it touches into lifeless propositions and axioms. And yet, those moments do exist: I am real. I am conscious. I am self-aware. I am alive at this moment in time. What a happy accident of the universe that I am here to notice it!
Maybe other people have these moments of heightened self-awareness, too. If so, I don’t see much evidence of it. Our practical concerns seem to take up so much of our consciousness and make up so much of our day-to-day experience that there is little room for wonderment or reverence for the universe’s creative power in bringing consciousness into existence in general, much less my consciousness or your consciousness in particular at this present moment. But once in a while I encounter a glimmer of the same insight in other people. For example, there is a line in the song In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, written by Jeff Magnum and performed by his band Neutral Milk Hotel (although I prefer the version of the song recorded by Roma di Luna) that seemingly captures the very same sentiment, the wonderment and amazement at being alive and being conscious:
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all.
I sometimes wish I could hold on to this feeling, which is as close to a religious feeling as any other religious feeling I’ve had, orthodox or otherwise. While those moments of existential insight are rare, they do exist, and they are transcendent in some sense, rising above the concerns and experience of day-to-day life, a (perhaps) uniquely human insight and self-awareness of our own consciousness, so rare in the cosmos as we currently understand it. And yet, it is real, and we are here. How marvelous!
Do moments of insight like this have the power to make us more humble as human beings, even with our special powers of self-awareness, because of our own rarity and our relative insignificance in the cosmic sphere? Do they have the power to help us connect with other people, seeing something just as rare in them as we see in ourselves, as conscious beings, most unlikely to have arisen and to exist in the first place in the cosmic void? Do they have the power to unite humanity in a shared quest for cosmic understanding and collective understanding of ourselves as conscious beings, both as a species and as beings in the world (as Martin Heidegger called us)? Can we stretch out these moments of insight and wonderment, and make them last for more than the fraction of a second that they typically seem to last? Can we place them at the center of our consciousness instead of at the periphery, reframing our picture of ourselves, the meaning of our lives, and our special place in the universe?
Or will we simply let these moments pass, again and again, like a missed train for which we arrived too late to catch a ride, never reaching the cosmic insight which these moments leave us yearning for—a gnostic tantra for our minds, teasing and piquing our consciousness with the faintest glimmer of cosmic understanding but never satisfying, leaving us wanting for more but never yielding the deeper understanding we long for as humans and as sentient beings?
But how wonderful it is that we are here together at all, even to ask the question in the first place!
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