Consciousness as a Wave: a book review
This is a review of a book by Jonathan Edwards, How Many People are there in My Head? and in Hers? an exploration of Single-Cell Consciousness. It was the the subtitle, “single-cell consciousness,” that drew...
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Suppose that when you learn to read and write, you replay one resonant moment in evolutionary history, namely the invention of writing. You achieve what human beings achieved many centuries ago when they invented alphabetic writing, namely new kind of memory, a technology for storing speech outside their own bodies. Only you do it in your own unique way.
In the meantime, we have invented many other ways to do this -- photography, video, digital sensors and synthesisers. They don't exactly replace writing, as some say. Rather they expand and complicate a "communications economy," balance or imbalance, competition or confluence among possibilities we all have for interacting with the world: speaking and listening, writing and reading, taking and viewing photographs, drawing and dancing, carving and coding. We settle on one, or a few. And with that, we make and remake worlds, preferring or requiring, or feeling comfortable and creative with a particular form or blend of communication, a particular evolutionary solution. I feel at ease with homo conloquens --conversing animals -- and, on the whole, with homo photographens. I'm in awe, and a bit tongue-tied in the company of homo calculens, who remake the world in code. I myself am a committed homo scrivens.
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