Epistemic Status: Strong Confidence in Evolutionary Argument. Weak Confidence in Contemporary Application. (85% and 35%, respectively)

I.

You are; therefore, you think. Or so at least that’s what Barbara Tversky would have you believe from her arguments in Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Long before people were writing blog posts, debating rabbinical texts, or even gutturally spewing pre-phonemes; they were moving. Cognitive linguists like Noam Chomsky have focused on the importance, perhaps even the centrality, of language to the nature of human consciousness. If consciousness is a form of self-referential reflection then it makes sense that one could only reflect if one has the linguistic concepts required to faithfully describe oneself and your relationship to others and the environment. Tversky’s point is to say that long before we developed any of these linguistic concepts, we still had to navigate the world and understand our relationship to it through our physical forms. Our sense of self, our awareness of others, our conceptualization of our environment occur through understanding our physical being. This framing is known as, “Embodied Cognition” and argues that features of our cognitive processes are formed by the entire body’s neural processing, not just the ones happening in the parts of our brain that oversee language and self-referential thought.

While the true nature of human consciousness probably occurs through a mixture of these paradigms, here we’ll assume that those of embodied cognition are more ancient and foundational to our sense of self. Our sense of space and motion are core to much of our evolutionary progression. From the early development of photosensitive organelles that allowed Phototrophs in the ocean to move towards the sun for energy to contemporary subthalamic neural relays that allow us to interact with and manipulate our environment. Move towards food. Flee from danger. Flatter to fornicate. All these processes are facilitated by you understanding your relationship to your physical environment and how to utilize it for survival purposes. The same holds for any other species of animal. While some may deny animals have very highly developed levels of consciousness, spending enough time around other animals is pretty convincing that they have at least some form of it. And if they don’t, at what level do you make that limitation? What of the Bonobo? Or the Gorilla? Their representation of themselves as an agent in their environment is critical to their success in this world just as it is to us.

The process of resource limitations also places a value on regular migration. When winter comes, or when a territory has gone bare, it’s protective to leave and search for new resources. Bacteria that do not migrate towards resources quickly die and fade from the germplasm. Even if one location is rich in resources to support you it still probably makes sense to understand your environment so that you have backup plans and escape routes in mind.

II.

Okay, so movement is a very strong evolutionary pressure and successful movement requires some ability to interact with, understand, and predict outcomes in the external environment. And these capacities for environmental self-awareness likely presented themselves far before linguistic capacities developed. What’s the big deal?

Have you ever noticed that most post-apocalyptic novels or plotlines revolve around people just wandering around? While Tyler Cowen was interviewing Emily St. John Mandel, author of the novel and upcoming Amazon prime series Station Eleven, this topic came up:

COWEN: In so many post-apocalyptic novels, it seems that people wander a lot. Do they wander too much? Should they just stay put?

ST. JOHN MANDEL: I had this conversation with another post-apocalyptic novelist. Would everybody stop walking? Why is everybody wandering endlessly in a post-apocalypse?

Think about it. Why is it rare in a zombie apocalypse series to come across a small group of people subsistence farming? And when they do turn up, something always goes wrong that involves the complete destruction of that little settlement they’ve created. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the father and son don’t even have names. They go by, “The Man” and “The Boy” and they hardly ever speak. And what do they do when the end of the world is around them? They wander. They migrate in the hopes of better environments. Their world is described as monotonous and gray, frozen in ash, unchanging. And still, we realize that if they weren’t moving, they’d go insane. Those who they encounter who have settled down are depicted as having fully abandoned their humanity.

Okay, so interesting. Even in our end-of-the-world fables, we have our imagined selves moving almost constantly and facing great pains if they try to settle down. And that process of wandering around and interacting with the environment has some evolutionary effect on cognition/consciousness in humanity. But that seems a pretty tenuous string to thread and why is this useful to be aware of anyhow? What possible value could this have to my life now?

III.

Over the past two years, many people around the world have undergone a great natural experiment in the nature of movement and its absence. How many individuals or families spent a majority of their time throughout 2020 hardly leaving their apartments, townhomes, or residential facilities? I originally thought that this could be an environment I would thrive in. Go home from the lab? Get to stay in and just read and do research or go on long and wandering runs, who could ask for more? I tried to learn how to code, I tried to write papers with people in my lab, I tried to do and learn many things and mostly, I failed.

Agnes Callard wrote about this phenomenon and detailed the difficulty of rising towards the personal educational promises of this pandemic’s forced hermitage. About feeling a great struggle to produce, or to feel that what one is producing is concrete and real in its worth and function while stuck at home. I think this is something that more people dealt with than we really like to discuss. Lots of people thrived in the pandemic, but mostly, people who were stuck at home were suffering in little ways.

If our sense of self-awareness, of relationship with our environment and the others within it, begins not with our ability to communicate, think, and banter with individuals; but from our movement within space, then no degree of highly connected language sharing systems will provide the feeling of wholistic personal progress.

Within cities and rural areas, the implicit need to move through space is maintained by different systems. In an urban setting, while you may never travel more than five miles from your apartment, you will likely move through dozens or even hundreds of unique environments, challenges, and interactions. Each interaction is a composite node in the manifold of the day’s activities. In rural localities, the process of completing even simple tasks can require traveling long distances. Growing up, if my family needed a grocery item, at least thirty minutes of time had to be spent rocketing through plains and canyons for even this one small task.

Included in these processes of daily life are whatever talismans, productive projects, and resources you ferry along to complete your task. Though your head will touch the same linen case that night, it feels like you’ve embarked on and conquered a multitude of highly complex tasks in varied environments.

Now, as all of us forced hermits had to learn, even the most productive days spent within 750 square feet of enclosed walls fail to provide that same felt sense of movement. If we were stuck this way for a long time, perhaps we could find base fulfillment in a non-motile, yet text-rich world.

But who really wants that?

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