Death and movement
When moving in an environment, animals are constantly searching for evidence of movement. Let’s concentrate on mammals. They are using movement perception together with smell and sound to establish what animal types are around and where they are. Identifying the animated is a constant and almost all consuming activity even for those who eat plants. Animals re-cognise other animals overwhelmingly by the fact that they are animate (hence the closeness of the meaning clusters for the two words animal and animate).
Detection of movement, and stillness to avoid detection, are everywhere within animal lives in order to identify prey and predators. Those animals that eat other animals are particularly attentive to reducing their prey animal to an inanimate state. If they do not do this, they can be injured by horns from neck movements or limbs swung round or even a last peck, bite or claw pull. Many species make no movements in order to catch predators or prey off guard. Some prey species take this strategy into the full presence of the predator;‘playing dead’ and escaping in the gap between killing and eating. The bottom line is that any detected movement is highly registered and is a priority for focused attention.
Human animals are no different. Animals can be unsettled by natural movement particularly wind moving plants. Humans with their remarkable capacity to register experience, and the accompanying opportunities for the emotion of interest, will use their new language to refer to animation in everything that moves. They will use animation to explain the movement of the wind, clouds and the sun. “The golden tortoise walks slowly across the sky every day”. “That is not a golden tortoise, it is a burning ball and it does not move across the sky we move around it”. “Don’t be silly”.
For the living, death is the condition where there is a body but no animation.
Animals can register body biochemical breakdown and decay and therefore detect bodily death. This includes us when we get the chance. The skill of ‘laying out’ is that of plugging orifices and preparing a body for others to see.
Death and absence
What is the relationship between absence and death? How is death registered by a group of social animals when they never see the lifeless body? New and unusual new episodic memories in which a member of the group is absent often lead to movement models for searching. Meer Kats and most primates do this and they often find a body. Given that all animals are unique (variation, unpredictability and mathematics) it is very likely that at least the primates have the brain ability to understand that this is the body of the animal now absent from their recent and ongoing episodic memories. Humans have language and can think of absence. They can also talk of absence. They can also be told that someone is dead. We tend to use the latter nearly all the time now. Death has become an absence sustained across a social ‘group’, a story of how it happened and new episodic memories that exclude the absent person. We rarely now see the body unless we are very close.
Why isn’t absence death? When you go out of the room why are you not dead to me? Because I have rich episodic and movement models that include you leaving and reappearing. In the memory topic the small animal in its den expects that its mate will return, and that its absence is only temporary, because it has episodic and associated register memories that include absence and reappearance. It does not ‘think’ it will return. Our own use of the same registering and brain life modeling, is dominant over our thought. I expect that my friend will come back roughly around the time they said but I am not sure that the volunteer stranger, saying that they will be back in a moment following a tiff with a user, will return to help me hand out the coffees. I feel these and might act based on the feelings. There is no need to think them in my inner dialogues or articulate them. Language spends a lot of time doing light dances over reality. Reality is embodied.
For all animals the death of another animal can only finally be registered by encountering the dead body. A body that has absence of movement (particularly the movement of breathing), coldness and signs of decay. Without a body we only have the belief that someone is dead (committing to dialogue content). If we are used to spending time with them then we also have the contrast between old and new episodic memories. Over time, an increasing range of new episodic memories and absence in shared attention life models exclude the animal that is absent. This exclusion can be very distressing for social animals like us. Now the memories are different. The actual lived encounter has itself changed. ‘They used to hold the other end’. ‘I can hear them saying ------’. ‘I feel alone going to the match’. Our feeling of happiness suffers most. Whatever else is involved the social world is built and sustained by the emotion satisfied/happy. Intimacy with each other is by far and away our major source of this feeling.
Death and ritual
In the natural world all experience points to their being two aspects to an animal’s existence the body and its animation. We refer to its animation as the life within. When studying human groups that still live dependent on the natural world around them, the words that they use to point to the ‘life within’ are routinely translated as ‘spirit’. This is a spoiler. The word is so degraded in our culture that people can readily say ‘I do not have a ‘spirit’. In topics such as Variation, unpredictability and mathematics, Existential principles and biological registers and Life modeling we show that animal life is beyond language, mathematics and science. These are ways of partially and selectively referring to, and engaging with, it. They are not ways of capturing it. A live animal is made up of a body and its animation. Death takes the life-within and leaves the inanimate body. We need to move between animation and all that accompanies it, reference to the life within and the words spirit and soul.
How do we know that the human condition leads to the understanding that we have both a body and a life-within?
Let’s head to the Chelsea Physic Garden, where you will find that all and every human group and traditional culture across the planet has done two things simultaneously to help the injured and sick. Firstly, experience of nature over generations leads to shared experience and knowledge of the effect of eating (or applying) certain leaves, roots and seeds and how to prepare them for ingestion and application. The art (shared attention life models) of understanding symptoms also needs to develop. Secondly, and alongside this, ritual shared attention life models are carried out in order to strengthen the life-within.
You may want to argue that the ‘herbs’ are enough and that the rituals will have no effect. The rituals are part of the placebo effects of the herbs as are the beneficial intimacy of group members and of the group itself. The generation of the feeling that you are being healed has hormonal features that positively affect biological healing. We can easily see this in the emotions where we know that apprehension/fear makes healing more difficult and satisfaction/happy makes it more effective. This is a large topic and there is a lot of inquiry, experiment, science and natural philosophy needed in order to understand it. We often say things like ‘thank you for x, I feel better already’. It is likely that the broad area of placebo effect/faith healing will show that your body, brain and life-within have benefited. A wide ranging study of GP surgeries using alternative practitioners, found faith healing using touch or proximate ‘touch’ to be the most effective. This demonstrates the central nature and power of intimacy. That is why we cuddle, embrace and hold the hand, of people who are suffering.
Everything that moves has animation therefore everything that moves has a life- within. This would be a natural conclusion for early humans to make. They also experienced that death was part of hunting and eating food both for themselves and other animals. They knew that eating some plants could make them ill or take their life. Death also came to them for no reason that they could see or refer to. Viruses, bacteria, many parasites and diseases such as cancer and heart disease are modern discoveries. All our early ancestors could experience was illness and death. They used their encounters to imagine and verbally express that unknown and invisible ‘animated beings’ were the cause of unexplained death. Sometimes the herbs and rituals healed and saved life and sometimes they did not. There must be an unknown animate that intervenes for good or ill. The third element in the physic garden is a ritual appeal to what we call the supernatural. This is another meaning cluster in poor repair.
In our first social condition we lived intimately with life and death because we lived a life full of the animated and the bodies it left behind. In these natural environments it would be common to experience the sense that you were being watched by some unknown animal as the chance that you were being actually watched was very high. This became more acute at night as our night vision is poor. The assumption that we are being watched by ‘beings’ that we do not know who are capable of doing us harm is a natural aspect of threat perception. Threat perception is explained in the emotion topic. Hunting is often us remaining unseen while we seek to kill another animal so we also participate in creating the feeling.
Half of the supernatural is no more or less than the sense that we are being looked at by ‘animates’ that we cannot see who are capable of doing us harm. In the early modern period in the Ribble valley the physicality of this was still evident. Harmful unseen animates came down the cottagers chimneys or through the ill- fitting doors and window shutters (no glass). They could be prevented by horseshoes nailed up, bottles filled with urine, salt and rituals around it, special stones placed over barn entrances, holed stones, shoes included in the building of windows, doors and chimneys and mummified cats. The very poor who lived on the edge of death were the most likely to believe in and practise these actions. The other half of the supernatural, the sense that we are being looked at by ‘animates’ that we cannot see who are capable of doing us good has a different origin. It first emerges in an intermediary step, where animates who are looking at us to cause us harm are hungry and if we give them some food it will placate them. The animates/beings that we never quite see who cause illnesses and weather are hard to placate and for them we create food offerings set in ritual actions.
When generations of humans live in an area of land it becomes alive with episodic memories, some of the most powerful being shared experiences with high intimacy individuals from the group. When these humans die you move around a familiar environment with human intimates that are absent not forgotten. When an elephant feels the bones, and when we visit a grave of an intimate our animal nature is reminding the brain/body that the elephant/person is actually dead despite the episodic memories of them. There is evidence that many social animals mourn their dead but scientists are reluctant to say that they feel as we do. They say we are ‘projecting’ our feelings but it is an essential part of shared attention animal life modeling and their experience is the same as ours.
Courtesy of a rich episodic memory, I can still ‘feel’ the presence of my uncle when I sit by the pool beneath the fig tree and hear the monkeys in the branches. Is the life within of my uncle actually in this place? It is hard to even imagine this in a man made environment but it is still possible in a sort of damaged and limited way. The natural world feels alive and is full of encounters. Can he still help me? What does he expect of me? The uncle experience becomes the still alive ancestors who, unseen, look at us and all our doings. They cover the range from causing harm through placation to doing good. Ancestors are intimates or imagined/articulated intimates. From these we begin to imagine that other animates might do us good. These can be unseen or odd versions of animals that we depend on, the great fish or the white (albino) deer. We are likely to include physical animation particularly water. We imagine animates who have the nature of water but the form of an animal often a human (the water sprite is very common).
Our only way of engaging with unseen animates is ritual. Ritual is the core of intimacy and the most powerful force for social cohesion in human affairs. Why is ritual so powerful? It is because it is at the very heart of our social world. It is the simplest and most generalised modeling that we have got. Any meanings and stories that you like can be bolted on but you do not need them because rituals are the first shared attention life models emerging by a different route. They are a return to the baby and mother with their meaningless strange intimacy life modeling, and equally as strange to observers. ‘No purpose’ is fundamental to building the social world of intimate relationships. Habitual and ritual elements within our encounters with each other, regardless of the size of the group, are obscurely satisfying. Ritual elements quickly solidify. In the social world, we ‘live’ in intimacy. At its most fundamental this is simply being together without purpose either ‘hanging out’ and/or following an explicit ritual or a shared attention life model. Add in content from shared similar episodic memory and you have the full core picture. Anything further away from the material world it would be hard to imagine.
The natural home of language is intimacy and this can be seen most clearly in poetic referencing; the language equivalent of ritual; particularly when using poetic truth to capture the all-embracing nature of intimacy; ‘the wolf and the lamb will feed together and the lion will eat straw like the ox’ (Isaiah); ‘may the road rise up to meet you and the sun be always on your back, until we meet again’ (Celtic).
‘What that is, which when it is in the body, the body will be alive?’
Plato has Socrates ask this question (Phaedra). In a sense we still do not know how to answer it. Here, we would answer that the body requires life, the life-within. This website only attempts to set out what this means, or rather what meaning clusters to assemble under the word life. The answer to the question is given by the full knowledge of what it is to be alive. The answer is not given by science – the material account of being alive; the imprint and traces, as it were, with ways of interfering.
Plato argues that the question calls for a clear answer or the debate (dialogue) runs out. He would not consider our position as acceptable. Rather than a lengthy and complex journey the grammar of the question asks for a ‘that’, a ‘something’. Every ‘object’ can only be animated by a movement as every noun can only be animated by a verb. The object nouns ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ answer his question. If you want to use them they begin empty, totally and absolutely empty. They can be filled by whatever you drag in from experience and from language that you commit to (beliefs). Socrates argues that what he knows will be part of his soul and will re-appear when his soul acquires another body. Others have themselves (the whole package) as transcendent, i.e. sitting in the place of the nouns spirit and soul. Plato would have had a problem with this as he shared a common understanding that the emotions had their origins outside of human beings and outside of the soul. Socrates envisaged experiences for souls in an afterlife and many cultures have built on similar beliefs. The problem with a philosophical approach is that it is overly dependent on language through its focus on exploring topics. Language, the mind and belief (all aspects of the same thing) can only refer to life. They are already disembodied.
The depths of poetic truth have more to offer. Staying with the ancients the writer of Ecclesiastes says:
‘Remember your creator before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, before the pitcher is shattered at the spring and the wheel broken at the well, before the dust returns to the earth as it began and the spirit returns to god who gave it. Utter futility, says the Speaker, everything is meaningless.’