Spirits in Ásatrú, Heathenry and Norse Paganism

We believe in spirits not to change our experience or to delude ourselves, but to give language to parts of our experience that have no other expression.

It’s not that natural phenomena have no other explanation. But the experience of being conscious is so bizarre in and of itself that it should be no surprise when some of us experience something out of the ordinary. There have been times when you’ve seen something just out of the corner of your eye, at the edge of your experience. You either choose to dismiss it or you choose to follow that feeling.

Many people have had a coincidence happen, or had a dream, or had an animal look at them funny and they thought it meant something but they wonder what the Gods must be telling them. What you miss here is that coincidences happen all the time, dreams come almost every night and animals are always looking at us funny.

But for some reason, this time it meant something different to you. This time this coincidence was significant, the dream stuck with you and you finally noticed that crow that’s been looking at you funny for weeks. But that’s the difference: this time you noticed. This time it seemed like the whole universe itself was speaking to you in a single moment. You felt that everything had meaning and significance. In asking what that might mean, we miss what it did mean. We had a rare and precious moment: an experience that defied expression.

In theory, I could take a single nerve cell out of your brain and keep it alive in a dish of nutrient solution.

Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do it without your permission.

I could measure what that cell was doing, and what it would be doing would be. . . not much. Maybe occasionally sending a spontaneous electrochemical wave down its length—what we call an action potential. Other than that, it would just sit there.

By itself, it wouldn’t write poetry, experience a sunset, play Mario Karts, feel bored, or awkwardly try to reconnect with an ex-lover. Consciousness isn’t a property of single cells. Now imagine that Raquel Welch and I could go SCUBA diving inside your brain. (Just work with me here. If you haven’t seen the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, you should; it’s a lot of fun if you can suspend a whopping big heap of disbelief.)

We could watch action potentials zipping along nerve cells and jumping from one cell to another. We’d see nerve cells communicating with each other, and we could explain it strictly by the laws of physics and chemistry—but we still couldn’t see you composing poetry, winning the 50cc Wii Grand Prix, or whatever it is you do.

We couldn’t read your thoughts or understand your consciousness. Not because there’s anything “supernatural” about consciousness—but because consciousness is what we call an emergent property. It’s not a “thing.” It arises out of the ways in which ten billion brain cells interact with each other.

Modern life is often said to be “disenchanted”; we tend to see the natural world not as alive and conscious, but as inert matter, often with the added assumption that it is ours to use as we see fit.

You can’t reduce consciousness to brain cells, for the same reason that you can’t reduce a house to bricks—the pattern in which the bricks are arranged and laid determines the shape of the house, and the far more complex pattern in which brain cells are arranged and wired up determines the shape of your mind.

Or the “cells” from which a conscious mind grows could be, say, the living things in a meadow—the grasses and flowers, the bugs that eat the grasses and flowers, the birds that eat the bugs, the mycorrhizal fungi that grow into the flowers’ roots and link them together, the parasitic protists in the bugs’ guts, and so on.

Each of these sends signals to others, many of which we’re only just beginning to decipher—signals that can ripple through the entire ecosystem.

Like a miniaturized Raquel Welch inside a brain, we can see a few of the signals and links, but the whole pattern is mind-bendingly complicated, and mostly beyond our ken—the consciousness of an ecosystem is simply too big to see.

In fact, the consciousness of an ecosystem would have to include our own minds and bodies as subsystems of itself.

We are no less participants in our ecosystems than flowers and fungi. So while putting the idea to rigorous testing is a bit tricky. . . it doesn’t violate any laws of science (that I know of ) to say that a meadow is aware, even conscious. Or a forest, or a mountain, or a pond. In any diverse ecosystem, you get complex emergent behaviors.

Maybe, just maybe, they can be complex enough to generate something we can call self-awareness.

And maybe, just maybe, that awareness is something that some people can pick up on. Perhaps we can learn to detect subtle cues about the state of the whole ecosystem that let us know quite literally what it’s thinking—and even learn to communicate with it.

I haven’t worked out all the details to my own satisfaction, and I’m sure a better-informed philosopher could pick holes in my idea. But this is how I can, so far, manage to reconcile science with a belief in wights. Nothing “supernatural” here—just some amazing potential of the plain ol’ natural world, which, perhaps, we can come to know as persons, as our forebears did.  (Waggoner, Idunna 95)