Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 38

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 38 - Animal Will

Javelinas are intriguing creatures, so similar to humans in many ways. They live in groups. They jostle for social status. With their snorts and confident stances they embody will power. And they eat almost anything.  

The complex behaviors of javelinas serve basic needs. The dynamic networks of biochemicals that must constantly be active inside each cell are continually breaking down. Thus flows of matter and energy are continually required. In a word, the javelinas require nutrients. The resulting chemical processing creates wastes that must be expelled. Finally, because death is inevitable, either from senescence, disease, predation, or accident, the pattern of metabolism will continue into the future only if it is copied, hence reproduction. That’s it—the triad of metabolic needs: intake nutrients, expel wastes, reproduce.  

Paramecia, flowering plants, bats, people, moles, mosquitoes, pine trees—all are various ways of fulfilling the same basic triad of fundamental processes. This is a deep and important truth, a law of life’s functions (so different from the laws of physics and chemistry). Now, relevant to the mental whirlpools I’ve been watching in myself, the idea of a basic triad can be extended to behaviors of neuronal animals: All higher, complex behaviors could be considered as enhancements of the triad. A javelina’s grunt to warn another away from the compost pile is a behavior that helps it obtain food. One could write a story around the evolution of will, how wants and the satisfaction of wants grew into more and more elaborate ways to fulfill the basic triad. The desire for an alternative moment, by representing the desired state of the outer (or inner) world in mind, is a very high level way of helping fulfill one or more parts of the triad. However sophisticated the ways, the fulfillment of basic metabolic needs might be the foundational ‘reason’ for most if not all complex evolved forms and applications of will in the animal kingdom, using various levels of survival “tools”: senses, muscles, nerve systems, decision-making, social behaviors, intelligence. 

We can apply this reasoning to humans. A human infant clearly wants food. It is simply hungry and its cries. Later, it can speak. We say it wants to communicate.  But does it want to communicate? Surely, it learns advantages in communicating, but does it want to communicate or really only want food? Do you really want that fancy new car or do you want status, because back in the Paleolithic a hundred thousand years ago, status seeking helped get sex?  

In his book The Robot’s Rebellion, the psychologist Keith Stanovich writes about behaviors tied to the genes by either short or long leashes. A mating dance of a fruit fly is a short leash link to the genes, because the behavior has little flexibility and is directly linked to genetic propagation. On the other hand, more rarified examples of human creativity, such as art, have longer leashes. The complexity of cultural evolution has added levels between genes and behaviors. Crucially, the behaviors linked to genes by long leashes can more easily be cut free from direct ties to those genes. Creativity, to make the matter somewhat over-simplified, can be sought after for its own sake.

This is helpful to keep in mind when thinking about the mental whirlpools. What do I expect from trying to learn how to better exert “will” upon the structure of the present moment, when it’s not tied to a task but free-running, for example, when watching a sunset or lounging in bed? I might want more food, better accomplishments that will lead to a raise at work, or more sex. Or, better, wouldn’t this be a case of a more rarified goal, such as positive changes to the will “itself”? I mean for my own internal evolution as a conscious being. A stronger internal evaluator could be part of (or identical to?) the larger “I,” that most humungous whirlpool of attention on existence. And could that strengthening add to improved attention on the ways of the component whirlpools? 

Experiment with mentally living outside the moment-to-moment component whirlpools. Start with the smaller ones and work up to the larger ones in the nested hierarchy. What is the state of being mentally outside those mental swirls? Is this related to the proverbial thinking outside the box? Will this lead to greater creativity? Is this state more emotional or more mystical? Could this practice provide more sensuous connection to nature? Is being outside the whirlpools outside the stream of consciousness or perhaps a new kind of stream within? How can introspective watching the inner streams ever change their behavior? It is difficult to make clear structural statements about these matters. But I like the idea of experiment-and-see. 

In my opinion, we don’t need to worry that much about the fact that we might only be serving the genes by investigating the patterns of the mind. Unlike the will of obviously simpler animals (e.g., mating dances of fruit flies), our difficult yet refined metacognitive forays into self-understanding are only connected to the genes by extremely long, tenuous, and perhaps non-existent leashes. We can go after higher forms of self-knowledge for their own sakes and ours—for the sake of the new “I” who is being constructed from these endeavors. 

Javelinas are both complex and fascinating, so about them I will say nothing more, except to thank them for inspiration. 

© 2025 by Tyler Volk

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