Four Things I Learned By Being a Single Parent

The burdens and benefits of conscious awareness

The last month has been absolutely dreadful. Now that my wife’s foot has healed enough for her to hobble around the house a bit and yell at the children and I have any time to write at all have time to pause and reflect, I can say that the reason this was so awful was that, while my wife was bedridden, with a house full of children out of school, broken appliances, and a set of generally busy and unhelpful in-laws, I just experienced single parenthood for a month. So instead of a well edited post, I give you these four things I learned!

Thing One: Being a Single Parent

Don’t be a single parent.

Thing Two: Caffeine is Not Always Your Friend

You’re a single parent? Stay away from caffeine. Caffeine is useless for a person who is dramatically overworked. When your muscles ache, your mind whirls from being interrupted from being interrupted from the last urgent task you were interrupted from, and numbing boredom competes with a clawing desire to yell at people and/or tumble into a dank quiet hole lurks at the edge of consciousness, the last thing you need is caffeine. What you need is alcohol.

Alcohol lowers your inhibitions. It’s famous for that. And that feeling that you really, really don’t want to do the eight things that need to be done right away is an inhibition.

You don’t need it. Just let it go. Just let it go.

Granted, most people drink for reasons I generally don’t understand, and I’m told they run into serious problems. If you don’t have enough to do all day long but swipe through your Twitter feed, well, OK! Stay off the sauce! If you are getting ready to leave for work later today, well OK! Sobriety is your friend!

But if, on the other hand—if you’re living like a medieval widower and you’ve been working like mad for weeks on end with no respite in sight, then, well, any resistance to working you that you’re experiencing because you need rest is really just in the way.

Right? That sense you feel that you’re pushing past boundaries, and seriously should stop? It’s just in the way.

If you know you’ll be at home for the foreseeable future making lunch / changing diapers / sweeping up broken glass / mediating an argument between your children / making lunch for someone else who won’t eat the lunch you just made / asking what’s that smell / washing dishes / figuring out what the smell is / forgot your train of thought, then I forgot my train of thought.

Disclaimer

Don’t drink if you’re underage or it’s otherwise illegal.

Don’t drink if you’re an alcoholic.

Don’t operate heavy machinery under the influence of drugs.

Also: Don’t attempt to pin the blame on me when you’re caught using PCP to “help you work” on that bridge you’re fixing with the rest of your construction crew, and jump into traffic because Mickey Mouse was chasing you.

Thing Three: Capitalism is just Unregulated Evolution for the Economy

When I had a restful moment on one shopping trip—a trip made alone, without injured wives or enthusiastic children—I ran into a young man I know working at Generic Shopping Mart™. We’ll call him Darien.

Now Darien is a brilliant young fellow, and finding him overseeing the automated cash registers made me briefly ponder the effectiveness of capitalism. Darien’s position struck me as both a success—at least he’s working, rather than writing manifestos and making homemade bombs—and a failure, since he’s smart enough to be running the entire franchise.

When I asked him what he thought about capitalism, he said without hesitation “I hate it.”

I didn’t argue with him; I’m not fond of capitalism. But frankly it’s hard to know if things would have been much better for him under a more heavily planned economy. And more crucially, we know an unregulated market does work, because the entire evolutionary process is essentially just capitalism for the ecosystem.

Mother Nature isn’t regulated. Species proliferate and fall into extinction in just the same way businesses flourish and disappear. The mad scramble to find and exploit a niche is what brought us to where we are today; unregulated natural processes have created intelligence—conscious intelligence, even.

No, they aren’t perfect; some psychologists tell me the genetic underpinnings to education¹ as well as many other socially valued traits like intelligence, a trim waist, and avoiding smoking² are currently in decline. In just the same way, the environment has suffered, and income inequality is widening³ under market forces. Although I obviously can’t cite a study for this, I’d argue that even the quality of modern movies, television, and fiction has faltered. When society, ecology, and the market go unregulated, nature gives rise to interesting things—even things that, on the whole, are beautiful—but you have to be willing to put up with a lot of other stuff, like COVID, rising obesity, and clever young men wasting their talents in demoralizing jobs at a Generic Shopping Mart™ near you.

Thing Four: Intelligence and Consciousness

But I mentioned intelligence and consciousness, and there’s something more there. Like everything else in biological life, they arose from unfettered evolution. Why?

Image by Steve Johnson

Once, I believed that intelligence and consciousness were probably the same thing. It wasn’t a deep or satisfactory belief, because it didn’t quite mesh with intuition, but it was the simplest way to explain what I could observe: cats, dogs, pigs, and most humans demonstrate behavior that looks both intelligent and conscious, while pine trees, amoebas, and mushrooms don’t seem conscious. Obviously consciousness and intelligence go together at least somewhat.

GPT-2 changed all that for me. It was clearly intelligent, but not at all conscious. (Normally I’d try harder to demonstrate this is true, but I haven’t had the time for it—if you don’t agree, let me know in the comments.) So intelligence and consciousness may have a relationship, but they can’t be treated as identical.

And this reopens the great mystery of evolution: How could blind processes give rise to consciousness? How, or why, would mere matter ever become aware?

The exact details of how it might work are interesting to consider, but I suspect that most neuroscientists won’t know the answer to that for a long while. And I do at least have an idea about why.

Intelligence arose because, in a manner of speaking, creatures had an incentive to understand their problems and think inventively—rather than instinctively—to solve them. When creatures move into areas where their instincts aren’t much help (like dolphins moving from land to the sea), or find themselves in situations where food lies just outside of reach (like chimpanzees with a skull full of brains left by a carnivore), smarter members of a group have a reproductive advantage.

This may feel like a rare process, given how much smarter humans are compared to anything else, but it isn’t. Elephants, octopi, killer whales, and ravens have all developed an impressive level of intelligence. Even hominids aren’t that unique among primates; if aliens annihilated not only every human alive, but every gorilla, orangutan, and chimpanzee along with us, evolution would still have plenty of raw material to play with:

Intelligence across the primate phylogenetic tree, as determined by an aggregate of multiple skills, including “measures of innovation, social learning, tool use, extractive foraging and tactical deception.”

The image above is adapted from a 2011 article published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.⁴ They found that extractive foraging, or the need to use tools and physical reasoning to get food from difficult sources, correlated extremely well with overall intelligence. The names of the first three highlighted groups may be unfamiliar, but you’re looking at three branches which contain organisms primatologists find to be smarter than gorillas, and on par with orangs: capuchins, macaques, and baboons. We generally don’t pay attention to them because they’re more distant from us genetically, but give them four million years and the right evolutionary stresses, hey, you’ve got human level intelligence again.

So Mother Nature is all too happy to make intelligent creatures; whenever intelligence helps to cope with novel situations or difficult food-finding puzzles, nature will make a way. But what about consciousness?

Consciousness is astonishing

We take consciousness for granted, because we’re surrounded by it. Yet if anything, consciousness is even more astonishing than intelligence. Its existence begs some kind of explanation, even an incorrect explanation that can serve as a working model. So what do we know?

We know intelligence can exist without consciousness. Indeed, I think a GPT-style creature—something that has wants, and the intelligence needed to satisfy those wants—could make a decent zombie. Definitely it could be well suited to caring for a houseful of children and a wife who can’t walk.

We don’t know consciousness can exist without intelligence. In the foraging societies of long ago, people who followed the ancient folkways held animistic beliefs, treating inanimate objects as conscious and aware. It’s fascinating, but I think animism is wrong. I don’t think consciousness can exist without intelligence.

Somewhere in our nervous systems, there must be areas, little subroutines in the mental programs we call ourselves that don’t just route sensory stimuli directly into processing and motor reactions. That consciousness architecture must be a drain on the system, always slowing everything down. Like the factory foreman who wanders the rows of conveyor belts asking, “what’s this,” “what’s that,” consciousness must serve some purpose, or Mother Nature would have streamlined it out of existence.

Consciousness seems to be the thing that lets a creature experience emotions, say “Wait a minute,” ask, “What’s going on,” and wonder, “What am I doing?” Simple emotions are extremely important to providing motivation for action, but processing those emotions, actually feeling the emotions, helps to make sense of an organism’s deeper problems. When people start to fray, they find most therapy ultimately involves processing experiences, encouraging patients to try to work through things they said or did or saw or felt by triggering them to be conscious and reflective rather than just acting and reacting all the time.

So what I think is

An external environment filled with puzzles nurtures the evolution of intelligence, and that intelligence then provides a internal environment that nurtures the evolution of consciousness.

This would help explain why consciousness seems to go together with intelligence; it can’t exist without intelligence, but once intelligence appears, consciousness becomes useful. Once a creature is smart, it probably has a few cognitive resources to spare on being aware of things, and that awareness itself can be very helpful. Many people practice meditation purely for the sake of deepening their awareness.

Sometimes, when we’re surrounded by too many problems that need to be solved right away, awareness can be a difficult burden to bear. But eventually, when stresses relax, when the flow of work gradually abates, and a person doesn’t need to act on the instant to solve the most pressing problem as soon as possible, maybe there’s something valuable to be found in the ability to expand our consciousness, to simply experience ourselves in the world around us, take a deep breath, and reflect.

1. Kong, A., Frigge, M. L., Thorleifsson, G., Stefansson, H., Young, A. I., Zink, F., ... & Stefansson, K. (2017). Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(5), E727-E732.

2. Hugh-Jones, D., & Abdellaoui, A. (2021). Natural Selection in Contemporary Humans is Linked to Income and Substitution Effects (No. 2021-02). School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

3. Roser, M., & Cuaresma, J. C. (2016). Why is income inequality increasing in the developed world?. Review of Income and Wealth, 62(1), 1-27.

4. Reader, S. M., Hager, Y., & Laland, K. N. (2011). The evolution of primate general and cultural intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366(1567), 1017-1027.