Maybe You’re Alive, Maybe You’re Not

Among the many Muppet sketches that have stuck with me all the way to adulthood is that absolute banger of an earworm, “You’re Alive.” Like many of the musical numbers on Sesame Street, this performance by “Chrissy and the Alphabeats” is a life lesson in the form of a music video. Frizzy orange hair flying, Chrissy jams on a keyboard while crying out the criteria of our aliveness: we breathe and eat and grow. Two nerdy backup singers punctuate the message with a catchy refrain (always my favorite part): “huh, breathe in, hah breathe out.” To illustrate the criteria, a parade of non-alive or alive things in puppet form make their way across the screen; we learn that a rock, a clock, a telephone, and an ice cream cone are, in fact, not alive, while frogs, dogs, ponies, and bunnies are very much alive. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this sketch was single-handedly responsible for me learning the concept of what it means to be alive or not alive as a kid. (What it means to be dead was more complex, and very much came later.) I maybe saw the sketch once or twice but it lodged in my consciousness to such a degree that I can still sing the whole thing at the age of 46.

Looking back on it now, it strikes me how basic scientific and cultural frameworks are embedded in our little brains from a very early age. Chrissy and the Alphabeats were imparting a very binary (and very Western) view of the world that separates all matter into two buckets: alive things and non-alive things. Through a simple song, I learned the human art of taxonomizing, setting criteria (it breathes and eats and grows!) and using them to sort the world into neat categories. 

I’m not going to argue at length with the message of “You’re Alive,” although my husband who works in the home energy field has strong feelings about buildings that breathe, and the small earthquake I experienced earlier this year reminded me that rocks can absolutely grow (or at the very least move). (Also, way to limit my childhood imagination, Chrissy and the Alphabeats - what if as a kid I wanted to have a little empathetic chat with my soft serve?) 

I’m willing to concede that some things are perhaps more alive than others. The thing I want to poke at, however, is certain humans’ self-appointed position as arbiters of these questions. Of late, we are perhaps less divided over what is and isn’t alive and instead relatively obsessed with the related matter of intelligence or sentience, given the rapid rise of and emergence of an arms race for the development of AI. Can the machines we’re creating exhibit intelligence without being sentient? Will they ever achieve sentience and how will we be able to tell?

In exploring these questions, the philosopher Jonathan Birch draws us back to the work of Herbert Feigl, who in the late 1960s and 70s was issuing prescient warnings at the University of Minnesota about “what terrible blunderers we are in the art of living together on this Earth” and suggesting that science alone can’t save us from the human-made destruction he saw coming down the pike. Feigl distinguished between sentience, sapience, and selfhood as distinct but layered markers of intelligence in organisms. As Birch summarizes it, “sentience is about the immediate raw sensations, sapience is our ability to reflect on those sensations, and selfhood is about our ability to abstract a sense of ourselves as existing in time.” 

All three–sentience, sapience, and selfhood–are key elements of how we define the core experience of being human, and (at least in the developed Western world) we have long functioned under the assumption that humans are at the top of the natural intelligence hierarchy, the end stage of the evolution of creaturely brilliance. It follows then, that science has long been fascinated with the quest to find all three in other organisms, to determine if they measure up to our standards of smart. 

The supposedly gold-standard way to explore that is the famed “mirror test” to which countless animals in lab settings have been subjected. The game is: put a visual mark of some kind on the animal’s body and then place the besmudged creature in front of a mirror to observe whether they notice the mark, adjust their positioning to see it better, and/or attempt to remove it. Theoretically, this test offers proof of self-knowledge, as the animal supposedly recognizes the mirror image as a reflection of themself.

My dog would absolutely fail the mirror test. But does that mean he’s not intelligent? For one thing, he’s completely uninterested in mirrors so I doubt he would even know he’s being subjected to the test in the first place. More importantly, a dog’s way of knowing itself and others is based around its sense of smell and not its vision. Anyone who walks their canine companion in winter knows: there is a whole complex olfactory world of signaling and self-identifying that dogs engage in that we miss entirely until we can see it streaked in yellow across the snow. As Ed Yong illuminates so beautifully in his book An Immense World, animals inhabit entirely different sensory existences that we can’t access but can only try to imagine. If the dogs were the scientists, we would undoubtedly tank the odorous final exams they would set up to measure our intelligence.

I wonder how many equivalents of the mirror test we humans regularly hold for each other, often without even realizing it. How often do we make assumptions about someone else’s intelligence, aptitude, and even sanity by measuring them against our individual or cultural ways of viewing the world? So many of us navigate our lives with a default setting of evaluating whether others see things our way and then shaking our heads in complete bafflement when people fail to measure up to those criteria. At base, it’s really a colonialist mindset: it’s like we arrive on another person’s shores and immediately declare them uncivilized because they don’t practice our religion or haven’t invented the same technologies we have.

Instead of asking, “are you like me?” it might be worth approaching the world instead with the more curious question of “what are you like?” In what may be my favorite book of all time, Ways of Being, artist and writer James Bridle invites us to take the time to “glimpse another kind, or many different kinds, of intelligence… In doing so, we might change the way we think about the world, and thus chart a path towards a future which is less extractive, destructive and unequal, and more just, kind and regenerative.” This calls for absolute humility: a willingness to let go of the very human desire to sort and categorize the world into binary buckets (alive-not alive, intelligent-not intelligent, right-wrong). Those buckets are our deleterious way of wishing away complexity and grasping desperately for simpler ways of establishing truths about the world, but complexity is where the good stuff is.

To quote the wise words of Chrissy and the Alphabeats, that’s no jive.

Erin Cohn is the Director of the Wuertle Center for Leadership at Smith College, and she is a new member of the Leadership + Design board. This article was originally published on her substack, Facit Saltus (subscribe by clicking here).