What Is Skin

by Jay Paul

Perhaps the most common assumption about skin is that it seals off what is “me” from the rest of the world. For instance, I am sitting in this room right now with a bicycle to my right, a computer in front of me, and a bed behind me. My skin provides the barrier between these other objects and what is “me.”

            Upon reflection, problems arise with this naive view. The biggest one is that we usually associate our consciousness with our self, but our consciousness rarely concerns itself with what is inside our skin. Except when we are in pain or discomfort, our consciousness focuses on what is about us in the world. Right now, the keys on this keyboard, which are outside me but touching my fingers, are part of my conscious awareness while, say, my heart is not. It’s true that I need the heart to be conscious, but I am rarely conscious of it unless something goes wrong with it. 

            The seat of consciousness is not inside our skin. It is all over the place. Imagine a sunny day in July. The sun heats up your skin. Your skin reaches out into the heat of the world and away from you. In this instance, your skin reaches out 93,000,000 miles away, the distance between the earth and the sun. Consciousness is vast and way outside our skin. 

            What’s more, consciousness is the result, in large part, of our bodily interactions with the world. As we move about, our consciousness lights on various things that we need for any project we may be involved in. For instance, if I wanted to curl my hair, I would look for my hair curler and plug it in. In doing this, I, of course, use the skin of my fingers to open drawers and grab the iron. But I do not focus my consciousness on my skin; I focus it on the stuff I want to get done.

            The skin is not a barrier between us and the rest of the world; rather, it is feelers sent out into the world to make and remake a home for us there.  It tells us if the temperature is warm or cool and therefore what clothes to wear. It tells us if a key on the keyboard is stuck and needs replacing. And when we touch other people, we learn something about them, through the skin. We can tell if they are hot or cold. We can tell if they are touched often, and how badly they need a hug.

            My skin seems smart to me. Conventionally, it is believed that as I type out these words on my keyboard nerve endings in my fingertips send signals all the way up my hands and arms to my brain, and then the brain sends signals all the way back down to the fingertips. But it doesn’t feel as if it works that way. My fingers seem to work out these words on their own, without some brain or sense of “me” interfering. My fingers seem to think and know, as if the entire nervous system, rather than just the brain, interacts directly with the world.

            I am not the only one who feels as if words come to my fingers from outside what I call “me.” The poet Jack Spicer liked to refer to poetry as a kind of “dictation.” (See “Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures” in The Poetics of the New American Poetry.) For Spicer, a poet is something like a radio set receiving and conveying signals from elsewhere. Spicer’s idea is a modern reframing of the Classical notion that poetry comes to the poet from the muses, and that the muses deserve credit for writing the poem.

            Anyone who has tried to quiet his or her mind through meditation has a sense of what Spicer is getting at: it’s almost impossible to quiet the mind. Thoughts pop up out of nowhere and just take over, even when we explicitly don’t want them to. Where do these thoughts come from? Certainly not some center inside the skin. 

            I suggest that the thoughts come from consciousness itself, the consciousness that provides the backdrop to all life, just as the canvas provides the backdrop for the various drops of paint in a painting. Consciousness is not in us but around and through us. It is often supposed that consciousness arises from the play of neurons in the brain. My guess is that it is just the opposite: consciousness causes the neurons to move, and consciousness is outside the skin, all over the place, even 93,000,000 miles away. The whole universe shares a level of consciousness that is, in many ways, different from, yet part of, human awareness. Our individual awareness is just a specific way this larger consciousness has happened to fall out. Granted, humans are much more conscious than a boulder since we are more complexly organized. But a boulder probably has a small degree of consciousness.

            What I am saying is that consciousness suffuses matter and is fundamental. This position has become possible, in large part, because quantum physics has shown that measurement and observation, conscious acts, are part of the physical universe. I believe we can go all the way with this and say that consciousness is part of everything. Granted, human-style intent is not “out there” somewhere in the universe. The universe may be conscious on some level, but that doesn’t mean it in any way takes human beliefs and values into consideration. Consciousness existed long before the human brain, and it will exist long after. It is gross anthropocentrism to think the human brain is the seat of consciousness. We’re just another species.

            The technical term for the contemporary view that everything has some degree of consciousness is panpsychism. It has even become a respectable, while hardly a majority, position in academia. A good contemporary book on the subject is Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff. Some panpsychists point to spontaneous self-organization—the tendency of entities in proximity to one another to sync up and vibrate in something like unison—as a possible explanation for the consciousness inherent in matter. (See Tam Hunt “The Hippies Were Right: It’s All About Vibrations, Man!” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-all-about-vibrations-man/)

            If this is correct, then something like the human subconscious syncs up with the things about us. And the subconscious, strangely enough, is part of consciousness; it’s what we are not paying attention to but could. Perhaps with our language and knowledge we humans are distracted from that which connects us to the rest of the universe: spontaneous self-organization at the level of vibration. Could mystics be sensing this vibration, sensing how the whole universe is one, vibrating together? They may be conscious of the basis of everything, something most of us pass over.

So, what is the skin? It is one of the many small ways consciousness opens out—together with the vibrations in a grain of sand or the way migratory birds sense the earth’s magnetism or the way the same side of the moon always faces the earth. Skin doesn’t seal us off. It makes us at home.

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I believe I've come to this position, in part, because of my schizoaffective. After I recovered from delusions and hallucinations, I became acutely aware that I had been taken over by something outside "me." It caused me to reflect on how often all of us, regardless of whether or not we have been diagnosed, are taken over by something other than a core, rational self. It appeared to me that it happened a lot. We are taken over by other people's ideas, ways of using language, mannerisms and attitudes. We are taken over by fear or impulse. We often wonder, "what got into me?" The fact that we are less in control of ourselves than we in the West might want to believe is not a bad thing. It just is.