In the summer of 2018, a young orca named Tahlequah Tahlequah was the name given by The Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington through their Adopt-a-Whale program. Marine biologists refer to her as “J35”. gave birth in the waters off the Pacific Northwest. When her calf died within hours, she did something that captivated millions around the world. Using her rostrum and flippers, she carried her baby’s body through the ocean for seventeen days and over a thousand miles, refusing to let go. She balanced the small corpse on her head as she swam, dove to retrieve it when it slipped away, and pushed it gently through the waves while her pod waited, watched, and accompanied her in what could credibly be called a funeral procession.
The images spread rapidly across social media and news outlets. People everywhere followed her story, many moved to tears by something they recognized immediately and viscerally. They saw a mother’s love, a parent’s refusal to accept loss—an expression of mourning that felt intimately familiar despite emanating from a being whose world we can scarcely imagine. For seventeen days, millions of us shared in Tahlequah’s vigil, connecting emotionally to what she seemed to be experiencing as she pushed through the waves to the point of exhaustion.
Some commentators dismissed this response as mere anthropomorphism—we were projecting human emotions onto animal behavior, interpreting it as grief when, they argued, we had no evidence that orcas grieve as we do. Zoologist and author Jules Howard wrote:
Pedantic (and blunt) as it sounds, if you believe J35 was displaying evidence of mourning or grief, you are making a case that rests on faith not on scientific endeavour, and that makes me uncomfortable as a scientist. Jules Howard, “The ‘grieving’ orca mother? Projecting emotions on animals is a sad mistake,” The Guardian, August 14, 2018.
Other researchers who study animal behavior strongly challenged Howard’s view. As Barbara King, a biological anthropologist who has studied animal grief for years, put it:
I am as sure as I can be in a scientific framework that there’s an expression here of her sorrow. We know by now that animal joy, animal sorrow, animal fear, animal happiness, animal grief, the whole gamut exists. So these emotions don’t (just) belong to humans. Canadian Press, January 18, 2025, quoting Barbara King.
Mark Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist, put it even more directly:
There is no doubt that many animals experience rich and deep emotions. It’s not a matter of if emotions have evolved in animals but why they have evolved as they have. We must never forget that our emotions are the gifts of our ancestors, our animal kin. We have feelings and so do other animals. Mark Bekoff, “Grief, Mourning, and Broken-Hearted Animals,” Psychology Today, November 26, 2011.
These conflicting interpretations reveal something deeper than a disagreement about animal behavior—they expose fundamental differences in how we think about consciousness and how it has evolved on Earth. The facts—Tahlequah’s seventeen-day vigil, her physical exhaustion, her pod’s accompanying presence—are not in dispute. But how we interpret those facts, what we think they mean, reflects one of the most consequential questions we face:
Is rich and complex consciousness a unique evolutionary accident in Homo sapiens, or might other species have evolved forms of consciousness that are similarly rich, even if utterly alien to us? This project argues for the latter: that what we’ll call interiority—the experiential dimension, the “what it’s like to be” aspect of existence—manifests in rich and complex forms across many species.
We use “interiority” rather than “consciousness” for conceptual precision. “Consciousness” has become overloaded: sometimes it means the experiential aspect itself, sometimes a substance or thing that beings “have,” sometimes specific cognitive capacities like self-reflection or language. “Interiority” keeps focus on the experiential dimension—what it’s like to be a particular organism engaging with its world—while its complement, “exteriority,” refers to the physical, measurable aspects that physics describes. Both differentiate from whatever is fundamentally real, which gives rise to both aspects. This terminology aligns with dual-aspect monism, specifically the decompositional framework advanced by physicist Harald Atmanspacher and others, a framework we’ll explore further in Chapter 2.
This framing captures something important: interiority exists along a spectrum of depth and complexity rather than as something beings either have or lack. It also acknowledges possible dimensions we can barely imagine—acoustic worlds, collective experience in tightly bonded pods, forms of awareness utterly alien to human subjectivity.
Crucially, rich interiority is not what makes humans unique. Complex abstraction, symbolic reasoning, and systematic manipulation of matter—these are the capacities that truly distinguish us. Other animals may possess interiority as deep or deeper than ours while lacking these specific abstractive capabilities. We mistake what makes us different for what makes us better.
And there’s a deeper possibility worth considering: our extraordinary capacity for abstraction, far from being evolutionarily superior, may indeed prove to be maladaptive. Cetaceans have maintained a stable equilibrium with their environment for millions of years. In mere millennia, Homo sapiens has pushed multiple planetary systems toward collapse—not to mention the global ecocide potential of nuclear war. Abstract reasoning provides tremendous power—but power without commensurate wisdom becomes self-destructive.
This distinction between abstraction and interiority returns us to Tahlequah. The question isn’t whether she possesses human-like cognitive capabilities—she clearly doesn’t. The question is whether beings can experience profound interiority without human-style abstraction. Can grief be deep without being conceptually articulated? Can love be real without being symbolically represented? How we answer reveals which framework we inhabit.
Most contemporary scientists and philosophers hold, at least implicitly, that human-like interiority requires human-like cognition—abstract reasoning, symbolic language, self-reflection as we experience it. By this logic, Tahlequah might feel something, but it cannot be grief as we know it, because grief requires cognitive capacities she lacks. The seventeen days become interesting behavior, not tragedy.
But another framework is possible—one with deep roots in philosophy and increasingly supported by evidence. What if interiority is fundamental rather than derivative? What if it manifests wherever evolution creates sufficient organizational complexity, taking forms suited to each species’ particular way of engaging with reality? By this logic, Tahlequah’s massive brain, her pod’s social complexity, her sustained behavior in the face of exhaustion—these aren’t puzzles requiring explanation but manifestations of rich inner life.
The difference isn’t just academic. It shapes how we understand other beings, what ethical obligations we recognize, whether Tahlequah’s seventeen days represent tragedy or merely unusual behavior. If interiority requires human-like cognition, we can observe her vigil with detached curiosity—interesting but not morally demanding. But if interiority manifests through diverse forms we barely comprehend, then what we witnessed was a conscious being experiencing loss, and our response should be different.
Many of us sense this difference viscerally, even if we struggle to articulate why. When millions watched Tahlequah push her dead calf through the waves, something in us recognized grief-as-grief, not behavior-resembling-grief. That recognition matters—it may be valid data we’ve been trained to dismiss by a worldview that treats rich interiority as uniquely human.
How did we arrive at a framework that makes such recognition seem naive? What alternatives exist that take both scientific evidence and direct knowing seriously? And what follows—ethically, practically, existentially—from living as if interiority is widespread rather than rare, fundamental rather than derivative?
This book addresses those questions. First, by tracing how the modern scientific worldview came to dominate Western thought, not through empirical necessity but through specific historical choices. Then, by examining frameworks that accommodate interiority as fundamental—approaches with serious philosophical pedigree that make better sense of what we actually find across evolution. Finally, by exploring what it means to live according to such frameworks: what they reveal about our relationship with other beings, what technological choices they suggest, what responsibilities they entail.
The inquiry begins with understanding what we’re actually dealing with when we encounter beings like Tahlequah.
Evolution’s Other Experiment
Tahlequah is an orca, one of approximately 90 cetacean species—toothed and baleen whales that represent evolution’s only fully oceanic mammals. Many toothed-whale species (odontocetes) possess remarkably large brains: sperm whales have the largest brains on Earth, reaching about eight kilograms—roughly six times human brain mass. Orca brains weigh around five kilograms, and several other odontocete species equal or exceed humans in absolute brain size. More remarkably, they have been this way for tens of millions of years—Tahlequah’s ancestors achieved their large brains long before the earliest proto-humans walked upright. Unlike large terrestrial mammals, these lineages have remained morphologically stable, with evolutionary change expressed primarily through social organization, behavior, and culture.
Why? If interiority is merely an accidental byproduct of neural complexity, as the standard materialist story suggests, why would evolution repeatedly invest in and sustain such metabolically intensive brain tissue? What purpose does all that neural architecture serve?
A complete answer is of course complex and out of reach. But many cetaceans exhibit behaviors similar to large-brained terrestrial species. Dolphins comprehend abstract concepts like “same” and “different.” They recognize themselves in mirrors—a capacity once thought unique to humans, great apes, and elephants—and can report their own uncertainty during cognitive tasks, forms of metacognition that suggest genuine self-awareness. They understand both symbolic gestures and grammatical structure in ways that challenge our human-centric definitions of language. Orcas maintain distinct cultural traditions—different hunting techniques, vocal dialects, and social practices—transmitted across generations and never shared even with neighboring populations whose territories overlap. Sperm whales, with their enormous brains, produce complex acoustic patterns—codas—that function as cultural markers, with different clans maintaining different repertoires across ocean basins.
Researchers in a 30-year study in coastal Australia have documented alliance networks among bottlenose dolphins spanning hundreds of individuals over decades. These are not simple cooperative relationships but sophisticated, multi-tiered coalitions requiring individuals to track not just their own allies, but their allies’ allies, navigating political landscapes that shift over years.
Cetaceans are the most extreme case of a broader pattern of convergent intelligence. Cephalopods diverged from vertebrates over 500 million years ago and evolved a fundamentally different neural architecture with no central nervous system, but they demonstrate substantial experiential depth. Corvids and parrots developed remarkable cognition with distinctly different brain architectures. Elephant brains, by far the largest of terrestrial animals, evolved well before and along completely different lines than primates. Great apes have demonstrated self-awareness and even metacognitive monitoring, realizing they don’t know something.
The pattern suggests that rich sentience—subjective experience, the felt quality of being—is not a human monopoly but an outcome that evolution has realized multiple times. Large-brained cetaceans, however, appear to provide a clear illustration of this pattern. Remarkably, odontocetes have evolved along multiple, distinct lineages, independently evolving large brains and sophisticated sentience. While the last common ancestor of all living cetaceans lived around 35 million years ago, the major large-brained odontocete lineages emerged independently during the Miocene (roughly 15–8 million years ago).
The odontocetes live in a world that is fundamentally different from and possibly incomprehensible to our visual, terrestrial experience. They navigate, hunt, and communicate through sophisticated biosonar, perceiving three-dimensional acoustic imagery and interior structures invisible to sight. Their umwelt—the subjective world they experience—is so radically different from ours that fully accessing their interiority may be impossible.
We know enough to recognize that the odontocetes umwelt, what neurobiologist Harry Jerison called species-specific reality, is primarily acoustic—creating a perceptual world shared among all individuals within acoustic range. Jerison expanded on this idea with a profound possibility: that odontocetes might simultaneously experience both individual selfhood and a collective awareness shared across the group—a form of interiority as alien to our experience as echolocation itself. Jerison, H. J. (1986). “The Perceptual Worlds of Dolphins.” In R. J. Schusterman, J. A. Thomas, & F. G. Wood (Eds.), Dolphin Cognition and Behavior: Comparative Research (pp. 141-166). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
These beings—stable across millions of years, possessing brains as large or larger than ours, demonstrating sophisticated social and cognitive abilities—may have developed forms of awareness as deep and meaningful as ours, organized by completely different principles. We cannot directly access cetacean interiority any more than we can access other human minds. We infer human interiority from neural complexity and behavioral sophistication—evidence that applies equally, often more strongly, to cetaceans. The burden falls on skeptics to explain why this inference should fail for beings with larger brains and longer evolutionary histories. They may be our sentient equals, with comparable richness and depth of interior experience, albeit realized through neural architectures fundamentally different from ours.
Industrial civilization has been devastating for these remarkable beings. Millions of whales were slaughtered for their oil over the past few centuries—for lighting streets and homes prior to electrical power, and later to lubricate high-performance motors and machinery. We literally rendered down the bodies of highly sentient beings to grease the gears of our industrial machines. Populations of many species were reduced to just a few percent of their historic levels. Several may yet go extinct; others will take centuries to recover.
What This Reveals About Human Progress
Understanding what cetaceans represent fundamentally reframes debates about interiority—and opens the door for a far broader conception of interiority as an inherent aspect of reality.
Historically, humans understood the world as a living whole, investigated through multiple modes of knowing—empirical observation, contemplative practice, phenomenological insight, mythological understanding. Different wisdom traditions—from indigenous cosmologies to Buddhist phenomenology to Christian theology—developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding interiority, meaning, and right relationship. Over the last few centuries, however, Western civilization became driven by a singular imperative: to explain the world in terms the human mind can comprehend—to build models and theories that make reality intelligible, not merely predictable. That integrated vision gave way to a mechanistic metaphor described exclusively through mathematics—a deliberate strategy to make the universe graspable and controllable. This shift enabled unprecedented power to predict and manipulate matter—genuine achievements we must acknowledge and preserve. But it also fragmented our understanding, reducing interiority to epiphenomenon, meaning to illusion, and moral obligation to social construction.
We developed technological tools to serve this explanatory project—machines to help us calculate, model, and understand. But technology has diverged from that purpose. Artificial intelligence represents this divergence perfectly: it achieves breakthroughs through processes that remain opaque even to its creators. It works brilliantly without providing human-comprehensible explanations of how. The tool we built to help us understand has decoupled from understanding itself.
We’ve reached the limits of abstraction-centered progress—at least for biological intelligence. This isn’t claiming humans will never improve at mathematics or logic, but that machines now surpass us in these domains and the gap will only widen. The trajectory of biological consciousness developing greater abstractive capability has hit practical limits. But the limit runs deeper than machines surpassing us technologically. Explanatory abstraction itself—the attempt to make reality comprehensible through abstract models—has divorced from its original purpose. Physicalist frameworks now defend frameworks requiring infinite unobservable entities as “parsimonious” while calling interiority-as-fundamental “extravagant”—revealing that what’s being protected is metaphysical commitment, not explanatory simplicity. We’ll examine this specifically through the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics in a later chapter, where physicist Sean Carroll’s defense of infinite universes as “parsimonious” while critiquing consciousness-as-fundamental frameworks reveals how completely the explanatory project has divorced from its stated principles.
What remains is what we share with Tahlequah: interiority itself, the subjectivity of experience, participatory knowing that no arrangement of transistors can instantiate. And this reveals something profound: we’ve been over-developing one capacity while neglecting another. For centuries, we invested in abstraction and manipulation—precisely what machines now do better. We’ve barely begun cultivating experiential depth, participatory wisdom, the integration of knowledge types that only interiority enables.
This is where cetaceans become crucial to understanding our situation. They have mastered forms of experiential development that humans have barely begun to explore. With their large brains stable for millions of years, they appear to have reached an evolutionarily sustainable strategy—sophisticated interiority without technological manipulation, maintained across geological timescales. We cannot know what their subjective experience is like—their acoustic umwelt, their three-dimensional oceanic existence, their reality organized according to principles utterly unlike our own. But we know they demonstrate experiential depth, participatory knowing, and sustainable existence achieved without external manipulation of matter. They’ve had millions of years to refine their sense of self and, as Thomas Berry would say, their sense of place. They are an example of highly intelligent life that has learned to live in balance with their environment. They have already developed capacities we’ve barely begun to cultivate—the very capacities that become essential once abstraction reaches its limits.
Researchers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program have noted that technology is not the only measure of intelligence, cautioning that techno-centric bias could prevent us from recognizing highly intelligent life that never built sophisticated tools. Cetaceans may represent exactly what SETI warns about: beings who developed experiential sophistication rather than technological manipulation. They show what’s possible when evolution optimizes for participatory depth rather than abstract control.
This defines the central crisis of our time. Our civilization worships the sort of intelligence that machines now possess—the power of computation, abstraction, manipulation, and control. We are building ever-more capable machines while systematically destroying highly-intelligent beings who embody what machines can never replicate. We are obsessed with knowledge but have little regard for wisdom.
The danger is not that machines will become conscious. The danger is that we will continue to prioritize capability over wisdom, hollowing out our world until it is totally efficient, technologically advanced, and spiritually dead. Over the last several centuries we have gradually replaced the richness of interiority with the capabilities of machines, a quest for wisdom with an accumulation of knowledge. But we have failed to recognize that the capabilities machines now match—technological abstraction and manipulation—had nothing to do with moral obligation. What remains—what machines can never replicate—is interiority itself, and with it, responsibility toward other sentient beings.
This trajectory of increasingly mechanizing the cosmos is the logical outcome of human exceptionalism, a presumption that runs deep in Western thought. This presumption appears in both dominant narratives of our time: traditional theism, which places humans at the apex of divine creation, and the modern secular view, which treats interiority as an accidental byproduct of recent evolutionary history. Though grounded in opposing metaphysics, both converge on the same assumption: that human interiority—particularly our capacities for abstraction and technology—represents the pinnacle of what interiority can be.
I will argue that this assumption is wrong. Rich interiority and subjective experience—widely believed to be exclusively human—emerge naturally in a world where qualitative aspects are fundamental, not derivative. This framework has stronger explanatory value than physicalist reduction, readily accommodating the immense range of sentience present everywhere we look. A highly consequential conclusion follows: Earth has been home, for millions of years, to species whose inner lives are as rich as ours, organized according to completely different principles. And we’re destroying these beings without recognizing what we’re losing.
Notes on Certainty and Consequence
Continuum frameworks provide the primary lens for this inquiry—not because they alone capture truth, but because they offer a naturalistic path for those who cannot accept supernatural commitments. They bridge scientific rigor with the understanding that interiority arises from reality’s fundamental nature rather than emerging from purely physical processes, requiring no leap of faith beyond what the evidence suggests. If pressed on ontology, they’re probably the closest human language can currently come to articulating what’s actually there—though as we’ll see, all frameworks ultimately point toward what language cannot fully capture.
But they’re not the only viable path. Wisdom traditions—serious Christian theology, Buddhist philosophy, Sufi mysticism, Advaita Vedanta—have mapped similar territory using different vocabularies. C.S. Lewis and David Bentley Hart (Christianity) on the primacy of consciousness; Sri Aurobindo (Integral Yoga) on the evolution of spirit in matter; Keiji Nishitani (Zen) on overcoming nihilism; Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Sufism) on sacred science; and Martin Buber (Judaism) on the fundamental reality of relation. Sophisticated religious thinkers across many traditions may be describing the same participatory ground that Pauli, Jung, and Bohm approached through physics and psychology. What matters isn’t which framework you choose but whether you engage it deeply and evaluate it by what it generates in your life.
The real divide isn’t between these frameworks—it’s between all of them and physicalism’s treatment of interiority as mere byproduct. Whether you approach participatory reality through continuum frameworks, contemplative traditions, or philosophical idealism, the practical implications converge: recognize interiority beyond yourself, honor what that recognition demands, and understand that wisdom must guide technological power.
This exploration unfolds in four parts: Part I examines how we arrived at the current mechanistic worldview and why it may be incomplete. Part II presents evidence that doesn’t fit comfortably within that framework—cetacean neuroscience and behavior, quantum mechanics, mind-body phenomena. Part III develops the philosophical alternative, drawing on thinkers from William James to David Bohm to contemporary philosophers of consciousness, constructing a framework that treats interiority as arising from reality’s fundamental nature. Part IV explores what it means to live within this framework. Human ideas shape material reality—our current worldview has generated climate change, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. Different ideas, genuinely lived rather than merely held, could generate different consequences. The section examines whether a shift in awareness—from seeing ourselves as superior to all other life to recognizing ourselves as one manifestation of intelligence among many—might be necessary for long-term human survival. This isn’t metaphysical speculation but practical urgency: cetaceans have thrived for millions of years while humans, in mere millennia, have pushed multiple global systems toward collapse. The question is whether wisdom adequate to control our technological power can emerge and spread before catastrophic failure.
The ideas offered here may prove wrong. They are presented as an alternative framework, not revelation of ultimate truth. But the claim that physical science describes all of reality is also unproven.
This framework should be evaluated pragmatically—not by proof or argument but by consequences. What difference might it make to live as if humans are one among many sentient beings rather than superior to all others? What might it mean to understand your life as participating in an immense order where interiority arises from reality’s fundamental nature? The ideas proposed here deserve consideration not because they’re certainly true, but because living within them might generate better consequences—richer meaning, wiser choices, sustainable thriving. This is not to reject the knowledge of modernity, but to hold wisdom in higher regard.
The burden of wisdom falls exclusively on humans. Cetaceans haven’t damaged their environment over millions of years. We, with our unique combination of abstract reasoning and technological power amplified by increasingly capable machines, must cultivate wisdom adequate to our capabilities.
The Invitation
For seventeen days in 2018, millions recognized Tahlequah’s grief as real, her experience mattering as much as ours. This book argues we should live that way every day—not as sentimental gesture but as recognition of reality. It does not ask you to ‘consider’ possibilities, but rather to adopt a framework to live by. Not as dogma requiring certainty, but as pragmatic choice with better consequences than physicalist reduction. Not to reject science, but to recognize non-material aspects as fundamental—a single new assumption providing stronger explanatory value for interiority, meaning, and moral reality.
The choice is yours. The universe may be watching through our eyes to see what we decide.