Picture this, if you can: you are a twizzle of genetic material held in a capsule made of protein. You are very, very small—a hundred million of you could fit on the head of a pin. But strength comes in numbers: you and your kind, added together, weigh more than all the living matter in the world: all the trees, all the plants, all the people, all the animals.
Alone, admittedly, you don’t amount to much. You float around, perhaps clinging to droplets in the air, functionally inert. But when you come into contact with a possible host, you click into action. Injecting your genes into the new cell, you hijack its functions, multiply, then burst out, seeking fresh blood. You spread. You multiply—exponentially. Outside bodies collapse. Homes are quarantined. Cities lockdown.
What is it like to be a virus? Well, it’s hard to say. It is even disputed whether viruses count as being “alive.” As we went into lockdown last year, I spoke to the microbiologist Dorothy Crawford. The distinction, she said, was “a moot point.” Viruses cannot grow and do not respond to external stimuli. But they carry either DNA or RNA and—crucially—have the capacity to reproduce, one of the key definitions of life.
Crawford was personally inclined towards “not-living.” But she told me it was an interesting question nonetheless, “not just scientifically, but also philosophically.” It makes us question what it is to be alive. Asking what it’s like to be a virus is thus a philosophical grenade to toss onto the dinner table—or at least, it will be once Covid-19’s reign of terror is relaxed to the point where we are allowed to gather round a table again.
Lacking vision, hearing or other senses, it’s hard to argue a virus can “feel.” Some will jump to conclude that they cannot “think” either. But to others there is more wiggle room. On one side of the debate, there are neuroscientists who believe thought to be the preserve of the cerebral cortex; at the far end, there are panpsychics, proponents of a philosophy that suggests the mind—or, at least, aspects of what we call “mind” and “experience”—exist not only in everything with DNA, but also in everything in the world—from electrons to rocks to tables. This, they say, could offer a solution to some of science’s most baffling dilemmas—including the notorious mind-body problem, the “hard problem” of consciousness.
To the average person, however, ascribing meaningful “interiority” to a virus still feels like a stretch. But bacteria and other unicellular organisms give us pause for thought. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes in his thrilling Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, one might look at a paramecium, “a single-celled organism, swimming vigorously through a film of water,” and accept that, since it has goals, responds to stimuli and has the capacity to move and multiply, “on a tiny scale, it has experience.”
But then others, he adds, will not only dismiss such specks of life, but also rule out meaningful experience in more complex creatures like fish, birds or my old friends the bats, maintaining that while they might have a great many reflexes, instincts and learned responses, “all of this activity is going on ‘in the dark.’”
When I studied experimental psychology at university, I was taught to approach the question of animal consciousness with a measured scepticism. The field was still shaped by 20th-century behaviourist assumptions: anything that could not be observed and measured must be disregarded. It was a school of thought that brought much rigor to the subject, but also constraints. And, I felt, it drained the joy from it.
So swim, paramecium! Swim for your life! Don’t let the haters get you down. In my book, if you can sense the outside world then you can feel—you can be.
Viruses, virions—OK, I’m less convinced about you. You can float through the air, take over cells, bring organisms from life to death in a matter of hours. Left uncontained, you can spread and bring the world to its knees. But can you feel? Have you mind-like aspects? Have you, in the Aristotelian sense, soul?
Perhaps not. You have no light receptors, so you won’t get the metaphor. But even I suspect you’re doing all of this in the dark.
You can read the rest of Cal Flyn's "What it's like to be a" series here
