In 2001, during a crackdown against drug dealers in Atlanta, Georgia, the police made an unexpected discovery. In the basement they found three young cubs in a deplorable condition: an American black bear, an African lion and a Bengal tiger. They eventually became known worldwide as ‘BLT’.1
Their unique friendship made headlines. It is not usual for a lion, a tiger and a bear to coexist; even more unusual was the depth of their friendship during the years they lived together at the sanctuary of Noah's Arch.2 Attempts to separate them ended with them sitting on separate sides and crying. Now (2023) only the bear Baloo remains, but for fifteen years they showed the world that behind differences there is someone who is unaffected by the conditions of the physical world.
Who is Baloo the bear, who abandoned his normal bear reactions to befriend a tiger and a lion? Who was the lion Leo, who discovered two friends in a tiger and a bear? Who was the tiger Shere Khan, who saw a bear and a lion as comrades and was described by the staff at Noah's Arch as the naughty boy of the trio. Who were they really?
Did they discover the individual being in each other, the being that dwells in the core of individual existence in each other and made them perceive an individual, not a generic species form? Had it been geographically possible for an adult American black bear, an African lion and a Bengal tiger to bump into each other in the wilderness, it is likely that the encounter would have been far from friendly. After all, they are top predators, each in their own right.
Their broken upbringing caused Baloo, Leo and Shere Khan to lose the reflexive aversion they else would have had. Or, put it another way, their upbringing gave them opportunity to discover the other creatures inner being before the image of threatening competitors was evoked.
We sat in the kitchen one evening and heard the cat rattling in the food bowl and gave it no further thought until we saw that the cat had company! Over the edge of the food bowl, next to the cat, hung a shrew, fully occupied with her own business. The cat just took a glance and the shrew disappeared under the stove with the prey. Unaffected about the cat, she came back again and again and built on its storage.
– “Shrews are poisonous. Cats don't eat them.” is a common comment. Maybe not eating, but maybe play with them. At the shrews expense. What was strange about the situation is not just that the cat allowed its food to be taken by the shrew – one can certainly wonder about that, but strange is how the shrew understood that the coast was clear. Admittedly, a shrew is not a mouse, but still ... Somehow the shrew must have read the cat's state of mind.
Theory of Mind, mentalization or empathy, are concepts that relate to the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking or feeling. ‘Theory’ in the English term marks that it can never be other than conjecture. One can never be sure what someone else thinks or feel, but even if uncertainty is a basic element, the ability to empathize is one of the most important prerequisites for a functioning social life. For humans as for other animals.
Biology, genes, inherited instincts – what has happened when animals establish connections across species boundaries, even with species that would normally be seen as threatening? Maybe biology alone can't explain. Perhaps we have had a too narrow view of what it means to be a living being?
A crow bird and a dog are playing with each other. Bird meets mammal, beak versus teeth, claws versus paws, differences in size, eating habits and lifestyle. Nevertheless, they have found each other and play together without misunderstandings.
A ‘normal’ crow hardly sits still when a dog gets too close. But in the clip, the dog can even pretend to bite the crow and the crow pecks at the dog and lies defenceless on its back. It is not a behaviour that normally favours survival. How can the crow be safe with the dog? What have they discovered in each other? There can hardly be any doubt that the crow recognizes its dog among other dogs, that the dog recognizes its crow among other crows.
We can be sure that a bird does not see the world in the same way as a dog. They each have their own way of expressing themselves, eat different things, master different areas, do not see dangers in the same way; yet they find each other in a common game where they tumble about on the lawn; yet they have managed to find a being in each other that lies deeper than the superficial image of dog/crow with the conflicts it could bring.
It is probably no risk to say that most people believe that reality is the world the way they perceive it. What they see is the reality. But no one sees the world as it is, every being is limited to what the senses can convey.
Take sight for example, the testimony of the eyes. Bees see ultraviolet instead of red, many birds of prey perceive red, green and blue as well as ultraviolet. Humans see the world via electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 770 nm (red) and 380 nm (violet). Bats perceive the world through reflected sound with frequencies between 15 kHz and a little over 100 kHz. Dogs and pigs pick up the essential messages of reality via the sense of smell. Butterflies and birds are believed to read information from the earth's magnetic field. For a large part of the earth's population, the world consists of water, currents and dark depths.
So what is reality? We can be thankful that we don't see everything there is to see. If all material phenomena were observable, we would hardly venture outside the door. Fields from radio and television broadcasts, Wi-Fi, mobile networks, neighbours' LAN, heat radiation from cars, roads, houses, bodies, electromagnetic fields from power lines, cars and mopeds, radioactive background radiation—just a few examples of what vision had to contend with if susceptibility to electromagnetic radiation were not limited.
On the plus side, we would perceive space in a different way. If solar wind, van Allen belts, earth magnetism, cosmic background radiation and other phenomena were directly observable, space would probably look more like a flower meadow. It looks empty and dark for one reason only: we don't see everything. But we see what we need to see as human beings.
In physics, there are concepts such as dark energy and dark matter that can neither be seen nor measured, but are included in the calculations for physics models to work. With that assumption our visible, atomic universe only makes up around 4% of everything that exists. With the way physics looks at the universe and the way the universe actually behaves, there has to be this invisibility, or physics has to change its models and find a different way of looking at the world.
Consciousness also has its dark matter: What is it that converts nerve impulses into subjective experiences? The materialistically oriented natural science lacks answers. It can detect activities in the brain and relate them to sensations, intentions, thoughts, feelings and memories but lacks understanding of the nature of experiences, the subjective consciousness. The transitions are missing. The experience of a color is of a completely different nature than electromagnetic radiation; sound is something else than wave motions in the air. Electrical activities in the neurons are not the same as thoughts and experiences.
If you claim that a colour is the same as an electromagnetic field of a certain wavelength, you stay, so to speak, on the outside of conscious experience. Electromagnetic radiation is as little colour as the nerve impulses that the radiation gives rise to. The problem is the dimensional transition. An entirely physical phenomenon gives rise to a conscious experience, and despite the fact that they interact, the question remains: What is consciousness?
Feelings, will, thoughts, desires, dreams, imagination, fantasy, pain, beliefs may have support in nerve and brain activities, but they are not material in nature. They can be linked to activities in physical structures, but cannot be explained by them more than transistors, resistors, coils and capacitors can explain the weather report.
Natural science creates models using abstract concepts. Sometimes it defines objects that do not exist in our everyday reality, but are part of a set of powerful tools that give power to control material existence. The root of minus one opens up an imaginary dimension that does not become real until it is squared. The point and line of mathematics have no counterpart in the physical world. A dot on a piece of paper is in fact a three-dimensional figure, although thin and small, but in the microscope it has both width and height. The mathematical point does not exist in the material world. But still exists.
An idea of reality, a model, an image, a way of thinking, gives reality contours and is a way for thinking to approach existence and get hold of it. Beliefs in themselves contain no absolute truths, they can only be judged by how they work, by the effect they have. Like a compass or a map whose value is determined by how well it guides us.
When you are born you do not know much about the world to which you were born. Through the influence of educators and circumstances, an increasingly pronounced, conscious and mediated approach to the world grows. Large parts of humanity have God in one form or another as the basis for their version of reality. Others have chosen a faith where the mysteries of the universe and life can be solved with materialistic natural science.
At that point, natural science may turn over from method to religion and then the world no longer has room for a spiritual reality. Consciousness remains an enigma because reality ends in the chemical machinery of neurons and synapses.
All views of the world, whether called religion or science, are based on faith. There is no way to prove which view is correct because there is none. No right view, only a myriad of perspectives. Whether you are sluiced into your private belief through upbringinging or have pondered and suffered your way, you live with ideas that you have adopted in the belief that they are parts of true reality. But, as Tage Danielsson put it: “Without a doubt you are not really wise”.
The film ‘Tangerines’ 3 takes place in an almost abandoned village in Georgia during the civil war between South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 1992. Only the tangerine farmer Margus and his friend Ivo are still in the village. Soldiers sometimes pass by on the village road. One day there is a battle nearby and Ivo brings home the two survivors, soldiers from both sides – the mercenary Ahmed from Chechnya, who became a soldier to earn money for his family and Nika, a Georgian actor who became a soldier out of a sense of duty. When they come to their senses and discover each other, murder is in the air, enemies are meant to be killed. Ivo forces them to promise: no killing in my house. They have to cope with taunts, threats and murderous looks.
Through the mundanities of everyday life and Ivo's way of treating them, their glued-on warrior identities are peeled away, and the film culminates in a decisive scene where they fight on the same side against a common threat.
People hide behind masks and disguises and have many arguments to keep them on. Behind masks and layers of traditions, cultures, languages, habits, upbringing, beliefs and whatever layers that encapsulate and hide, exists the individual human being. Otherwise, we would have to admit that the human being is nothing more than a conglomeration of traditions, cultures, languages, habits and everything else that makes the individual visible and linked to a social context. In that case, who is who that choosesand decides about how to look at the world?
Who says that the innermost existence in a human must be precisely a human being? It might as well be a universal consciousness that we share with all other living things. The human individual could be the sum of these layers. A bear gets bear clothes, a lion gets a lion's soul and a lion's physical body, a tiger, a crow, a dog – everyone gets their clothes of body, senses and conditions of their existence as envelopes to work and experience through.
Of course, this is only one of many possible perspectives. What decides is whether it is a perspective that can be of some help in understanding nature, animals and humans. Perhaps it can also lead to an understanding of how it is possible that animals that should actually be shy of each other can create friendly relationships.
The Story of Kate and Pippin is the story of how circumstances led a family dog and a wild black-tailed deer to form a lifelong friendship.
Kate's family has told us that the adult Pippin usually comes back every year with her newborn kids. On Youtube there are many clips and pictures with Kate and Pippin. They have become quite famous.
The Internet and Youtube have made it possible to publish everyday observations in a way and in a quantity that was never before possible.4 There are so many ’unlikely’ meetings documented that they have formed their own category, Odd Couples
Cross-species friendships can no longer be seen as isolated funny episodes, but must, given the right conditions, be regarded as something normal. When you even find examples in the wild, you probably have to think that it occurs to a greater extent than we previously thought. Here is an example where a capuchin monkey adopted a marmoset. Normally they eat them.