Tube Theory
There are many like it, but this explanation is how I make sense of my self as an organism.
I have a model of what it is to be human that I use as a panacea to certain kinds of anthrocentric exceptionalism (i.e. humans are special) and as a reality check for certain flavours of ideology.
I posit that we are organisms that generally share many traits with our close cousins, the primates, fewer with our wider mammal family tree, and so on, right out to the farthest cousins with whom we might identify, sharing only MRS GREN-level commonalities. We can learn about ourselves and our underlying natures by comparing ourselves with our extended family, and finding our place among their number.
The tube, to me, represents the bottom layer of a kind of simultaneous set of layers of organism that we exist as.
The Point
There is a tendency to ideologically position humans as different to our cousins, who we Other in order to define ourselves. It’s a natural, self-centred tendency, and because we have built such complex societies it’s an easy illusion to maintain. “What a piece of work is a man” etc
When we forget this underlying reality we start to believe silly ideas:
pROduCTIviTy is GOOd, and THE PuRPoSe of OUR EXistENcE
Rest and idleness is oPTional OR eVEN IMmORal
The mind and the body are SEpaRATe
Movement is A ChorE tO be eNduREd
We are aUToNOMous INdiViDuAls
We are rAtional BeiNGS who MAKe dEcisiONS based on fAcTs nOt FeElings
One could go on. We forget these realities at our peril.
The Disclaimers
This model is close to a bunch of bad ideas, and I want to call them out. The model also has severe limits, so caveat emptor!
Disclaimer: Not Biological Essentialism
I want to emphasize that this model isn’t essentialism, which I oppose. While we exist as material, biological organisms with associated needs and desires, how these are all expressed is more flexible than an essentialist worldview would imply. To put it crudely: pooping is universal, but when and how we poop is up to us and only informed by our biology.
Disclaimer: Not Evolutionary Psychology
Evo psych (or at least the popular understanding of it) is scorned, correctly, as being mostly “just-so” stories that overly-attribute evolutionary adaptations with explanatory power for how things are. We must not imagine that all the wonders of our existence are reduce-able to some underlying organic “truth”.
Disclaimer: Not Paleo
There is a certain romanticism about the fantasy of the “primitive”, that if we can somehow “return” to an imagined natural state that our modern ills will all be solved. Let’s not invent a Mythic Past that prevents us from engaging honestly with our modern, complex, realities.
Disclaimer: Bad Biology
This model is not a scientific biological one. I’m not a biologist; I don’t even play one on TV. I’m being deliberately loose with my language - for example, in this model I don’t meaningfully distinguish between ‘primate’, ‘ape’, or ‘simian’. This is bad science and I am suitably ashamed of myself.
Disclaimer: Reductionist and Simplistic
Living organisms are quite complex, did you know. This model’s explanatory power is modest, and I use it as a tool specifically to challenge ideological conditioning in my own thinking, as well as the odd bout of existential terror.
The layers that I use
I broadly think of myself as broadly falling into these nesting categories that are similar, but much cruder, to biological clades:
We belong to all of these categories at once and they all inform our needs, our pleasures, our limits. I’m gonna quickly run through how I see each group.
Tube
Right down in the beginning, both historically and embryologically, we start as a kind of blob that develops a single hole with which to eat and excrete. We start as a bag. But bags aren’t up to much, and so pretty soon we add a second hole and form a tube. The second hole takes one of the two functions from the first hole. In humans, it is a mouth, which means we start as a butthole. But I digress.
Life as a tube is simple.
Food comes in, excretion goes out. Food in, excretion out. Wriggle around, find better real estate to serve tube. Grow eyes? Eyes serve tube. Everything serves tube. Tube does what tubes do.
Keep tube happy.
Animal
This is a super-category that broadly covers all the organisms that move around, with a focus on fellow vertebrates, and their common basal ganglia (sometimes known as “lizard brain”).
Animals need to sleep, regularly.
Animals feel pain, they learn, they remember.
They have strategies for danger like fight or flight.
Animals flock, and some have partners and families, rear their young.
Animals need stimulation - they feel boredom, and stress.
Most of that’s pretty familiar to yours truly; perhaps you, too, can relate?
Furry Mammal
It’s no coincidence that the majority of our pets are mammals, or that mammals are semi-regularly spotted bonding across species in the wild. We share more in common with our fellow mammals than we differ from them.
Mammals seek comfort in the presence of others of their species or compatible species. They cuddle.
Mammals seek shelter from the rain, from cold, from heat. They react to scary things or dangerous stimuli.
Not all mammals are social in the same way as us, but they raise their babies, they have families, they bond.
Mammals play. They gambol, they pester, they throw tantrums.
When we encounter a new tool, and haven’t used it before (present-at-hand), our explorations with it look a lot like any other animal’s poking and prodding and experimenting.
Apes
We are definitely primates, cousins to Gorillas and Orangutan (literally “forest person”), and Chimpanzees and the rest.
Apes groom each other, and this is a major part of how they maintain social connections.
Apes love a good meal with a mix of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Gorillas will hum little happy tunes to themselves when they eat.
Apes posture and strut, power dynamics are important to their social structures
Apes go to war - Chimpanzees in particular are famous for their inter-tribal fighting.
The social grooming aspect is particularly relevant, as it informs such ideas as Dunbar’s number (briefly: that humans can maintain up to about 150 stable relationships). We can view small-talk and water-cooler chat as a kind of social grooming.
Human
We remain humans, with our particular species’ mix of biology and culture. Tube theory doesn’t say “we are simply animals”; it says “we are also animals”. Even among our closest cousins we find many and varied examples of social structures, of sociosexual relations, of levels of aggression. There is plenty that is unique to our little branch of the great tree.
Some kind of conclusion
This post has wiggled all over the place, grabbing at a bunch of ideas. Hopefully a through-line remains clear. What I try to remind myself when I get wrapped up in abstract, human-brained thoughts is that I’m still an animal with a daily cycle, and a tube to keep happy. If I want to live well, I have to function as a successful organism. I need to hum little tunes to myself as I eat, I need to spend a bit of time brachiating, I need to pay attention to my tube-self, and keep it happy. Perhaps you do, too?
Addendum: Related Ideas
Because this is well-trod territory by others, there are many related ideas floating around that have informed my thinking. This is a brief list of some interesting ones.
Triune Brain
It’s not considered serious science these days, but the idea of dividing the human brain into three in the Triune Brain is powerful enough to persist in popular thought.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
We can see a similar preoccupation with underlying needs in the famous Maslow’s hierarchy and its possible inspiration from Blackfeet philosophy.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
In The Shadow, The Darkness - by my favourite pessimist, Thomas Ligotti - the concept of ego death caused by gastrointestinal crisis is used to examine the possibility of a human organism without a sense of self to hide it from nightmarish truths.
Those among us who are successful organisms to any degree, including artists, are so only by virtue of the extent to which we function as bodies and by no means as minds or selves.
Ligotti views consciousness as somewhere between an illusion and a monstrous absurd accident.
Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of soul or self exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up. There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race - no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book. There is no one at all who can say anything about this most basic fact of existence, no one who can betray this reality. And there is no one to whom it could ever be conveyed.