The Softness Effect
Animals probably like the texture of soft things because we have similarly soft brains.
© 2022 Andrew Hodgson. Edited by Lisa Anthony.
I scarcely closed my eyes all night long. Goodness knows what was in my bed. I lay upon something hard, so that I am black and blue all over. It is quite dreadful!
— H.C. Anderson, The Princess and the Pea (Scudder 1909)
There’s nothing soft, or very little softness to speak of anywhere in the universe except on Earth where life transforms fluids and solids into the liquid crystalline material that makes us up. Living things absorb environmental fluids and deconstruct the crystalline structure of solids, incorporating matter into an intermediate, fleshy condition with special capacities like moving around without falling apart, perceiving the environment and expressing preferences. The softness of life has gone unnoticed in science and philosophy, perhaps because it’s so familiar. We usually treat it as unimportant despite the fact that it’s arguably more fundamental than any of life’s other properties.
An animal’s body is made of material spanning a range of physical states, from fully crystalline to fully fluid and everything in between. Brains are right in the middle, with maximum softness. The most extensively…
