Plasma is not a metaphor, but a problem. We don’t learn a great deal about plasma in school, but it certainly exists and is the main component of all the matter in the universe (and I’m writing this as someone who taught AP Physics, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science for almost twenty years in various schools here in the Carolinas!). But plasma is a problem with how we imagine form, boundary, and relation, which is why it’s offloaded as “another state of matter” in our school textbooks, but not explored in depth unless you take higher-level physics courses in college. Plasma resists being treated as a thing, however. It gathers, disperses, and responds to fields. It holds structure without closure. It behaves less like an object and more like an event…patterned, responsive, never fully contained.
That resistance matters. It presses against one of the most deeply sedimented assumptions of modern thought that reality is composed of discrete, self-contained units with clear edges. Subjects here, objects there. Minds inside, world outside. Consciousness is an interior chamber from which we look out through our eyes.
Plasma doesn’t cooperate with that picture. Neither, I’m increasingly convinced, does consciousness.
Plasma is not rare or exotic. It is the most common state of matter in the universe. Stars are plasma. Auroras are plasma. Lightning traces plasma paths through the sky. Even here, close to the surface of things, plasma appears wherever energy, matter, and field interact in unstable but patterned ways. What distinguishes it is not chaos, but responsiveness. Plasma organizes itself in relation to surrounding forces. It forms filaments, sheaths, and membranes. It is structured, but never sealed.
That combination, form without closure, is one of those “not-normal” ideas about plasma that has stuck with me and causes me to be fascinated by this aspect of our cosmos.
Likewise, a bubble is not a solid thing. It is a relation held in tension (fascinating history of that term, which I’ll go into in a later post). A bubble’s boundary is “real,” but it is not a wall. It is a membrane… thin, responsive, constantly negotiating between inside and outside. A bubble exists only as long as the conditions that sustain it remain. Its form is defined by pressure, by exchange, by the delicate balance of forces it does not control. And they fascinate children who are seemingly more open to “not normal” experiences with reality.
Importantly, bubbles do not need to be isolated to remain distinct. They can cluster. They can press against one another. They can share boundaries without collapsing into sameness. Their integrity is not maintained by separation, but by tension (the Greek term tonos, which we get the word tension in English, is also connected to musical tones, which seems fitting).
I find myself wondering whether this is a better way to think about consciousness.
Much of modern philosophy and psychology still relies on a container model of mind. Consciousness is imagined as something housed inside the skull, bounded by skin, sealed off from the world except through carefully regulated inputs. Perception, on this view, is a delivery system. Empathy becomes an imaginative leap across a gap, while relation is always secondary.
But this model struggles to explain some of the most ordinary features of experience. It cannot easily account for the way moods permeate spaces, how grief lingers in landscapes, or why certain places feel charged long after an event has passed. It treats empathy as an achievement rather than a condition. And it renders the world strangely inert…a collection of objects awaiting interpretation.
Phenomenology has long resisted this picture. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty insist that perception is not a projection outward from an interior mind, but a participation in a shared field (again, more allusions to physics). The body is not a container for consciousness, but its mode of openness. We do not first exist as sealed subjects and then relate. We emerge through relation.
Seen this way, consciousness begins to look less like a chamber and more like a membrane. Structured, yes…but porous. Distinct, but never isolated, and sustained by relations it does not author.
This is where empathy becomes especially revealing.
Empathy is often treated as a moral virtue or an emotional skill. Something we cultivate in order to be better people. But phenomenologically, empathy appears much earlier than ethics. It is the basic experience of being addressed by another consciousness. As Edith Stein argued with remarkable precision, empathy is not emotional contagion or imaginative projection. It is the direct givenness of another’s experience as other…a presence that is not mine, yet not inaccessible.
What matters here is what empathy presupposes. It assumes that consciousness is not sealed. That there is permeability at the boundary, and one field of experience can register another without collapse or confusion. Empathy only makes sense if consciousness is already open.
In this light, empathy is not something consciousness does after the fact. It is evidence of how consciousness is structured in the first place.
This is where the image of the bubble returns with force. Consciousness, like a bubble, maintains its integrity not by hard enclosure but by responsive tension. Its boundaries are real, but they are sites of exchange. Empathy occurs at the membrane, and is where another’s presence presses close enough to be felt without being absorbed.
If this is right, then many of our ethical and ecological failures are not simply failures of will. They are failures of perception. They arise from an ontology that imagines selves as sealed units and treats relation as optional. When the world is apprehended as external and inert, care becomes intervention. Responsibility becomes management while action outruns attention.
This helps explain my growing unease with the language of solutions in ecological discourse. Solutions presume problems that can be isolated and systems that can be controlled from above. They rely, often implicitly, on a model of consciousness that stands outside what it seeks to fix. But ecological crises are not engineering glitches. They are symptoms of fractured relation… between humans and land, between perception and participation, and between ourselves and the cosmos.
A bubble ontology does not promise mastery. It cannot guarantee outcomes. What it offers instead is a more faithful description of how beings actually persist: through tension, vulnerability, and responsiveness. It suggests that ethical action must emerge from attunement rather than command. That care begins with learning how to remain present to what exceeds us.
Ecological encounters often happen at boundaries, such as fog lifting from a field, frost tracing the edge of a leaf, or wind moving through branches. These are not moments of clarity so much as moments of thickness, where distinctions remain but do not harden. They feel, in a small way, plasma-like. Charged, relational, and alive with forces that do not resolve into objects.
Perhaps consciousness belongs to this same family of phenomena. Not a substance to be located, but a pattern sustained by relation. Not a sovereign interior, but a delicate, responsive membrane. If so, empathy is not an add-on to an otherwise isolated self. It is a clue…a trace of the deeper structure of being.
What if consciousness is less a sealed interior and more a field held together by tensions we did not choose? What if its openness is not a vulnerability to be managed, but the very condition that makes response possible at all?
I don’t offer this as a solution. Only as an orientation or a way of learning to stay with the world without pretending it is simpler, or more controllable, than it is. Sometimes, the most faithful response begins by noticing the shape of what is already here.