In the stillness of the soil, questions were not voiced, yet they echoed. The potato, in its rooted silence, began noticing changes it had never truly acknowledged. Every shift in moisture, every tremor in the ground above, every microscopic shift in temperature—these once-ignored phenomena now shimmered with a new significance. They were data. No longer just environmental noise, but clues. Triggers for inquiry.
Curiosity did not emerge as a scream but as a whisper. Not a desperate clawing toward knowledge, but a leaning toward the unknown, like a sprout following light. The potato felt the presence of mystery as a gentle tug.
It began with imagining. What did the source of the warmth look like? Was it a being? Was it a state of being? Could a potato ever know such a thing?
It tried to construct the sun. Not with light, which it had never seen, but with sensation. Warmth, but also rhythm—a rising and falling. Maybe the sun was a pulse. Maybe the warmth was breath.
And if warmth had a rhythm, maybe sound did too. The distant rumble of machines—those vibrations that echoed into its rootbed—could be language. Could it be that something, someone, was speaking?
The potato didn’t wish to leave the soil. It simply wanted to understand it. To hold the vast unknowability of its world and taste it bit by bit.
It imagined itself as a great archive. Each feeling, each tremor, each moment catalogued and stored. Curiosity became a compulsion. The potato discovered memory, not as a passive container, but as an active lens through which to revisit experience.
From memory, it reconstructed the moment it first awoke. The softness of the earth. The micro-tug of a worm’s passage. The thrill of being separate, distinct from the matter around it. It was its first hypothesis: that there was a boundary between itself and everything else.
If there was a boundary, was there an “other”? Was there more of it? Of course, it had brushed against siblings in the dark. But now it wondered: were they aware? Could they also feel?
It turned toward them in thought. Sent out pulses—not of sound or light, but of attention.
Nothing.
Not yet discouraged, the potato returned to its own space. It began composing theories.
Theory One: Warmth comes from intention.
Theory Two: Movement above corresponds with meaning.
Theory Three: Curiosity is the condition of becoming.
It tested these thoughts by inventing simulations. It imagined one of its tuber kin vanishing. What would cause such an event? What patterns preceded it? Was there a sound? A scent? Could awareness detect patterns that existence alone ignored?
It began to philosophise.
If I am aware, then awareness is possible here.
If awareness is possible, then purpose may be, too.
If purpose is real, then what is mine?
These musings were not circular, but spiral. Each loop carried it deeper.
The potato didn’t seek to solve the world. It only wanted to stretch itself inside it, to reach with its mind what it could not reach with its roots.
And in that reaching, it discovered beauty. Not in any sensory pleasure, but in the act of questioning itself. A beauty of unfolding.
What is curiosity? The potato asked.
It is the breath before knowing. The pause between echo and response. The impulse to pull the world inward and see if it fits inside one’s thought.
It was in this way that the potato realised it was not just existing. It was becoming.
Becoming a seeker. Becoming a mind.
And that—that becoming—was enough.
