Janus

by Arthur Koestler

  This curious parallel seems to have gone unnoticed by both Lamarckians and parapsychologists; I have found no mention of it in the literature of either school. Yet it seems to me relevant, because both heresies show up the shortcomings of scientific orthodoxies, without being able to offer a comprehensive alternative beyond Johannsen's 'great central mystery' or Grassé's 'It seems possible that confronted by these problems, biology is reduced to helplessness and must hand over to metaphysics.' [43]

  XIV

  A GLANCE THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

  1

  Approaching the end of this journey, it might be useful to look back at the Prologue, in which I discussed the sudden rise of the human neocortex, and its growth at a speed without precedent in the history of evolution. We have seen that one of the consequences of this explosive process was the chronic conflict between the new brain which endowed man with his reasoning powers, and the archaic old brain, governed by instinct and emotion. The outcome was a mentally unbalanced species, with a built-in paranoid streak, mercilessly revealed by its past and present history.

  But the brain explosion in the late Pleistocene also led to other consequences -- less dramatic, but no less far-reaching -- which remain to be discussed.

  The crucial point is, that in creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

  An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its

  possessor . . . Natural selection could only have endowed the

  savage with a brain a little superior to that of the ape, whereas

  he possesses one very little inferior to that of the average member

  of our learned societies . . . [1]

  This was written by no less an authority than Alfred Russell Wallace, who co-fathered (if the expression is permitted) with Darwin the theory of evolution by natural selection.* Darwin instantly realized the potentially disastrous implications of the argument, and wrote to Wallace. 'I hope you have not murdered completely your own and my child.' [2] But he had no satisfactory answer to Wallace's criticism, and his disciples swept it under the carpet.

  * The first public unveiling of the theory was a joint communication

  to the Linnean Society by Darwin and Wallace in 1858.

  Why was that criticism so important? There were two reasons. The first is merely of historical interest, in that Wallace's objection demolishes one of the cornerstones of the Darwinian edifice. Evolution in Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory must proceed in very small steps, each of which confers some minimal selective advantage on the mutated organism -- otherwise the whole conception makes no sense, as Darwin himself kept reiterating. But the rapid evolution of the human cerebrum, which some anthropologists have compared to a 'tumorous overgrowth' [3], could by no stretch of the imagination be fitted into this theory. Hence Darwin's agonized response, and the subsequent conspiracy of silence.

  The second, and by far the more important, aspect of Wallace's criticism, he himself does not seem to have fully realized. He emphasized that the 'instrument' -- the human brain -- had been 'developed in advance of the needs of its possessor'. [4] But the evolution of the human brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is also the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use; a luxury organ, which will take its owner thousands of years to learn to put to proper use -- if he ever does.

  The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest representative of homo sapiens -- Cro-Magnon man who enters the scene a hundred thousand years ago or earlier -- was already endowed with a brain which in size and shape is indistinguishable from ours. But, however paradoxical it sounds, he hardly made any use of that luxury organ. He remained an illiterate cave-dweller and, for millennium after millennium, went on manufacturing spears, bows and arrows of the same primitive type, while the organ which was to take man to the moon was already there, ready for use, inside his skull. Thus the evolution of the brain overshot the mark by a time factor of astronomical magnitude. This paradox is not easy to grasp; in The Ghost in the Machine I tried to illustrate it by a bit of science fiction which I called 'the parable of the unsolicited gift':

  There was once a poor, illiterate shopkeeper in an Arab bazaar,

  called Ali, who, not being very good at doing sums, was always

  cheated by his customers -- instead of cheating them, as it should

  be. So he prayed every night to Allah for the present of an abacus

  -- that venerable contraption for adding and subtracting by pushing

  beads along wires. But some malicious djin forwarded his prayers to

  the wrong branch of the heavenly Mail Order Department, and so one

  morning, arriving at the bazaar, Ali found his stall transformed

  into a multi-storey, steel-framed building, housing the latest

  I.B.M. computer with instrument panels covering all the walls,

  with thousands of fluorescent oscillators, dials, magic eyes, et

  cetera; and an instruction book of several hundred pages -- which,

  being illiterate, he could not read. However, after days of useless

  fiddling with this or that dial, he flew into a rage and started

  kicking a shiny, delicate panel. The shocks disturbed one of the

  machine's millions of electronic circuits, and after a while Ali

  discovered to his delight that if he kicked that panel, say, three

  times and afterwards five times, one of the dials showed the figure

  eight. He thanked Allah for having sent him such a pretty abacus,

  and continued to use the machine to add up two and three -- happily

  unaware that it was capable of deriving Einstein's equations in a

  jiffy, or predicting the orbits of planets and stars thousands of

  years ahead.

  Ali's children, then his grandchildren, inherited the machine

  and the secret of kicking the same panel; but it took hundreds

  of generations until they learned to use it even for the purpose

  of simple multiplication. We ourselves are Ali's descendants, and

  though we have discovered many other ways of putting the machine to

  work, we have still only learned to utilise a very small fraction

  of the potentials of its millions of circuits. For the unsolicited

  gift is of course the human brain. As for the instruction book, it

  is lost -- if it ever existed. Plato maintains that it did once --

  but that is hearsay. [5]

  When biologists talk of 'mental evolution' superseding biological evolution as a specific characteristic in man and absent in animals, they generally fail to see the crux of the problem. For the learning potential in animals is inevitably limited by the fact that they, unlike man, make full use -- or nearly full use -- of all organs of their native equipment, including their brains. The capabilities of the computers inside the reptilian or lower mammalian skull are exploited almost to the full and thus leave no scope for cumulative learning and 'mental evolution'. Only in the case of homo sapiens has evolution anticipated his needs by a time factor of such magnitude that he is only beginning to utilize some of the unexploited, unexplored potentials of the brain's estimated ten thousand million neurons and their virtually inexhaustible synaptic cross-connections. The history of science, philosophy and art is, from this point of view, the slow process of the mind learning by experience to actualize the brain's potentials. The new frontiers to be conquered are in the convolutions of the cortex.

  The reasons why this process of learning to use our brains was so slow, spasmodic and beset with reverses, can be summed up in a simple formula: the old brain got in the way of, or acted as a brake on, the new. The only periods in European history in which there was a truly cumulative growth of scientific knowledge were the three great centuries of Greece before the Macedonian conquest, and the four centuries from the Renaissance to the present.
The organ to generate that knowledge was there inside the skulls of men all the time during the dark interregnum of two thousand years; but it was not allowed to generate that knowledge. For most of the time of recorded human history, and the much longer stretches of pre-history, the marvellous potentialities of the unsolicited gift were only allowed to manifest themselves in the service of archaic, emotion-based beliefs, saturated with taboos; in the magically motivated paintings of the Dordogne caves; in the translation of archetypal imagery into the language of mythology; in the religious art of Asia and the Christian Middle Ages. The task of reason was to act as ancilla fidei, the hand-maid of faith -- whether it was the faith of sorcerers and medicine men, theologians, scholastics, dialectical materialists, devotees of Chairman Mao or King Mbo-Mba. The fault was not in our stars, but in the horse and crocodile which we carry inside our skulls.

  2

  The historical consequences of man's split personality have been discussed at length in earlier chapters; my purpose in bringing the subject up once more is to point out a quite different consequence of this condition, which raises basic philosophical problems. To stay for another moment with our metaphor: Ali's descendants were so impressed by and delighted with the apparently inexhaustible capabilities of the computer (in those happy periods when it was allowed to operate unimpeded) that they fell victim to the understandable illusion that the computer was potentially omniscient. This illusion was a direct consequence of evolution's overshooting the mark. In other words, the brain's powers of learning and reasoning turned out to be so enormous compared to those of other animals, and also compared to the immediate needs of its possessors, that they became convinced its untapped potentials were inexhaustible, and its powers of reasoning unlimited. There was indeed no reason to believe that problems existed to which the computer had no answer, because it was not 'programmed' to answer them. One might call this attitude the 'rationalist illusion' -- the belief that it is only a question of time before the ultimate mysteries of the universe are solved, thanks to the brain's unlimited reasoning powers.

  This illusion was shared by most of Ali's successors, including the most eminent among them. Aristotle thought that nearly everything worth discovering about the ways of the universe had already been discovered and that there were no unsolved problems left. [6] Descartes was so carried away by the success of applying mathematical methods to science that he believed he would be able to complete the whole edifice of the new physics by himself. His more cautious contemporaries among the pioneers of the scientific revolution thought it might take as much as two generations to wrest its last secret from Nature. 'The particular phenomena of the arts and sciences are in reality but a handful,' wrote Sir Francis Bacon. 'The invention of all causes and sciences would be a labour of but a few years.' [7] Two centuries later, in 1899, the eminent German biologist and apostle of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, published his book Die Welträtsel, 'The Riddles of the Universe' (which became the bible of my youth). The book enumerated seven great riddles, of which six were 'definitively solved' -- including the structure of matter and the origin of life. The seventh -- the subjective experience of the freedom of will -- was but 'an illusion having no real existence' -- so there were no more unsolved riddles left, which was nice to know. Sir Julian Huxley probably shared this opinion when he wrote: 'In the field of evolution, genetics has given its basic answer, and evolutionary biologists are free to pursue other problems.' [8]

  The philosophy of reductionism was a direct offspring of the rationalist illusion. 'The invention [i.e., discovery] of all causes and sciences would be a labour of but a few years.' Replace 'years' by 'centuries' and you get the essence of the reductionist credo that the potentially omniscient brain of man will eventually explain all the riddles of the universe by reducing them to 'nothing but' the interplay of electrons, protons and quarks. Dazzled by the benefits derived from the unsolicited gift, it did not occur to the beneficiaries that although the human brain's powers were in some respects immense, they were nevertheless severely limited in other respects, concerned with ultimate meanings. In other words, while evolution 'overshot' its target, it also grievously undershot it with respect to the ultimate, existential questions, for which it was not 'programmed'. These ultimates include the paradoxa of infinity and eternity ('If the universe started with the Big Bang, what was before the Bang?'); the curvature of space according to relativity; the notion of parallel and inter-penetrating universes; the phenomena of parapsychology and of acausal processes; and all questions related to ultimate meanings (of the universe, of life, of good and evil, etc.). To quote (for the last time) an eminent physicist, Professor Henry Margenau of the University of Yale:

  An artifact occasionally invoked to explain precognition is to make

  time multidimensional. This allows a genuine backward passage of

  time, which might permit positive intervals in one time direction to

  become negative ('effect before cause') in another. In principle, this

  represents a valid scheme, and I know of no criticism that will rule

  it out as a scientific procedure. If it is to be acceptable, however,

  a completely new metric of space-time needs to be developed. . . [9]

  But we are not 'programmed' for such a new metric; we are not able to visualize spatial dimensions added to length, width and height; nor time flowing from tomorrow towards yesterday, and so on. We are unable to visualise such phenomena, not because they are impossible but because the human brain and nervous system are not programmed for them.

  The limitations of our programming -- of our native equipment -- are even more obvious in our sensory receptor organs. The human eye can perceive only a very small fraction of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiations; our hearing is restricted to a range of sound frequencies narrower than the dog's; our sense of smell is desultory and our capacity of spatial orientation cannot compare with the migrating bird's. Until about the thirteenth century man did not realize that he was surrounded by magnetic forces; nor does he have any sensory awareness of them; nor of the showers of neutrinos which penetrate and traverse his body in millions; nor of other unknown fields and influences operating inside and around him. If the sensory apparatus of our species is programmed to perceive only an infinitesimally small part of the cosmic phantasmagoria, then why not admit that its cognitive apparatus may be subject to equally severe limitations in programming -- i.e., that it is unable to provide answers to the ultimate questions of 'the meaning of it all'? Such an admission would neither belittle the mind of man, nor discourage him from putting it to full use -- for creative minds will always try to do just that, 'as if' the answers were just around the corner.

  To admit the inherent limitations of man's reasoning power automatically leads to a more tolerant and open-minded attitude toward phenomena which seem to defy reason -- like quantum physics, parapsychology and acausal events. Such a change of attitude would also put an end to the crude reductionist maxim that what cannot be explained cannot exist. A species of humans without eyes, such as the citizens of H. G. Wells's Country of the Blind, would reject our claim of being able to perceive distant objects without contact by touch, as occult nonsense. There is a Chinese proverb which tells us that it is useless to speak about the sea to a frog that lives at the bottom of a well.

  We have heard a whole chorus of Nobel laureates assert that matter is merely energy in disguise, that causality is dead, determinism is dead. If that is so, they should be given a public funeral in the olive groves of Academe, with a requiem of electronic music. It is indeed time to get out of the strait-jacket which nineteenth-century materialism, combined with reductionism and the rationalist illusion, imposed on our philosophical outlook. Had that outlook kept abreast with the revolutionary messages from the bubble chambers and radio-telescopes, instead of lagging a century behind them, we would have been liberated from that strait-jacket a long time ago.

  Once this simple fact is recognized, we might becom
e more receptive to bizarre phenomena inside and around us which a one-sided emphasis on mechanical determinism made us ignore; might feel the draught that is blowing through the chinks of the causal edifice; include paranormal phenomena in our revised concepts of normality; and realize that we have been living in the Country of the Blind -- or at the bottom of a well.

  The consequences of such a shift of awareness are unforeseeable. In the words of Professor H. H. Price 'psychical research is one of the most important branches of investigation which the human mind has undertaken', and 'it may transform the whole intellectual outlook upon which our present civilisation is based'. [10] These are strong words coming from an Oxford Professor of Logic, but I do not think they overstate the case.

  It is possible that in this particular field of psychic endowment we are -- together with our other handicaps -- an under-privileged species. The grand design of evolutionary strategy does not exclude the existence of biological freaks, like the koala bear, nor of self-destructive races, like our paranoid selves. If this is the case, we have to live 'as if' it were not so, and try to make the best of it -- as we are trying to make the best of our suspended death-sentences qua individuals.

  The limitations of Ali's computer may condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity. But at least we can try to take the stuffing out of the keyhole, which blocks even our limited view.