Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  In the 1990s, before he started dating the determinist redhead who admired my father and is mentioned above, my brother had an e-mail tag that ran, “I have a strong will and a weak won’t.” I’m not sure if he intended it as a lure to women or a warning, but apparently it did the trick. The experimental evidence strongly suggests that all of us have strong wills and weak won’ts, and are no match against the quick-draw of our ivory-handled brains. It strongly suggests that we cannot stop or deflect those bullets because we are those bullets.

  And if free will is an illusion, there may be repercussions. Why do some behaviors land us in prison while others confine us to the hospital? Samuel Butler, in his strange morality novel Erewhon, tells of people who are imprisoned for typhoid fever, but who are coddled sympathetically by their friends when they come down with a propensity to commit a minor crime, for example, when a woman suffers an outbreak of shoplifting. Elsewhere Butler argues that microbes make little choices that, over time, become habits such that, for example, we no longer remember when our ancestors first decided to grow an eye. The historical background for these literary-philosophical experiments comes from his disenchantment, after great initial enthusiasm, with Charles Darwin’s portrayal of evolution as largely mechanical. Given that unconscious processes are so complex, how can we distinguish between when “we” decide to do something and when something happens automatically? Between what we can help and should be responsible for, and what we can’t help and is not our fault?

  Trautteur, at the end of his essay on the double feel, wonders what his colleagues are thinking when, after adducing all sorts of good arguments against free will, announce that they believe in it anyway, or that they don’t but it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t it? Aren’t they tempted to rob a bank and take off for a South Seas island, given that they have no choice?

  Further experimental evidence suggests that, irrespective of whether free will exists or not, consequences accrue to those who believe in it. Think about what you are thinking right now. Who is thinking it? Where is it coming from?

  Consider the words and images that shadow forth and turn into water scenes as you doze. Are “you” the origin of them, or are you simply their observer? And where are you, who are you, if you are not those thoughts or words but just their observer?

  It thinks, wrote Nietzsche. You are at a reality carnival, on a ride. No clown is moving the trapeze artists of your thoughts. They are just doing their own thing.

  It has yet to be proved that anything could be otherwise. The wave function or sum over probabilities of quantum physics may suggest this, but that still does not seem enough to rescue the “last Ptolemeic.” Neither quantum probabilism nor garden-variety determinism, the complexities and algorithmic surprises of deterministic chaos that are neither predictable nor free, can save free will. Perhaps only a radical leap of faith can save free will. “I believe in free will because that is my choice.” Notice I said “because.” Free will exists because I say so. Free will exists because it has no choice.

  Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, also became interested in free will. He suggested that our feeling of free will is based on a part of the brain, the anterior cingulate sulcus. I think it would be funny if we located, long after Descartes, the part of the brain that controls free will. It reminds me of a comedy skit. A great scientific discovery is made, and an even greater press conference is called. In dour tones in one of the studios of one the most popular television networks, an announcer interviews a scientist who announces that at long last the elusive human sense of humor has been located. After a commercial break for adult diapers, it is revealed that it resides in an amplified ionic pattern in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum.

  In fairness, Crick postulated it was our sense of free will, not free will itself, that had been located. If free will doesn’t exist, it will be difficult to locate it.

  What then?

  The press conference is over, leaving us hanging, and now there is a show on the prehistory of muppetry. An expert discusses the German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). Kleist glossed the perplexing agency of puppets, which seem to come alive at the end of their strings, and whose mechanism, one of sensitivity to their surroundings combined with a kind of ease of movement, allowed them to dance as well as, if not better than, their handlers, their would-be puppeteer-controllers:

  One evening in the winter of 1801 I met an old friend in a public park. He had recently been appointed principal dancer at the local theatre and was enjoying immense popularity with the audiences. I told him I had been surprised to see him more than once at the marionette theatre which had been put up in the market-place to entertain the public with dramatic burlesques interspersed with song and dance. He assured me that the mute gestures of these puppets gave him much satisfaction and told me bluntly that any dancer who wished to perfect his art could learn a lot from them.

  Sitting down—I will lower the textual marionette of Kleist now—the writer inquires further into his friend’s “remarkable assertion.”

  “A group of four peasants dancing the rondo in quick time couldn’t have been painted more delicately by Teniers,” Kleist tells us, admitting to his friend the gracefulness of the dance movements of the puppets, “particularly the smaller ones.”

  I inquired about the mechanism. . . . I wanted to know how it is possible, without having a maze of strings attached to one’s fingers, to move the separate limbs and extremities in the rhythm of the dance. His answer was that I must not imagine each limb as being individually positioned and moved by the operator in the various phases of the dance. Each movement, he told me, has its centre of gravity; it is enough to control this within the puppet. The limbs, which are only pendulums, then follow mechanically of their own accord, without further help. He added that this movement is very simple. When the centre of gravity is moved in a straight line, the limbs describe curves. Often shaken in a purely haphazard way, the puppet falls into a kind of rhythmic movement which resembles dance.

  This observation seemed to me to throw some light at last on the enjoyment he said he got from the marionette theatre, but I was far from guessing the inferences he would draw from it later.5

  The Estonian-born biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt, meaning life-world. All organisms have such worlds, he argues, and in his writings he imagines what it’s like to be a blind, deaf tick smelling the butyric acid of a succulent mammal, jumping onto a sweet patch of skin with blood beneath the surface on which to feed. He imagines (and in his essay, “A Foray into the Worlds of Humans and Animals,” depicts!) the view a scallop might see of a European street. Dogs, he points out, navigate differently through space, because their four legs carry them up inclines without missing a beat and see indoor objects primarily in terms of how they may sit on them. What’s it like to be a heron fishing with an iridescent beetle, a swarm of bees in a field of ultraviolet-patterned flowers? The Jesus lizard walking on water, the pebble toad, Oreophrynella nigra, ricocheting down a Venezuelan mountain, the queen bee laying a thousand eggs in her fragrant maze, the female mosquito finally draining blood from a host during a muggy dusk, and perhaps cells in that host, and perhaps water lilies in the pond where dives the fat bullfrog whose croak filled the sounds of the rustling forest the night before, and perhaps even the forest itself, in its slow chemically complex growth, its subterranean nuclei-trading networks of mycelial tendrils, its bacterially diverse metabolism, able to breathe arsenic and sulfur, to grow and merge, the biological world as a vast colossus of differentiable and merging sensitivities. . . . All of these and each of us, one might argue, to whatever extent we actually control our actions, are spectators at the greatest show on Earth. Each of us is, in a way, like an instrument in a billion-year-old symphony, making vibrations and emotions and Uexküllian music, for ourselves and one another if not, as the post-Kantian biologist may have thought, as localized beings in the perception of a multidimensional
immanent being seeing itself, at least partly, through its manifold perceivers. Here organism, the word, returns to its root, organon, Greek for instrument. We play, or are played, by the manifold all.

  A cartoon that whipped around the Internet in 2011 seems to have originated, proximately at least, in Japan. It shows Kermit, the famous Sesame Street Muppet and bright green frog, known for his bulging bug eyes and Robin Hood demeanor, replete with swashbuckling throat kerchief and ability to look dead serious despite the fingers that form his forehead and the thumb that articulates his lower jaw.

  Kermit is consulting with a doctor. He is attentive and looks as if he could be worried. The doctor is looking at an X-ray that, because it is in the picture’s foreground (we look over the doctor’s shoulder), is almost as big as live Kermit on the other side of the desk, the white sheets hanging on the aluminum rod behind him suggesting that he may just have dressed or undressed.

  “Sit down,” says the Doctor. “What I’m about to tell you may change your life.”

  But there is not a seat for Kermit to sit on, and, since it is a still cartoon, no movement of any kind.

  The X-ray looks accurate: It depicts the amphibian’s bones, and there does seem to be a kind of problem. Instead of a normal frog skull, we see an ulna and radius, carpals and metacarpals and phalanges. That is, we see the bones of a human hand.

  If Kermit were to find out, he might be quite upset.

  There is not much more of an insult to one’s feeling of independence to find out that one is, literally, a Muppet.

  And that is the kermitronic predicament. Can we handle the letdown of not being in control? After losing the center of the universe, and having our obvious position as the mightiest, most intelligent, and attractive of species impugned by deluded biologists?

  Hell, we’ve come this far, why not. It is not true that we are not in control, that we are being played. We are playing. We are playing ourselves in that we think we are in control. Kermitronics—or “kerm” as you might call it—is the notion that even if we do not control the stochastic-deterministic universe, we can enjoy the post-Uexküllian Spinozistic ride. It is the notion that everything is connected, so volition truly makes sense only at the level of the whole. But since this universe is infinite in extension and consciousness, as well, possibly as time, there is neither planning for the future nor the sort of feeling of free will that accompanies a human creature constrained by linear time. Call it God or the Universe, there is no free will (or purpose) at the level of the whole. At that level there is no possibility of local freedom. Everything is already always geometrically and eternally articulated. And at our level, there is no fully separable agency, so we are part of this whole.

  It has yet to be proved that anything could have possibly been done different.

  Got kerm?

  kerm

  abbr: kermitronics

  CHAPTER 14

  ON DOYLE ON DRUGS

  I GREW UP in Timothy Leary’s old neighborhood. Newton Center in the mid-1970s was past the glory days of Orange Sunshine, but a few kids knew about it. We did all right though, with our Blotter, Microdot, and Windowpane, which catapulted me, one fine afternoon, after a whole hit and an emergency purchase with shaky fingers (I was not a smoker) of a pack of Marlboros, and a harrowing walk that turned into a run, from Murray Road, the oldest alternative high school east of the Mississippi, a converted elementary school with a Ping-Pong table in the front entrance across the street from which in a swampy outback where we had tried unsuccessfully with our thumbnails to slice the tiny cellophane-like tab, I ran from the newly iridescent white ball and my friends, the older one of whom had told us to just take a whole one and, smoking with us, that marijuana always helped him come down and that no one was going to die or anything, with that word die in my mind, newly transfixed and pointing toward me, I ran from them (who would later come to my house looking for me and hear blaring what they thought was my stepfather yelling at me), miles along Commonwealth Avenue, wild-eyed thinking about how I could understand how Art Linkletter’s daughter committed suicide, seeing now a street sign called HOMER, which took on a veneer of cosmic significance, the inside becoming the outside as it renewed me in my efforts to get back, home I must get home, until a cab driver friend of the older boy who told us it was a good idea to take a whole square of eight-way Windowpane, recognizing me and asking me if I needed a ride where was I going and I said Home, 106 Gibbs Street, inside the green house on top of which I now found myself blasting the television and being freaked out by an ad with a female model with nail polish on her claws, that not helping I fixed myself some chocolate milk, spilling it on the counter beneath the blaring radio I had turned on with my shaky hand, another misguided attempt at comfort, to run to my room. Hours later, after shaking on my single bed near the multicolored peace and love logos I’d affixed to the black-painted wall of my teenage attic room, unable to distinguish among my senses, unable to tell if my eyes were open or closed, looking through the ceiling directly into a cosmic abyss that I would later describe as eternally recurring metaphysical evil, I found myself on our front porch asking my brother for a cigarette. Calm now from all the shaking, not having expected to ever return, the experience of being outside of time so unlike any other, I now, incredibly, believed myself when I told my brother that I had not taken anything, explaining I had just taken a nap! It took me days to piece together my whereabouts during the trip and, despite all the running I’m not sure I ever did arrive there, that house where we had earlier watched the moon landing in the dining room, not quite, not as I left it.

  IF YOU BELIEVE in the genius loci, the spirit of the place, then you could make the case that my friends and I were raised in the bosom of psychedelia, or in one of its other erogenous zones, in suburban Boston across the Charles River from the university, Harvard, where the West Point military academy graduate Leary had gone from straight-laced psych professor to free-love guru and self-described high priest teaching the gospel of turning on, focusing on the inner world, which can be infinite compared with the limited past and future, and dropping out of school.

  But while Leary found it necessary, or at least easy, to cut his ties with repressed academia, basking in the cult of personality and the women and freedom his counterculture fame afforded, others did not sever their ties with academia and its more rigorous if conservative protocols. They pushed forward with the goals of showing the value—medicinal, cultural, and biological—of “psychedelic” drugs. One of these is Rich Doyle, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania, who does an Aztec two-step, performing the seemingly impossible feat of keeping one foot in academia’s ivory tower and the other in the jungle. Doyle’s investigations chronicle experimenters while relaying his own experiences and what they mean, or don’t. This drop of the academic pose of objectivity paradoxically makes him more trustworthy, a better guide to this rugged psychic terrain than those who cling to the conceit of being credible tour guides of a country they claim never to have visited.

  Doyle follows in the tradition of the early Leary before he went off into the hinterlands of the counterculture, and of Ralph Metzner, Leary’s sometime coauthor, who wrote, “Those who are ideologically committed to the still-prevailing Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm will at best consider the statements and descriptions of the ayahuasceros as drug-induced ‘hallucinations,’ incapable of being scientifically evaluated or verified. From the perspective of a Jamesian radical empiricism however, the phenomenological descriptions of consciousness explorers must be accorded the same reality status as observations through a microscope or a telescope.”1 Are you experienced? an older kid had asked me even in the playground of our elementary school while I idled on a swing. What do you mean, I asked. Hendrix, he explained.

  One thing about psychedelic drugs is that they bracket the usually ironclad difference between inside and outside. Under the influence, you can be in a roomful of people and feel you are directly connected to them, a
single being distributed through separate bodies. Place and time can be upset, deconstructed as they also are in postmodern prose and the hypertexts of technology.

  Reading Doyle on Charles Darwin, drugs, and the evolution of the noösphere, this complication of place and time was forcibly brought home to me. In that green house on top of Gibbs Street where I grew up, we had a music room, a little ethnomusicological enclave with banjos and kalimbas and African talking drums. Neatly arranged on its bookshelf were iterations of a journal, the Psychedelic Review, whose back issues contained scholarly contributions by the likes of Leary, Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. I had occasion to gaze on them with curiosity, pulling them out and browsing a bit and taking them en masse as tacit approval of the more-than-street-worthiness of the substances they discussed and were. I did not read them then, but reading Doyle I found that my mother had contributed to one. It must have been there all along. All I knew about her and drugs was that once, when we were teens and her Colombian friend bragged about marijuana, she condescended to smoke a hit in front of me and my teenage brother. I think it was just to impress her friend, and her heart wasn’t in it. In the dining room where my stepfather hosted poker games with lawyers, doctors, and academics, she took a little puff, spilling some in the sour cream. “Look,” she pointed. “Chives.” It seemed to be a joke to cover the fact that she really wasn’t interested in getting high on pot, and in fact I’m not sure she ever did. She did tell us later that she had tried LSD under clinical conditions when it was still legal. This was done under the direction of Gene Sagan, an older cousin on my father’s side. She said that in the lab setting the men in their white coats looked to her like overgrown babies. She also found she could adjust ambient volume by touching her ears. Gene Sagan, whose wife, Arlene, was a big help to my mother around the time of my brother’s birth, later committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Not an auspicious start to the scientific investigation of this subject. My mother later visited Leary in his farm in Millbrook, New York. She was not impressed by the sight of him being surrounded by half-naked women, but what really disturbed her was his treatment of his own daughter, who at the time was in a sort of LSD Skinner box Leary had organized so that enclosed subjects could push keys to quantify and record their psychological state. But if she became disillusioned, she was initially excited about the potential for psychoactive drugs to be a phenomenological tool.