Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  The panel begins with a bucolic countryside, trees and birds, unmarred by humanity or its artifacts. As our eyes scan across sinistrodextrally, we see this same hillside cut by a train, then a road with a horse-drawn carriage, and on and on to telephone wires, paved streets, houses, and cars. In the end, there is a city with a Texaco station, billboards, tenements, streetlights, and a pink pimpmobile. Here we see a realm not of natural selection per se—the drunken oil economy has not yet been selected against—but of expanded energy use and networking based on gradient perception, the perception and exploitation of available energy gradients.

  The immediate realm of attention in the biosphere, “subjective” and dispersed among myriad organisms, is more directly connected to gradients in the environment than to long-term evolutionary effects, although of course it does have evolutionary consequences, as we see in sexual selection where mate choice reinforces attractive features by reproducing them. If you posit awareness all down the line, not just in human beings, then you have this constant awareness going on that is connected with the use of energy, which is theoretically what the awareness is for. Ecological function demands I find ways to get the materials I need for my body to go on, and that would be like Schopenhauer’s will to live; but also in play is the question of how can I expand my realm, how can I use more available energy. But this latter can be a dangerous thing, too, because expansion, like a fire, can lead to burning out; it can destroy the system that’s doing it. So there’s a play of forces. In the work of Jeffrey Wicken on information and thermodynamics, he talks about the two very important drives, not just to survive, which is in the Schopenhauerian register, but also to use energy.15 And so sustainability is a sort of a version of the Schopenhauerian will to live, preservation, the survival with which we’re familiar in Darwinian terms. It dramatically contrasts with sexual selection, of excess. The Nietzschean–Bataillean realm of aesthetics, energetics, and excess does not have a direct survival component. In fact, sexual selection seems more directly connected to what is informing it, scientifically underlying survival itself, which is use of the gradient. What you love can also kill you, what feeds you can destroy you, and that’s a sort of a condensed version of the phrasing of the paradox of our relationship to external growth, which is governed by the second law of thermodynamics, and which evolutionary stability aids only because it prolongs a process that would disappear without it.

  Thus one of my slight objections or criticisms of Doyle’s book is that he conflates information—and this isn’t just him, this has been done for a long time—with energy. The equations in thermodynamics and information theory are almost identical. Obviously we data process as living beings, and we also use energy. They’re not the same thing though. There’s been a conflation since John von Neumann told Claude Shannon, “Oh just use the term entropy, nobody knows what it means anyway.” I have a friend named Frank Lambert who has the most visited sites on entropy and thermodynamics on the web. He is over ninety years old, a professor emeritus at Occidental College who worked at the Getty Museum in California. As a chemist, he has a very nice simplification of the second law that applies to both the open and closed or isolated, thermally sealed systems.

  The basic sense of the second law is very phenomenological. It’s not mysterious. You don’t need abstract nouns or shibboleths or a PhD to understand it. You don’t even need to reify it with terms like entropy. Entropy is a measure of the tendency of energy to spread. It’s like an odometer. Entropy doesn’t run anything. It’s a measure of the spreading of energy.

  Another basic popular misunderstanding that even scientist types like Daniel Dennett make is that there’s no direct relationship between disorder and the spread of energy. As complex beings that have energy flowing through us, we need to be and are very complex. We stay organized, and that organization is directly connected to our use of energy and our dissipation of energy. So there’s a whole bunch of unnecessary confusion about the energetic essence of life as a complex system that is phenomenologically attached, sensuously involved and perceiving of its surroundings which it helps bring, slowly or rapidly, closer to equilibrium. This is because of the science of thermodynamics, which is kind of like economics: it’s a sort of dismal science, but intellectuals in the humanities love to appropriate thermodynamic terms because it’s fun, it’s sexy, and, like von Neumann stated, nobody knows what it is anyway. But this academic fetishizing misses an opportunity for a real communication about the basic nature of our reality as complex energy beings whose perception is related to our metabolism and gradient reduction. And I think that it is this direct phenomenological connection to our status as gradient-reducing systems—which becomes highlighted and magnified during the would-be “hallucinatory” psychedelic experience—that is so exciting to both me and Doyle. The thermodynamic worldview revalidates and contextualizes our real-time connection to an energetic living world. The more-than-human, more-than-living flows that underscore metabolism and survival are operative in the real world, and the thermodynamic description of life intuitively rings true. There are energy gradients; they’re tapped into by living beings; we help them. Not only does life not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but we actively perpetuate the spread of energy. Even nonliving systems like Bénard cells, Belousov–Zhabotinskii reactions, and storm systems have a fledgling identity, a temporary stability. We recognize a kinship to them. They are fellow complex materially cycling systems. The helically coiling DNA molecule itself looks like something out of an acid trip. But these vortices and complex cycling systems do not need to be tripping, nor do you need to be tripping to perceive them. They are part of a creative destructive realm proper to the deconstruction of gradients and the pleasures that can accompany that. If seeing vortices and spirals and iridescent false eyes of peacock plumage seems to go beyond mere survival, it is because it does. It tap into a more-than-hallucinatory moment of active energy degradation, the realm of which comes before either life or death. Temporarily stable complex systems more actively degrade ambient gradients, but to do so they’ve found ways to maintain their perimeters within the flux they enable. Organized, they are cyclically churning matter. Watts understood nonequilibrium thermodynamics intuitively, linking ecology and psychedelic experience as he described us as skin-encapsulated egos that have forgotten our connection to the whole, our kinship to the whirlpool and the flame, to the reality that we are glorified tubes taking in organized matter at one end and putting out degraded matter at the other. Our bodies are less temporary than a whirlpool; more long-lasting than a match zoomed in on in a David Lynch movie, but still, we are essentially processes, not things.

  In a profound way the thermodynamic worldview is both a teleological and a nonteleological view: Yes, we’re doing something, we’re going somewhere, and you can look at this over the history of evolution and see phenomena like Crumb describes—an energetic spread of energy-using life-forms, including human beings and our technology. Like I mentioned, there are more and more organisms, there are more species, they inhabit a greater extent of the environment, there are more elements in the Periodic Table that are involved in the biosphere, and there are more forms of interconnection. It looks like the Internet is a form of planetary growth, humanity is part of it, that life is becoming more interconnected and symbiotic. So there’s these vectors, and it’s not true to say there’s no direction to evolution, as people as superficially opposed as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins have said. They both basically agree that evolution is random. But this is a mistake, both tactically and empirically. There are creationists who say, no, no, it’s not random, there’s something’s going on, it’s going toward us. But that, too, is obviously wrong. They have a point, but the large point is teleology does not end with us. We are riding the crest of a wave that looks like it’s going straight past us into technology. As Freeman Dyson has said, if life gets a toehold in space, it may kick off its human shoes.

  So I think it’s exciting, bot
h scientifically and phenomenologically, both for the straight and the stoned, that there’s this thermodynamic vector. And it’s connected in a way, I think, to the difference in philosophical emphasis between Nietzsche’s will to power and Schopenhauer, his teacher’s will to live. Nietzsche came afterward, but his will to power is more originary in that energy is more basic and sets the context for life.

  So I agree with almost everything Doyle has said and especially the beautiful tenor and complexity of his seriously fun discourse, which repeats as Anaxagoran traces on plant product—paper—elements of the functional and transhuman and, as Doyle himself incarnates, suprahuman biodiversity and complexity of the Amazon itself. It is not just a pharmaceutical hallucination, this trip we’re on. The rain forest has a lot to teach us and seems to have found a most eloquent and hardworking and good-spirited spokesman in Doyle by which to do so. We should listen—and read.

  AFTERWARD DOYLE COMMENTED that we’re overly impressed with our technology, that ethnobotany is in a shamanic war against pharmacy companies and the question is which vision of human being is going to win, and that the answer is there’s no contest, because the pharmacy companies don’t have a vision of the human being; they only have the next prescription. In Kitchener he argued, correctly I think, that each of us as a human being is a local instantiation of something much larger, that if more of us started thinking of and experiencing ourselves on this larger scale, we might become more sustainable as a natural energy-using form, part of the biosphere and developing noösphere.

  If we did an evolutionary–ecological interpretation of this stage of capitalism, looking at these ridiculous pharmaceutical commercials and companies that are pushing these drugs and trying to patent life and chemicals that are endogenous to our brains, one might argue that, well, this capitalist moment in evolutionary history actually worked because it allowed us to tap into these gradients and get all these tools going, some of which might be used for life as a whole. But still, we should not be too quick to assume that they—the global nexus of other organisms in their concerted activities—are going to renew our lease. Now, if we step outside our human box—something enabled by taking rain forest drugs seriously—and look at the situation from a more expansive framework, we might be tempted to say to our species, relax and stop burning things down. You’re going to have to either get with the program or take a hike now that we have the technology. From a biospheric point of view, human beings may have served their purpose as an incubator of technology. We’ve had it nice; our overly self-focused growth was nicely enabled by a capitalist model, but this solely human-focused growth doesn’t necessarily have any evolutionary legs. We are drunk on biopower, but we are not necessarily holding a winning ecological hand. That would be a possible interpretation opened up by the more expansive, culturally inclusive, ecologically responsible view of psychedelics brought on by Doyle.

  CONCLUSION

  FLOATING INTO SPINOZA’S OCEAN

  G. EVELYN HUTCHINSON, considered the single most important author to understand the fundaments of modern ecology, emphasized that a scientific theory’s primary value was not its usefulness but its ability to produce a form of enlightenment, similar to a great work of art.1 And while Friedrich Schelling, the German idealist who tried to respond to Baruch Spinoza’s ideas on freedom, reportedly said there was no use in criticizing a philosopher for being incomprehensible, I think it’s better to follow Richard Feynman’s advice—that if you understand an idea you should be able to explain its gist to your grandmother. The idea of life’s basic purpose is not hard to grok. Life is a special case of the general phenomenon described by the second law of thermodynamics.2

  Located between the sun and space, life taps into an electromagnetic gradient defined by a difference between short-wave and long-wave packets of quanta. Like other complex systems, it finds ways to spread energy, producing entropy as heat, as it maintains and grows. You pull over to the side of the road to use a rest stop. A streamer of air finds its way out through an electric outlet into a cooler room. This is purposeful behavior. There is nothing mystical or specifically brain-based about it, although brains turn out to be quite good at helping find gradients, as the present melting of the ice caps shows. Demystified, purposeful behavior simply describes actions that take place in order for future states of affairs to occur. And the mother of all these future states, the main one, is equilibrium.

  That processes have a natural purpose, or telos, does not preclude them from being polyteleological. Even trees have other purposes than spreading energy, for example, producing fruit to attract animals or even chemical messages to warn other trees of an insect infestation. Purpose need not and should not be conflated with consciousness. This applies even to our own behaviors, as Pascal suggested when he said the heart has reasons of which the head knows not.

  Understanding the universe not as completely lifeless and soulless (so to speak) but as a telic medium in which we are deeply complicit is a breakthrough for understanding ourselves and our universe, and it provides a springboard for a richer view of who, what, and why we are. It is deeply consonant, I think, with the philosophia perennis—the perennial philosophy—that we are at one with the cosmos.3

  It also leads to valid scientific research programs. As the Spanish physicist Carlos de Castro Carranza points out, our understanding of ourselves and others as organisms prompts us to ask productive “why” questions. Embracing organicism, a world of real living things as opposed to bodies that are only validly explained by mechanical metaphors, focuses our attention on function and the future, on the register of why rather than how. J. Scott Turner, for example, wonders why termite mounds control their temperature.4 The termite mound and the beehive and the ant hill and the human city are in a sense not just the “house” but a “technological” extension, part of the body of a genuine superorganism. The evolution of detrivores and homeiotherms increases life’s gradient-reducing means. Teeth, as Aristotle said, are not just random but for something. Nor, perhaps, is Aristotle’s example exactly random, for teeth are the part of our bodies that are perhaps most related to entropy production. They get at gradients, increasing life’s ability to lay waste to concentrated energy reserves. They “grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food. . . . Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved . . . and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished and still perish.”

  Looking at the whole leads to a different understanding than focusing on the parts, both at the biospheric and at the cosmic scale. This is important in part because it leads to the possibility for a new, rational confluence between science and spirituality. Alfred North Whitehead was of the opinion that more than on any other single factor, humanity depends on the way science and religion interact. Gregory Bateson in his notebook ruminations on the great eye of Leonardo da Vinci, whose own notebook drawings gravitate as if magnetically to the heart of the nontrivial, wonders about the Renaissance master’s unerring prescience and focuses particularly on the Italian’s investigation of the wave. This leads Bateson to exult in the figure of the wave, this “hump” across the water that maintains “its” shape as “it” travels. He asks if we, if you and I, if the pronoun standing for discrete human identity, is itself not just such a wave. What is this “it,” this “hump” that consists, as do each of us, of different particles as it develops and eventually crashes, returning its droplets to the wide and frothy ocean? The pronoun is shorthand. The waveform persists. It is not unlike a glorified, thinking version of a flame or whirlpool. You don’t have to believe in anything more mystical than the naturalistic reincarnation of cells in variant forms including children—the curling of Batesonian waves across a cyclical sea of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other atoms—to believe in life’s prosaic purpose. Nor does such a scrappy
creed disqualify you from the right to be an Ophite, a Gnostic, or a Presbyterian.

  Carranza argues that the organicist view brings up distinct but equally scientifically valid viewpoints that can’t be whittled down to mechanism. This is probably because a view to the whole makes us focus on function in ways that we don’t when we focus on the part. For example, a clearing in the forest is better seen as a kind of scar that is healed by the recolonization of trees in an ecosystem than as a naturally selective competition—just as it would be silly to try to explain a wound healing on the hand in terms of natural selection among blood cells.

  Our organicist status connects us as teleological beings to a teleological universe, at least at the level of the part. At the level of the whole the universe may be purposeless and eternal, infinite and multidimensional, as Spinoza suggested. But even at the great levels of exploding supernovae and black holes, teleological maneuvers may be in evidence. James Gardner vigorously argues (he used to be a lawyer) that we are technologically on course to create black holes, and therefore may not be an existential fluke but part of vast cycles of universe creation. Scientific papers speculate on creating black holes in orbit using nuclear lasers, and I already mentioned that Otto Rössler fears they may be inadvertently created by CERN. If intelligent life carbon-based forms like us can produce black holes, not right away but in a geological moment, then maybe that is why we are here: to produce again (though we don’t remember the last time) new universes. Elaborating on the physicist Lee Smolin’s idea that new universes with distinct laws and physical constants, some more conducive in turn to further black hole production, Gardner adds the wrinkle that life could be part of this process, that it is not doing nothing but integrated into the reproductive workings of a “mother” universe doing its cosmic shebang.