The Last Syllable of Recorded Time

What time is it? Most of us ask this question unthinkingly, several times a day. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to work, to watch the news, and so on. But we are reminded recurrently—as on New Year’s Eve, for example—that clock time differs depending on where you live on the planet. Revelers in Australia are already celebrating the New Year while we in America still have hours to go before the Times Square ball drops (and if you’re in California, the ball has already dropped at nine o’clock, but our TV channels kindly re-run the tape for us at midnight Pacific Time.) So even the dullest of us knows that time is different—but regularlydifferent—in different time zones; and that the “now” I am experiencing at this moment is the same as everyone’s “now” no matter what the clock says in different parts of the globe. 

            Now comes Carlo Rovelli, a physicist whose specialty is ‘loop quantum gravity,’ to disabuse us of even this simple notion. Time is not at all simple, Rovelli tells us in his new book The Order of Time, (Penguin: 2018), and in fact may not even exist. And there is no “now” that prevails throughout the universe. At one point he even says it plainly: “The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance” (140). 

            To summarize what Rovelli means is not easy, and I’m not sure I understand many of his arguments, beautifully phrased as they are. But here is what I can more or less comprehend. First, he gives us a brief lesson in the history of speculations about time. Aristotle was the first to ask himself ‘what is time?’ and he concluded that “time is the measurement of change.” Pretty good. We can all see the logic in that. But Newton disagreed, and reached the opposite conclusion. Regardless of objects and the changes in them and in our world, there is something called “true time,” said Newton. This is the time, perceived and measured by physicists with their instruments, that goes steadily on regardless of whether things are changing or not. All of Newton’s principles and theories (and our clocks) depend on this notion of time. But, of course, along came Einstein, and he upset Newton’s sensible notions once again when he introduced his notion of space and time as “fields.” As “fields,” space and time become space/time, “the fabric on which the rest of the world is drawn” (74) as Rovelli puts it. And what this means for time is that it is no longer independent, as Newton thought, but relativeand thus, together with space, interacting with the rest of the world. We all know of the example of a twin in space aging more slowly than his sibling on earth because of the differing speeds at which they travel. But very large objects also have a noticeable effect on this fabric of spacetime, which is why clocks run more slowly near large objects: their gravitational fields distort the very fabric of time. Rovelli points out, in this regard, that clocks (very accurate ones) even show time passing more rapidly high on mountaintops than at sea level, due to this effect.  

            Rovelli then takes us into the strange world he studies, quantum mechanics, and tells us how it has, in turn, essentially demolished even the relativity of time Einstein discovered. In quantum mechanics, things get very strange indeed, and, according to Rovelli, so does time. The scale, of course, is beyond our imagining: it is called the Planck scale. For grains of time, Rovelli gives us the figure of 10^-44 seconds, or “a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second” (82). With such infinitesimal units, Rovelli speculates that “the notion of time is no longer valid” and “values of time t do not exist.” Thus, time at this level is not a continuous flow, and our notion of time loses its meaning. When added to the indeterminacy of everything at quantum levels (physicists call this “superposition”), spacetime gets so vague as to be cloudy, fluctuating. And here “even the distinction between present, past, and future becomes fluctuating, indeterminate,” just as with elementary particles. This means, according to Rovelli, that “an event may be both before and after another one” (88). If this doesn’t boggle your mind, you haven’t read that correctly. 

            What I like most about Rovelli is his writing ability and his sense of humor. Consider this little zinger, for example, where he is trying to emphasize his point that the ‘physical substratum’ that determines duration “is a quantum entity that does not have determined values until it interacts with something else” and then onlyfor that specific interaction; “they remain indeterminate for the rest of the universe” (90). It’s like many ‘things’ in the quantum universe: they do not take form as substances until they interact with an observer, until we look at them. In fact, they are better understood as “events” rather than “things.” And these “events” happen in what appears to be not the orderly, past-to-present fashion theorized by Newton or even Einstein, but in a kind of random order that is at best local. Hard to understand, but here is Rovelli’s metaphor to make this more humanly relevant: 

The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians (96). 

You gotta love a physicist, Italian himself, who writes like that. 

            One of Rovelli’s main ideas concerns what he calls “blurring:” this refers to the fact that we cannot see deep into matter, into what is going on at the quantum level, so our vision of the world is ‘blurred.’ Rovelli writes it this way: “the quantum indeterminacy of things produces a blurring,” even when we think we can measure everything. He goes on, 

Both the sources of blurring—quantum indeterminacy, and the fact that physical systems are composed of zillions of molecules—are at the heart of time. Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world (140).

So while we “see” a universe which “began” with the Big Bang and its low entropy state (which in turn produces our sense that greater order [low entropy] leads to greater disorder [higher entropy], to past preceding present preceding future—hence our sense of the ineluctable order of time), Rovelli maintains that all of this may be “more down to us than to the universe itself.” In other words, the universe in time appears as it does because of who we are, not how the world is. Here is how he concludes this line of thought:

The low initial entropy of the universe might be due to the particular way in which we—the physical system that we are part of—interact with it. We are attuned to a very particular subset of aspects of the universe, and it is thisthat is oriented to time (147). 

This is significant because everything that we know of proceeds from the growth of entropy; from, that is, sources of low entropy like our sun which is constantly breaking down due to its nuclear burning, but whose breaking down, or entropy, gives us the light on which we and all organisms depend. And of course, the low entropy of the sun comes from “an entropic configuration that was even lower: the primordial cloud from which the solar system was formed” (160), and that low entropy comes from other sources back to the low initial entropy of the universe at the Big Bang. This is the “great story of the cosmos” says Rovelli, the story of time powered by the growth of entropy. And it is the particular story which we, as humans, have become sensitive to, and aware of. A great story, no doubt about it, a story of causality, memory, the history of the happenings of the world, in short, the world in time, but a very limited story, only one story out of many. In short, Rovelli says, our sense of time is peculiar to us and necessarily ignores the vast, timeless goings-on at microscopic levels of which we are mostly unaware. Citing St. Augustine, Rovelli summarizes it thus: “this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation” (182). 

            There is more in this fascinating and often beautiful book, but to do it justice requires a leisurely reading, and reflection, and probably re-reading. Reading it like this will change your view of time, at least in part, and perhaps make you reflect on how little we truly know about time and its last syllables and what exactly it is that we are recording. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Immensity

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It is really a funny thing to be a human being. We embody what is called the “human condition” but we’re at a loss, usually, to explain what that is. What does it mean to have thoughts, to have emotions, to have senses, to have ‘intimations of immortality’ as Wordsworth titled one of his poems, and how do these things fit together? What is the logic or power that creates us, moves us, drives us, sustains us? We don’t really know. We have lots of sciences and social sciences that give us schemes for how the universe works, how life works, how our own life works, how our psyches work, how our brains work, but most of it seems to be temporary guesswork—pretty impressive guesswork at times, to be sure—but in the end doesn’t really tell us what we want to know. That’s because what we actually want to know comes down to the really simple questions that science doesn’t answer very well. Why are we here? How did we get here, really? What happens to here when we are no longer here? Does it matter? Does it even matter what we do while we are here? And is this the only ‘here’ in the vastness of space and time? Are we the only beings contemplating these questions? And are these questions worth a damn in the first place? Garrison Keillor refers humorously to his detective character Guy Noir as a man who is still “pondering life’s persistent questions” and we, the audience, are clearly meant to smile at a grown man bothering with questions suitable to a teenager. But though most of us put aside such “childish things” in favor of making a living and reproducing ourselves and making our mark on the world, the persistence of these questions, if we are honest, never truly goes away. Or perhaps it does, but only at the last moment when, as Gertrude Stein was reported to have said on her deathbed in response to someone who asked, “Gertrude, what is the answer?” 

            “What was the question?” was the great one’s response.

            Whether or not we like poetry, or literature, or Gertrude Stein, we recognize, I think, the wisdom here. It is the kind of wisdom most of us would call ‘spiritual.’ Many wise and/or spiritual leaders have come up with an answer that is similar: there is really no answer to the question of life. Life simply is. Katagiri Roshi, a Zen teacher in Minnesota, once had a similar answer: 

            “What is just is,” he said. And again, we recognize the wisdom.

            Still, we also recognize, if we are honest, that the questions persist. Especially at difficult or conflictual or depressing times, we find ourselves up against the same question: What is the use? What is the point? What is all this struggle for? All vanishes in the end in any case. And if we can’t answer the why question—why bother?— and we usually can’t, how about the what question? What is this “is” that is? And how do we fit into it? What are we in the first place? All our busyness, all our effort and worry and struggle and despair and joy—how do we consider it, make sense of it, comprehend it? It. What is it? Is all this living, struggling activity really just the product of chemical soups and photons and DNA and gravity and some process we have named evolution? Exploding galaxies? Black holes and worm holes? And to what end? That is, what we really want to know is simply this: What am I engaged in? involved in? Me. Aside from science fiction speculation about our being a product of some computer-generated projection, what about me, here and now, in this life. What am I really? Where do I begin and end? And is there some way to find out?

            This, I take it, is why religions have arisen ever since homo sapiens began to leave residues of his existence on earth. For some thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, humans have painted and carved and drawn and built monuments to this quest, to these questions. Or rather, monuments to their hoped-for answers. And evidently, none of these answers has satisfied in the long run, for the questing and the questioning continues to the present day. It is going on here, now. And what has prompted it, for me, has been something that has been nagging at me for several months, years, perhaps, of my pursuit to see. To understand. And that something is the uncanny feeling (the problem with such attempts to express this “it” is that language has developed out of our brain’s sensory equipment, and therefore must be cast in sensory language: “feeling”, the “sense that”, even when these don’t quite get to “it” or “isness”)—the uncanny feel or cognition or recognition that an immensity exists, an immensity of which I am part, which I am, and that that immensity is beyond comprehension (i.e. it is not sensory or cognitive or logical), but at the same time and in some way comprehensible. The way this occurs to me is, most often, in meditation, a practice I have been engaged in for about forty years. And contrary to the common misconception, the access doesn’t occur as a blinding strike of lightning. It doesn’t occur as a blockbuster of an insight, of a “knowledge” that is finished and permanent and which I can deposit in my memory bank or any other bank. For me, at least, it occurs in glimpses, back-of-the-head sensations (again, the language is sensory), inklings or strange empty tastings of space that is beyond physical space and dimension. Nor does it occur as “thought,” as we generally refer to thought (though often our attempt to grasp and possess it does occur as thought). In fact, thoughts are contrary to its occurrence and chase it away. So are feelings. So are sensory inputs. So is the interior viewpoint from which we normally inspect things. And this is why this kind of experience (if this overused word is really accurate) does not appear to compute with normal brain activity. Normal brain activity occurs in terms of sensory inputs, or cognitive inputs, or emotional inputs. This is none of those. Which is why in Zen, this ‘thing’ is very often expressed negatively. Not this, not that. Or simply, ‘not’ (the famous Mu koan turns on this word ‘mu,’ meaning, roughly, ‘not.’)

            But here, it is important to make a crucial point. This ‘thing’ does not occur as some ‘experience’ that blots out other forms of experience. It does not suddenly mean that the everyday sensorium is either invalidated or transcended. It is not of the nature of logic, of “either-or,” of “A” or “not-A”.  It is of the nature of simultaneity. Both/and. Yin/Yang. That is part of the nature of its heuristic or salvational (if that word means anything in a context where there is nothing to be saved from) value. What we know—and the type of knowing here, again, departs from our traditional ideas of knowing, of epistemology—is that this background, this space, this being-ness-that-we-are exists at the same time, is at the root of, does not invalidate or supersede in any way the normal sensory world. A Zen koan says, Sun-faced Buddha/Moon-faced Buddha. Or Samsara is Nirvana is Samsara. Or, the relative and the absolute are one, fitting like a box and its lid. That, I take it, is why this ‘experience,’ if we succumb to calling it that, has always been so difficult to convey. It violates all our norms of discourse. All our norms of human behavior, thought, feeling, being. And so it has most often been expressed in poetic or noetic or symbolic or metaphoric terms: “It is like…” But of course, the problem is that it is not like anything we know. It is not of the nature of “like.” Not of the nature of comparison. It is of itself. Of ‘what is just is’.

            And so here, all I can do is employ the term that came to me recently and to which I alluded above: immensity. We are involved in some sort of overwhelming immensity. All of us. Those who have had a glimpse of it, and those who haven’t. Those who would seem to deserve it, and those who don’t. Those who live long and those who live for only an instant. We are all involved (a more current term might be “entangled” in the sense that quantum particles once in relationship remain, even when separated, superluminally connected) in this immensity (the great Zen master Huang Po once compared it to a jewel that we have in our foreheads, always, but which we can’t see and so search for desperately until we realize that the entire search was unnecessary for ‘it’ has been here all along). Even as we are also all involved in the petty, stupid, day-to-day trials and tribulations and, yes, glories of everyday life. Even as, even during, even before and after everyday everything, even when and if or not when and if, always we are all entangled in it and cannot be otherwise. No matter what we do, we cannot escape or disqualify or abandon it. It is what we are. Immensity: some impossibly grand immensity. And to me, at least, and I’m not sure why, there is something reassuring, comforting, glorious in it, even when we wish we could blow up this groaning, pitiful, hate-mongering, mother of an earthworld out of disgust, and start again. Even then. It is there, this immensity, and so are we. And that’s something. Or nothing. As you wish.

Lawrence DiStasi

P.S.: as one way of metaphorically alluding to this ‘thing,’ I append here a link to a youtube video of the Mammoth Rubbing Stones still at large amongst us—huge stones which woolly mammoths used to rub against to scratch themselves, presumably, and which still bear the shiny evidence of that prehistoric scratching. An inkling of immensity, perhaps.

Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5EIhLMQSw

           

Dark Things

On my walk yesterday morning, I was feeling something I rarely feel: that the weather, a thick blanket of Pacific fog after some rain, felt “heavy.” I’ve often heard people use this term, but this was the first time I truly felt it. At this point I’m not sure what it signifies (except that we are approaching the darkest night of the year, in response to which many cultures have long celebrated a ‘festivals of light’ to counteract the dead feeling; and, in addition, that there may well be a residue of darkness in me after the mass murders in San Bernardino and Paris), but it has stimulated some thoughts about darkness, how most of us resist it, and how, nonetheless, it is a necessary and unsung part of existence.

            We humans are all geared to the light, specifically sunlight. We feel more lively when the sun is out, and more gloomy during winter months when, even if the sun shines, it shines for several fewer hours than in summer. When clouds and storms roll in, it gets even darker. Our language reflects this: “I saw the light,” to indicate comprehension or spiritual awakening; “I’m still in the dark,” to indicate bafflement, or “I’m in a dark place” to indicate depression. The sun itself has long been venerated as a kind of god, pouring its beneficence on earthly creatures, its photosynthetic energy into miraculous organs of growth. And sunrise has long signified relief, renewal, a reprieve from the dark of earthly trouble, or even the spiritual trouble signified by the phrase “dark night of the soul.” In a cosmic sense, we respond with joy and hope to the “light” of stars, as opposed to the barrenness of dark and cold and empty outer space. We even measure distance in “light years”—the time it takes, presumably, for light photons from distant stars to reach us, and thus serving as a measure of how far in miles/kilometers from us that star or galaxy is.

            And yet, the sun can be a problem and too much sunlight and heat can lead to all kinds of ailments such as droughts, sunburn, heat stroke, and the drying up of fertility or fecundity. It is when we begin to dwell on this, this diurnal and annual balance here on earth, that we begin to alter our perception and feeling about light and dark. Our internal mechanisms, most obviously our sleep patterns, depend on the alternation of light and dark in regular rhythm. If that balance is upset, as it is when humans decide that people can work at any time in the 24 hours that make up a day, bad things happen. People who work the “graveyard shift” are subject to strange ailments and delusions. Drivers and airline pilots who do this are far more prone to accidents than others working a more “normal” cycle. Travelers who shift time zones often notice that the interruption of their diurnal rhythms can lead to lower performance and even illness. So we humans need the dark, apparently as much as we need light. We need the respite from light; we need the cooling down that darkness brings; we need the dark side of the earth as much as we need the dark side of the moon. We also need the dark activity that night brings; the replenishment that night brings; the dreams and deep revival that sleep brings. This doesn’t even get to the penchant of some artists to find their creativity (a kind of dark dreaming?) much more active at night than in the daytime. Of some hunting animals to find far more prey at night, to only find their prey at night.

            But these are more or less surface matters. At a deeper level, we most of us may be astonished to learn that, though we thought we knew (or physicists did) what the vast stretches of space consisted of, it now turns out that adding up all of the known ‘matter’ in the universe as indicated by the light from stars simply is not enough to account for the accelerated expansion of the universe that seems to be happening. In fact, the known ‘matter’ that we’ve always observed (all the billions of stars and galaxies and planets) accounts for a mere five percent of what must be out there! Incredible. Where is the rest? What is the rest? We cover our ignorance by calling it “dark matter” (now calculated at 27% of the known universe) and its related “dark energy” (68% of the known universe). But what is it? Where is it? It, and we, are in the dark. So all our calculations about the content of the universe and its evolution, starting with the presumed Big Bang (of which we have evidence), may be totally off. Everything we know or think we know is now under review (see http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/).

            My point is not that we should all try to discover what’s “out there,” but rather that in some basic way, dark is an absolute necessity. Dark Matter. Dark Energy. Without such concepts, even though we don’t know what they signify, everything we seem to be observing makes no sense. The Universe is expanding when it should be contracting due to gravity. And not only is it expanding, that expansion is accelerating at a rate that suggests there is this enormous reserve of matter/energy out there causing it. And what we have always considered ‘empty space’ seems to be charged full of some sort of matter and energy we can’t detect but which seems to just pop up out of nothing. Though we really don’t know. We are in the dark.

            And this is the other part of the mystery. We really don’t know how the world works, how life works, how existence works. We want it to be apparent. We want things to work logically, causally, in the bright light of our brains, our consciousness, our reason, our mathematics, our machines, but they don’t. Rather, they work in a way that is only partially explained by our science and technology. Whenever we think we have some organizing function solved, we are stumped to learn that exceptions always appear. The dark side emerges. Uncertainty reigns. Some strange eruption blows all our predictions and calculations. This pertains in our social organizations in a way that gets more prominent as time goes on. Democracy was supposed to be the perfect system, giving each member of a society his vote and thereby a share in its success or failure. But democracy in the United States these days has been ‘hijacked’ by moneyed interests. Perhaps it has been from the beginning, but it seemed to work fairly well for a century or two, and to most people’s contentment. Not anymore. Rather than a society of equals, the United States has become a society of haves—the 1% or the 0.1% who control the vast majority of the wealth, and thereby the politicians who depend on that wealth—and have nots—the mass of people who vote in elections which seem more and more rigged to elect representatives who ignore the people’s will in favor of the will of corporations and the wealthy few. There’s even a term for this: “dark money.” And in this sense, the undue influence of those with money and power can be seen as the eruption of the dark side. So can the eruption of imperialism. Rome taught us that democracies can be easily replaced by empires and dictatorial emperors (the Greeks posited this transition as a natural, inevitable progression). The same thing has happened in the United States. From a nation of mostly independent farmers served by leaders who discouraged “entangling alliances” with foreign adventures, we have become the most powerful empire in history, with nearly a thousand military bases to govern our ‘soft’ empire, and nations everywhere quaking at our approach to “help them.” And some, as in San Bernardino recently, attempting to kill as many of us as possible. Again, the eruption of the dark side.

            So our enlightened penchant for equality, for fairness in sharing that finds its apotheosis in socialism or communism or democracy, tends in practice to have to pay its dues to the dark side. Russian communism demonstrated this clearly: instead of leaders and bureaucrats who were motivated by the good and equal sharing of a new kind of human, the Soviet Union degenerated into a cult of brutal megalomania in which the most necessary organization was the secret police—making sure that no one deviated from prescribed dogma. Instead of a government devoted to raising the level of existence for the masses, the Soviet government became, like its American twin, an instrument of empire. It gobbled up just-liberated nation-states with as eager an appetite as any empire of old. The dark side had eventually become dominant. No matter how glorious and efficient our dream of equality and cooperation has been, in short, all our utopias have sooner or later descended into the “some are more equal than others” mode immortalized by George Orwell.

            Perhaps this should not surprise us. Ancient religions have always felt the need to pay homage to this dark side—seeing, probably more clearly than we moderns, that the dark side will always emerge and demand its due. They perhaps saw that nothing that is all light can exist. It cannot exist in nature. It cannot exist in human groups or societies or religions. So in Hinduism, there are “dark” gods and goddesses: Shiva the Destroyer, Kali the Dark Mother adorned with skulls, the womb and tomb of the earth (related in this sense to Coatlicue of the Aztecs, whose name means “serpent skirt”).  Shiva is “responsible for change both in the form of death and destruction and in the positive sense of destroying the ego.” This latter capacity makes Shiva the god special to the Indian practice of meditation where the mind is stopped and everything associated with individuality and the world is dropped. So the dark side of the Hindu pantheon is ultimately seen as necessary to the most pure and aimed at the most good.

            We can see how this might have occurred to Indian philosophers and sages. They could see, as we can when we focus on it, that the world and existence could not survive if there were only creation and fecundity inspired by light. Most animals—as we are demonstrating ourselves today—have been given far too much reproductive power. If any animal or even plant were left to survive with no predators or diseases thinning it, it would soon overrun its nutritive zone and cause famine and chaos. Insects without birds to eat them would become destructive hordes, as locusts sometimes do. Rodents without larger animals to prey on them would overrun the world with disease and death. Humans with too much ability to counter diseases and floods and other natural disasters like the toll insects take on our food plants, would do precisely what we are doing now: increase far beyond the carrying capacity of the territories we inhabit, and force countless other species into a mass extinction without parallel. The destroyer in its many forms maintains the balance. Without destruction, without death, life cannot continue.

            Thus, from a larger point of view, we can all see that the dark side of death and destruction—no matter what form they take—are and must be part of the cycle of existence. Much as we as individuals would like to (for ourselves at least), we cannot eliminate them from our experience, cannot ignore or alter for long the fundamental centrality of darkness in the way the world functions. And it may well be that we are about to learn—especially we in the United States of America, who have always been nurtured on the myth that we are the special creation, the special light-bringing nation—that our mania to purify existence so that it can be palatable to our massive egos can only end in deep, deep oblivion. And that the regulating balance mechanism that has brought the earth to this pass must, in the end, rule as it always has—with us, or without us.

Lawrence DiStasi

Wonders

I am thinking today of the wonders that exist all around us and that usually either don’t get our attention, or are not available until someone points them out. The fact that we even exist is, of course, the first one. How does it happen that in a universe unimaginably large and cold, and with objects—whatever they are—so far apart that most cannot even be perceived without special equipment (not to mention the wholly imperceptible ‘dark matter’ that makes up most of the universe), how on an undistinguished rock 93 million miles from its parent star, does matter suddenly take on attributes that allow it to reproduce itself, and eventually, move where it wishes, direct its intelligence to solving problems, and produce theories about what it is, why it is here, and where it comes from? For that matter, how does it happen that there is matter in the first place? No one knows. And yet we are here, we are alive, we have minds that can ask such questions, and we take most of it for granted. We shouldn’t.

At the other extreme, we humans tend to have an exaggerated opinion of ourselves compared to other life forms. We shouldn’t do that either. We shouldn’t imagine, that is, that we’re somehow so exalted that we have no contact or common investment with other life forms, or anything in common with them either. Because even the humblest of the manifestations of what we call life, especially animal life, exhibit commonalities with us that are wonders both in themselves and in the intelligence they display. Consider slime molds. Molds and slime are normally things we consider with revulsion. In fact, the colloquial name of one species is “dog vomit slime mold,” because that’s exactly what it looks like. But these little buggers are truly amazing, both in their ability to “think,” and in their causal transformations. According to Robert Burton in A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind (2013), the individual cells in a slime mold communicate through release of a chemical called adenosine monophosphate (AMP). These cells live conventional lives when there’s enough food around. But when food gets scarce, the individuals (I’m not sure we can think of them as ‘individuals’ in our sense, but that’s what Burton calls them) gather together with their relatives and form giant amoeba-like aggregations that conform to our usual image of slime molds. More important, they become incredibly efficient at finding food. This ability has been tested in the laboratory and the tests show that slime molds can find their way through complex mazes to reach food. They do it by sending out networks of tube-like legs, each of which explores alternate routes until it finds the best path to the favored food. Then all consolidates into a single blob, which takes the shortest route to the food. The experimenters used oat flakes (one of this slime mold’s favorites) placed on a map of England to attract the slime molds, with the starting oat flake placed where London would be. What the experimenters found, to their astonishment, was that the solution to finding other oat flakes (placed where different cities would be) exactly duplicated the British intercity network of highways. In other words, this “mindless” creature, using pseudopodia (the tube-like legs acting as scouts) to feel its way towards food, duplicated the same routes that had required trained highway engineers long years to figure out. Japanese researchers found the same thing, this time with the slime molds exactly duplicating intercity rail routes from Tokyo. Now, I know what you’re thinking: given the stupidities evinced by highway engineers in recent years, especially in setting up the San Francisco Bay Area’s highway routes after the 1989 earthquake, it’s no wonder slime molds can do as well or better. But the wonder still stands: nature has somehow equipped one of its humblest and apparently simplest creatures with the kind of intelligence that we might have thought was limited only to us, or at least to mammals more or less like us in having a brain. Nothing of the kind. Intelligence seems to be a feature of nature at its simplest levels.

Here’s another example Burton provides. Locusts are familiar to most of us from the bible stories about “plagues of locusts” that overwhelmed ancient communities when they swarmed and ate everything in sight. But the precursors to locust swarming remind us of that same intelligence seen in slime molds. Like slime molds, individual locusts are normally solitary creatures—when the supply of food is sufficient for them. But when droughts occur, locusts begin to crowd together, usually in areas that still have some vegetation. It is this close contact from crowding that triggers remarkable changes in locusts. They begin marching together, seeking always to increase their numbers, and soon they are eating everything in sight, including each other. How does this happen? Australian researchers found what appears to be the tipping point. At densities of around thirty individuals, amazing physiological changes take place: the locusts change color, from brown to yellow-and-black. More “Hulk-like,” their leg muscles enlarge and seem to automatically begin marching movements. Their brains increase in size by some thirty percent, and reorganize, with areas normally devoted to visual processing for solitary food-finding minimized, and areas providing higher-level visual processing for group foraging growing larger. All these changes, in turn, were found by the researchers to be the product of rubbing each other’s hind-leg leg hairs (itself the product of the greater density of individuals). This rubbing of leg hairs triggers an outpouring of the neurochemical serotonin, which is known to regulate moods such as anger, aggression, and appetite. And voila, nature’s solution to drought for locusts is an aggregation impulse that leads them to become the fearsome consumers of everything in sight needed for their survival.

One other wonder, though this one’s from the dark side. As noted in the recent Frontline Documentary, Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria, some 2 million people get antibiotic resistant infections each year, many from the very hospitals where they go to get treated. Some are particularly hair-raising, such as the one that infected a pre-teen girl with something that started with strange sores and would not respond to any treatment. The infection finally got to her lungs, and, with no antibiotics to treat it, she had to have a lung replacement to save her life. The infection is still not gone, and her chances are only so-so, her life by now having been turned upside down. A young man got a similar resistant infection on his leg, and finally had to have the leg amputated. Again, the infection is still there. What is happening is that bacteria, one of the oldest and most ubiquitous life forms on this planet, are evolving resistance faster than we can create new antibiotics to fight them. Part of the problem, of course, is overuse of the antibiotics we have had, not just in fighting human infections, but also in our farm animals: their keepers does them with large quantities of antibiotics to keep them alive in the horrific conditions they’re raised in. Some researchers say that we are entering a new age—rapidly reverting to the time when we had no antibiotics at all. And the worst part is that drug companies have pretty much given up on costly research to find new antibiotics because these drugs get used only once for a few days; what they like to develop are drugs for heart disease—that have to be used for a lifetime. More profit, you know. But aside from the ignorance in entrusting our health to profit-making corporations, what we have to take note of is the amazing intelligence at work in our sometime adversaries, the bacteria. They have not only evolved new genes to protect them against our antibiotics, but have even learned how to pass the resistant genes on to other bacteria! The result is that more and more infectious bacterial species are becoming resistant to our increasingly vain efforts to control them.

I don’t know about you, but thinking about the subtle mechanisms at work in our fellow creatures—all without primate brains, or writing, or labs or computers—simply leaves me wonder-struck. It makes me want to bow before the inconceivable wonder we’re all engaged in, but also to wonder how anyone could, as billions of us now do, dismiss with such arrogance all other wonders besides our own. And it reminds me that though we may, through our arrogance and ignorance, finally do ourselves in via global warming or chemical poisoning or nuclear armaggedon, we won’t do in nature or our planet. It will go on, merrily giving birth to new and better adaptations that in some future eon may come up with a little wiser, humbler, and even happier organism than Homo sapiens sapiens.

Lawrence DiStasi

Ouroboros

A recent class I taught left me with residues of discontent. What I was not able to resolve, to my own satisfaction, at least, was how to reconcile modern science—especially physics—with the root mystery of life: how life originates, how human consciousness can arise from “meat” or neurons in the brain, how, or if, meaning arises at all. To hear many physicists talk about it, it’s all very straightforward. Everything proceeds by inexorable laws of motion, gravity, quantum mechanics, and mathematics. Particles appear out of something (or nothing) called quantum foam, or quantum jitters, or simply empty space, and once they appear, the whole shebang moves in quite orderly and predictable ways to clouds of expanding gas, galaxies, suns, planets, and, over billions of years, cells, multicellulars, and us.

            Of course not everyone is buying this determinism, and increasingly some scientists—mostly in the biological sciences—are raising objections. Stuart Kauffman, for example, wrote a book recently called Reinventing the Sacred. Appearing at lots of conferences to present his theory, Kauffman suggests that, though no creator God is needed, humans may need to attribute the mystery of being to something like a god, so why not name the immense “creativity” in the universe “God.” But it’s not just a renaming that Kauffman is after; it’s proving that the reductionism of physics—that all proceeds deterministically according to physical laws—simply can no longer be sustained. His reasons are complex, and I’ll cite some below, but basically what he says is that in order for a physical law to be applicable, one needs to know the state of the space in which it applies. Once life enters the picture, however, and even well before, the space is simply not predictable. Especially in biology is this true. Evolution proceeds by mutation and natural selection, yes; but the space or niche that any organism will be selected to fill can never be known ahead of time. Therefore, no law can predict what will be created (or selected to fill a niche that is unknowable beforehand). Equally important, life and matter seem to organize themselves in unpredictable ways, in Kauffman’s view, by something he calls “autocatalyis”:

            …the basis of life…rests in some way on catalysis, the speeding up of chemical reactions by enzymes. My second intuition is that life is based on some form of autocatalysis, in which the molecules in a set catalyze one another’s formation. (p. 55).

Kauffman then cites experiments by Gunter von Kiedrowski where DNA strands with 6 nucleotides (a hexamer) were able to bind with a DNA strand with 3 nucleotides (a trimer), to make the first “reproducing molecular system.” That is, the hexamer proved to be autocatalytic: “it builds a second copy of itself by ‘ligating’ the two trimers into a new hexamer.” Further experiments showed that this same “self-organization” could be achieved by peptide fragments, each fragment catalyzing the other in a kind of feedback loop.

            What interests me is that other scientists have focused on this same idea of self-organization or emergence to rethink how life works. Kauffman, for example, says flat out that “consciousness is emergent” and that not just conscious humans but a huge portion of living beings are “agents.” This means that they act in a purposeful way (not as deterministic automatons), and that those scientifically-forbidden concepts of value and meaning spring naturally from this. As Kauffman says: “you and I are agents; we act on our own behalf; we do things. In physics, there are only happenings, not doings” (p. 4). Other scientists, like Nobel chemist Ilya Prigogine, have also contested the alleged “passivity” of matter by pointing out how molecules, such as those in chemical suspensions, or, on a larger scale, in whirlpools, can organize themselves. As explained by Brian Swimme,

            Prigogine’s experiments demonstrated that under certain conditions, chemicals could organize themselves into complex patterns requiring the coordination of trillions of molecules. And they did this with no instructions. No humans organized them. Nor did they have a genetic blueprint that guided their actions. Instead, their own intrinsic self-organizing dynamics directed these complex interactions. (Swimme, Journey of the Universe, p. 106).

The late Francisco Varela took this idea of self-organization or emergence up to cell formation. Varela coined the term “autopoesis,” or self-creation. The term referred specifically to how, evolutionarily, groups of molecules were somehow able to bootstrap themselves into making a boundary, a membrane, that created a primary cell (i.e., by holding all together, the boundary literally creates the cell,):

            This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what’s unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. (Swimme, p. 49)

            Here is where it gets fascinating for me, for I begin to think of the self-referential implications in all of this. In a way, it almost defies our imaginations. Something creates that which is still “itself” but which changes the very nature of what it is. Our consciousness—or rather our self-consciousness—is like that. We see ourselves being ourselves. We are not only conscious—which is magical enough (especially if we take neuroscientists at their word that the brain, “meat”, somehow creates an immaterial entity like the mind)—but we are conscious of being conscious. It gets a bit dizzying, especially when, as in meditation, one is advised to focus on that which is the observer of, say, one’s thoughts. Who is that observer? Is it (he? she?), too, created by the “meat” of neurons? Very hard to say. What seems clear to me is that we are here in the realm of the emergent “self-organization” that seems to run through virtually all creation.

            There was a Pulitzer-prize winning book written around 1979 by Douglas Hofstadter called Godel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter’s reason for putting these three geniuses together had to do with the link between them, the link of self-reference. Bach’s fugues, Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and Escher’s prints all referred, each in their own ways, to the idea of self-reference. Escher’s prints provide the most graphic way to think of this: in one iconic drawing, the hands of the artist are depicted in a way that makes it seem that each drawn hand is drawing the other hand, drawing the drawing itself. It is a logical impossibility, but we know instantly what it means. We have a sense of its “rightness,” somehow. The same goes for Bach’s fugues and the Godel theorem—the latter deriving its logic from the fact that one can never see (or mathematically represent) a whole situation. The see-er can never include his seeing in what he sees, and thus never takes in the whole. And yet, there are these representations.

            My own take on this comes from an Italian folk tale collected by Italo Calvino in his classic Italian Folktales (1956). In Giovannin Senza Paura (Little John without fear), the main character has a reputation for being fearless. But one day, he goes into battle with a fearsome adversary, who cuts off our hero’s head. Calmly, Giovannin stoops and puts his head back on, confident of continuing the battle. But alas, he puts his head on backwards, looks at his backside, and dies of fright. What is it that frightens the fearless one to death? It is not explained, but we can guess it’s something like ‘the sight which is not to be seen.’ The sight of oneself whole, perhaps. The sight of the whole. And it reminds us of other sights, in mythology, that are not permitted to humans, and thereby to what we’ve been discussing:

            Tiresias sees snakes copulating (or Athena naked) and, transformed into a woman for 7 years, is then asked by Hera to judge who gets the greater pleasure in sex, man or woman. Tiresias claims it is woman, and Hera strikes him blind. He has seen what is not to be seen (so he becomes a blind ‘seer’). Similarly, Actaeon sees the Goddess Artemis naked, whereupon she turns him into a stag, to then be devoured by his own hounds who do not recognize him. All these tales—and there are many more—refer to the idea of humans seeing what is prohibited—seeing into the mystery. Notably, the seeing is always the normal kind of seeing, sensory seeing, seeing from a specific, objectifying point of view. I have written about this in my Mal Occhio book, but here the question becomes, ‘what is that which cannot be seen by the naked eye?’ by the normal human, rational, objectifying eye? From a Godelian point of view, completeness, perhaps, or wholeness. We cannot reduce the whole to a consistent formula. In many evil eye traditions, that which is at risk of harm from eyes is any hint of perfection. Perfection, including the fundamental mysteries of nature, cannot be seen. Thoreau referred to this in one of his Notebooks: he wrote something like, ‘Man cannot afford to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye.’ In other words, there is something inherently forbidden or un-seeable (it may be that physicists have already reached this level, for none has ever seen a quark or a “string” and no one ever will apparently—photons of light interfere with entities this small), and it clusters around ideas of wholeness, perfection, the mystery of life self-organizing, perhaps, improbably bootstrapping itself from one level of organization to another, as in consciousness.

            And yet we know it. Bach knew it. Escher knew it. And I think this knowing is symbolized by the ancient symbol of the ouroboros: the snake eating its own tail. This is an ancient symbol of deep mystery: a creature nourishing itself on itself. Eating not another, but itself in an act of incomprehensible self-creation (and self-sacrifice), of leaping improbably to another level. And depicted not as acquisitive or destructive, but as a self-renewing, infinite circle. In a way, we do this daily. For if we are all constructed of the same basic ingredients, which we are—all living cells being constructed on the same basic plan of the same basic elements, so we are related to every one of the bacteria whose numbers and creativity overwhelm our imaginations—then each time we eat a frog or a pig or a chicken or a fish or any vegetable or grain, we are eating ourselves. We are the ouroboros. We are the mystery whose most recent bootstrap miracle is consciousness. 

            And given that we do not know, cannot know what might be the next phase space for the next emergence, it may be that bootstrapping ourselves to another more global form of consciousness is right around the corner. I am comforted by that. Because if we are ever to get out of the current mess our celebrated, rational brains have got us into, it will have to be via a leap to something more, a more inclusive, less intrusive level of seeing and knowing and, most of all, accepting that from which we have come, that which we truly are.

            Perhaps the words of another cell biologist, Ursula Goodenough, provide a fitting end here, for Goodenough also places emergence at the center of her meditations on what she calls The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford U Press: 1998). And that she, too, makes use of the “snake eating its tail” metaphor here strikes me as, well, uncanny:

            For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no superordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. 

Lawrence DiStasi