Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (27 page)

One fills the other, complements it, suggesting that, even if Emerson was on to something, that there is no place to go, that we are where we want to be, running beautifully and hyperbolically in place, on the surface of a sphere in the depths of possibly infinite space. It is a heady feeling. Doyle brings us there, and I am grateful to him for upping the dose.

For Derrida, following Socrates but diverging from Heidegger, who lauds Socrates as the most perfect philosopher because he doesn’t write, writing is a pharmakon, a drug, a supplement that obeys the double logic of aid and handicap, window and screen, welcome addition and threatening replacement. The Pharmakeus is also a magician or medicine man, cosmetics, and the Socratic figure of he who is ritually excluded from the socius—unable to be digested and assimilated by the body politic in a way, formally similar perhaps, to that of drugs like
Amanita
or ayahuasca in the body.

These pharmaceutical and philosophical glitches and intrusions that are so hard to swallow personally and socially get us off; they send us on our way. Derrida talks of a general writing, an arche-writing,
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and writing in retreat, retracement, withdrawal. He, like Doyle, might take exception to the Heideggerian hand, which gathers and makes humans nonpareil and metabiological, somehow safeguarding our superiority over our biosphere-mates.

But, as the sound bite spirit master Eckhart Tolle reminds us, “I have lived with several Zen masters, and they have all been cats.” It is too early in our postreligious hangover to recapture human superiority under the umbrella of a Heideggerian ontotheology or the undeconstructed scientific myth of humans as “the highest species.” In philosophy as in science, where there is a movement afoot to name the present age the Anthropocene after its human namers, our hubris is showing. Consider the source and Doyle does, showing we are anthropobotanical and anthropofungal nodes in the noösphere. We do not know what we are. Not knowing is the great crossroads of science, religion, and philosophy, the creamy part of the Venn diagram that will sustain us as we lurch forward into the cosmic unknown with something more than hope but less than speciescidal self-confidence.

For Samuel Butler, technology itself was also a kind of drug, obeying Derrida’s double logic of writing as supplement, tough-to-swallow psychotropic, ecodelic, entheogen.

Arguing with himself in the pages of the New Zealand papers under various pseudonyms, the wily Butler described technology at once as an extension of the limbs—and now, with computers, we would say mental faculties—of the human race and as our biggest threat, “stealing across the face of the globe,” as he put it, like a new species out to replace us. From writing, which aids but destroys the memory by storing memories outside the head, to the electronic calculator that improves our calculative abilities in the same way, to television robbing kids of books, this double pharmakon structure keeps coming at us. It looks, feels, and smells evolutionary. And indeed it may well be.

But the very first—originary, if you will—example of this pharmakon structure is Doyle’s: writing, on paper, is a plant product, one we don’t digest, outside our bodies. This capacity for informational excess outside our bodies from which there is, as Derrida argues, no exit, is vegetal. It founds us, literally, as historical beings—preserving a written record. The plant world is also the world from which we primates come, from which we emerge—into houses of wood and stacks of paper, clothes made of textiles—into civilization concordant with agriculture and history. A species made possible, brought to you, in a quite real sense, by plants—and other beings. As nothing is wed to being, as fish swim in water without seeing what is so close to them, as we breathe the plant-oxygenated air, so the paper of writing acts as fantastic hallucination-realizing pharmakon. It is an underappreciated plant gift. Doyle helps us realize it and shows us that, nightmares of the paperless office notwithstanding, plants are not finished giving. Like Marlon Brando in
The Godfather,
they are making us offers we will be hard put to refuse.

Here’s an idea: The world is a perplexing mix of the finite and the infinite. It is an infinite mixture. But it can be unwound, disentangled with noös, mind—the noös of the noösphere. This is not my idea, but that of the pre-Socratic Anaxagoras. It was preserved by the medieval church in the doctrine of indwelling of the three persons of the Trinity. I learned from Doyle that Anaxagoras agrees with Empedocles that plants move according to their own desire. His idea of perichoresis—that is, Anaxagoras’s idea of the universe as infinite mixture that can be unpacked by noös, the mind of the noösphere—suggests our minds are on to something. Perhaps they will ultimately be able to retrieve or re-create the primordial state, getting us back to the Garden along a Möbius Trip. When humans think, Gaia laughs: our thinking and technology are all part of something bigger, older, deeper. At the same time the noösphere is manifesting this something.

In its secular form this infinite mixture unstirred by mind and the work of the ecodelic noösphere is accompanied by clear evolutionary vectors: increase in aggregate numbers of organisms, their types, connections, aggregate information-processing abilities, sentience, ability to perceive new gradients from which to extract energy to maintain and expand themselves in complete accord with the dissipative tendencies of thermodynamics’ second law—the centerpiece of that body of physics theory that Einstein said was most likely to resist future change. Here we may find Doyle’s peacock feather and Shiva hallucinations, the cross-cultural, biospheric truth of them. It is a difficult Vernadskian, Bataillean truth in which the mind that perceives it is revealed to be not central but a means along with sex and death to expand the possibilities of the biosphere, to explore and develop new regions of evolvability, to find new ways to spread genes, recombine genomes, arrange groups and tribes and multispecies assemblages to form working solutions to the cosmic task of ecologically sustainable gradient reduction. The second law tugs organisms to find ways to work together to stably reduce gradients, dissipating the energy that sustains them. The “sustainable” part is crucial but often gets lost in the work of thermodynamic theorizers and those who would critique them as making an unreconstructed unthinking and politically dangerous contribution to neoliberalism, as objectionable in its way as is social Darwinism and neo-Darwinism’s caricature of Darwinism.

What these critics and theorists miss is that life’s accomplishment of an implicitly destructive thermodynamic mandate—to seek out energetic gradients and lay waste to them, accelerating the inescapable work of the second law through a kind of daimonic biotic intelligence—is always ever compromised, threatened, by its own success. This is the origin of prudence and long-range planning, of moderation and likely also of the natural means of population control we call aging and programmed cell death, which are now known to be under multiple forms of genomic control.

Don’t worry; we are starting to come down now, only a few pages left. Indeed, the Shiva factor that Schumpeter calls creative destruction and Bataille calls expenditure without recompense is modulated by an ecological intelligence that is less fully developed in humans than in the ecosystems your species is destroying to make way for hamburgers. Human techno-intelligence is phenomenal, plastic, amoral, capitalist, and dangerously Promethean. We are overly impressed with it; it may be a flash in the evolutionary pan—like those bright flames magicians produce with chemically treated paper, that leave no ash but make a nice segue to something else, like a dove or a flower. Vernadsky pointed out before World War II—he was struck by the movement of munitions in World War I—that the number and rate of transport of elements in the Periodic Table involved in life’s process in and as Earth’s surface augmented over billions of years of time. With high-energy physics, fleeting isotopes never seen in our solar system before have been produced.

Today the situation is better-worse: modern atom-smashers such as the Large Hadron Collider produce energy levels seen elsewhere in the universe only in black holes and supernova explosions. Indeed, Otto Rössler (who brought Anaxagoran perichoresis to my attention) lobbied to stop CERN because of his calculation of a one in six chance of its forming a mini black hole that would inadvertently destroy the Earth. The romantic irony of this technical apocalypse makes it now my favorite apocalypse after J. Marvin Herndon’s nuclear geomagnetism failure scenario, and that only because the Herndon scenario features a Zen-like breakdown of global telecommunications accompanied by beautiful planet-wide aurora borealis effects resulting from the depletion of uranium that, undergoing fission in Earth’s core unbeknown to current science, is the actual source of our protective magnetic field. Perhaps both scenarios are preferable to the death by a thousand cuts theoretically being engineered by a globalist sociopathocracy scarcely to be preferred to mob rule.

On the positive side, nuclear lasers in space, it has been published, could be used to generate black holes at a safe distance. If, as some think, new cosmoi, cosmoses, arise on the other side of these black holes, then we confront a strange possible conflation of physics and metaphysics: is this universe the result of previous universes that have multiplied via the evolution of black hole–forming technonoetic polities?

Are we godlets in the making? Maybe, but right now it don’t look so good. Our chattering monkey minds and taste for technical sweets are not in accord with Team Gaia, the long-evolved, long-lasting, gradient-reducing virtuosities pioneered by ecosystems, including versions of the same forest ecosystems that fostered our own “recent” evolution.

As Schneider showed and Doyle reminds us, human gradient-reducing abilities pale in comparison to those of plants, especially those of diverse communities such as found in Amazonia and Borneo.
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This is not theory but thermal satellite measurement showing cloud cover temperatures over rain forests in the height of summer to be cooler than over Siberia in midwinter. Cut down a forest and it will get hotter. These plant-based biodiverse enclaves are, moreover, more stable in principle—more like adult bodies or healthy organisms than pioneer species or pathogens sweeping through a body or ecosystem. They are multigenomic, calm and biodiverse, not monoculturists metastasizing the countryside. Plants are our great planetary gradient reducers—and, yes, they perceive the solar gradient, turning their leaves and flowers to follow the sun. Indeed if we accept the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, it is clear that humans, despite our minds, have depleted global gradient-reducing function by increasing temperatures near the surface. Human technics are amazing but literally globally dysfunctional.

As Doyle also points out, there is a question as to the role of what Darwin called sexual selection in all this. Darwin was criticized by Butler and others for being overly mechanical, capitalistic, and simplistic. It seems likely that in trying to carve out a naturalistic view of nature in distinction to the superstitious teleologies and anthropomorphisms of Christian religion, Darwin accentuated the elements of evolutionary theory that worked themselves, the elements most akin in principle and spirit to the mechanisms and mathematics of a Newton or Descartes. There is thus, in general, little role in Darwin’s careful speculations for subjectivity or the effect of individual conduct on the evolutionary trajectory. Aside from humans, whose behaviors and ideas clearly influenced social organization, the one place Darwin felt compelled to grant a shaping influence was in mate selection, especially by females.

At the end of the Kitchener session, responding to my response, Doyle asked about the thermodynamics of beauty: “In neo-Darwinism,” he said, “natural selection and sexual selection are conflated. But then you’ll see a fan of peacock flowers and [it forces you to ask what is the source of this] exorbitance [in] squandering a gradient. [The peacocks seem to overlook] what they do. What they do is grab attention. You see a sort of tug toward the ability to grab attention and therefore [is it not the case that] beauty is in this evolutionary biological sense an ongoing race to be able to grab the attention in some fashion? Flowers do it, peacocks do it, humans being singing songs do it. Don’t we see, as Miller shows,
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what is a linkage to the importance of human consciousness and that this explains in part the function of human consciousness [which] can create infinitely unfathomably beautiful things that constantly elude our total grasp and force us onward to squander more amounts of information and hopefully sustainably? The peacock does it sustainably, so I wonder what you think about that informatic beauty part.”

I answered by comparing the difference between sexual selection and thermodynamics, on the one hand, and natural selection proper, to the difference in philosophies between Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer emphasized the will to live preservation, whereas Nietzsche expanded this idea to the will to power (the name of his collected notebooks). This philosophical dyad parallels the difference ecologically between sustainability and the Bataillean realm of excess that one experiences as pure thermodynamic gradient reduction. It seems to me that both these registers are working and that in evolution there is a sort of experimental realm that is tied to thermodynamics and goes beyond mere survival. If you look at it scientifically, it is clear that we have to stay alive. Otherwise we’re not going to have offspring. This is the Schopenhauerian will to live. But at the same time there’s a thermodynamic drive and we are only alive, life only exists in the first place, because of this. That is to say, life forms a more active region, a metabolic zone of energy flow that perpetuates the firelike spread of energy formally described by the second law. If we can find ways to tap into gradients, organisms—all organisms, not just us and our external technology—will expand as quickly as possible. This is the natural tendency for unchecked growth and exponential reproduction that natural selection curtails. However, it is not necessarily a stable regime. The difference between the Schopenhauerian will to live and the Nietzschean will to power is the difference between a sustained flame and a raging fire.