Janus: A Summing Up

by Arthur Koestler

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

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

  2

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

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

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

  An artifact occasionally invoked to explain precognition is to make time multidimensional. This allows a genuine backward passage of time, which might permit positive intervals in one time direction to become negative ('effect before cause') in another. In principle, this represents a valid scheme, and I know of no criticism that will rule it out as a scientific procedure. If it is to be acceptable, however, a completely new metric of space-time needs to be developed. . . [9]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3

  In the Prologue to this book I stressed the fact that our present situation is without precedent in history. To say it once more: in all previous generations man had to come to terms with the prospect of his death as an individual; the present generation is the first to face the prospect of the death of our species. Homo sapiens arrived on the scene about a hundred thousand years ago, which is but the blinking of an eye on the evolutionary time-scale. If he were to vanish now, his rise and fall would have been a brief episode, unsung and unlamented by other inhabitants of our galaxy. We know by now that other planets in the vastness of space are humming with life; that brief episode would probably never have come to their notice.

  Only a few decades ago it was generally thought that the emergence of life out of inanimate chemical compounds must have been an extremely improbable, and therefore extremely rare event, which may have occurred only once, on this privileged planet of ours, and nowhere else. It was further thought that the formation of solar systems, such as ours, was also a rare event, and that planets capable of supporting life must be even rarer. But these assumptions, flavoured by 'earth-chauvinism', have been refuted by the rapid advances of astrophysics. It is now generally accepted by astronomers that the formation of planetary systems, including inhabitable planets, is 'a common event' *; and that organic compounds, potentially capable of giving rise to life, are present both in our immediate neighbourhood, on Mars, and in the interstellar dust-clouds of distant nebulae. Moreover, a certain class of meteorites was found to contain organic materials whose spectra are the same as those of pollen-like spores in pre-Cambrian sediments. [11] Sir Fred Hoyle and his Indian colleague, Professor Chandra Wickranashinghe, proposed (in 1977) a theory, which regards 'pre-stellar molecular clouds such as are present in the Orion nebula, as the most natural "cradles" of life. Processes occurring in such clouds lead to the commencement and dispersal of biological activity in the Galaxy . . . It would now seem most likely that the transformation of inorganic matter into primitive biological systems is occurring more or less continually in the space between the stars.' [12]

  * Professor Carl Sagan (Centre for Radiophysics and Space Research, Cornell University), at the CETI Congress. 1971. CETI (Communication with Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) was sponsored by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences and attended by leading scientists from both countries. Its proceedings (published by the MIT Press, 1973) represent a landmark in the study of the problems of extraterrestrial life, and of the possible methods of establishing contact with alien life-forms.

  As for the pollen-like structures in meteorites, the authors hold it to be possible that they 'represent primitive, interstellar "proto-cells" in a state of suspended animation'. [13] At present 'some hundred tons of meteoritic material enter the earth's atmosphere every day; but in earlier geological epochs the accumulation rate may have been much higher'. Part of this material may have originated in the 'cradles of life' -- the dust-clouds pre-dating the formation of stars.

  Thus the doctrines of 'terran chauvinism' have become untenable, like so many other cherished beliefs of nineteenth-century science. We are not alone in the universe -- not the only spectators in the theatre, surrounded by empty seats. On the contrary, the universe around us is teeming with life, from primitive 'proto-cells', floating in interstellar space, to millions of advanced civilizations far ahead of us -- where 'far' might mean the distance we have travelled from our reptilian or amoebic ancestry. I find this perspective comforting and exhilarating. In the first place, it is nice to know that we are not alone, that we have company out there among the stars -- so that if we vanish, it does not matter too much, and the cosmic drama will not be played out before an empty house. The thought that we are the only conscious beings in this immensity, and that if we vanish, consciousness would vanish from it, is unbearable. Vice versa, the knowledge that there are billions of beings in our galaxy, and in other galaxies, infinitely more enlightened than our poor sick selves, may lead to that humility and self-transcendence which is the source of all religious experience.

  This brings me to a perhaps naive, but I think plausible consideration regarding the nature of extraterrestrial intelligences and civilizations. Terrestrial civilization (from the start of agriculture, written language, etc.) is, at a generous estimate, around 10,000 years old. To make guesses about the nature of extra-terrestrial civilizations a few million years older than ours is of course totally unrealistic. On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to assume that sooner or later -- within, say, its first 10,000 years -- each of these civilizations would have discovered thermonuclear reactions -- i.e., met the anno zero of its own calendar. From this point onward natural selection -- or rather, the 'selective weed-killer' as I have called it -- takes over on a cosmic scale. The sick civilizations engendered by biological misfits will sooner or later act as their own executioners and vanish from their polluted planet. Those civilizations which survive this and other tests of sanity will grow, or have already grown, into a cosmic elite of demi-gods. More soberly speaking, it is a comforting thought that owing to the action of the cosmic weed-killer, only the 'goodies' among these civilizations will survive, whereas the 'baddies' will annihilate themselves. It is nice to know that the universe
is a place reserved for goodies and that we are surrounded by them. The established religions take a less charitable view of the cosmic administration.*

  * The oft-raised question why these advanced civilizations do not communicate with us lies outside the scope of this book; the reader will find a few remarks and bibliographical references on the subject in Appendix IV.

  4

  I shall conclude this book with a kind of credo, the origin of which dates some forty years back, to the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 I spent several months in the Nationalists' prison in Seville, as a suspected spy, threatened with execution. [14] During that period, in solitary confinement, I had some experiences which seemed to me close to the mystics' 'oceanic feeling' and which I subsequently tried to describe in an autobiographical account.* I called those experiences 'the hours by the window'. The extract which follows, though rather loosely formulated, reflects what one may call 'an agnostic's credo':

  The 'hours by the window' had filled me with a direct certainty that a higher order of reality existed, and that it alone invested existence with meaning. I came to call it later on 'the reality of the third order'. The narrow world of sensory perception constituted the first order; this perceptual world was enveloped by the conceptual world which contained phenomena not directly perceivable, such as atoms, electromagnetic fields or curved space. This second order of reality filled in the gaps and gave meaning to the absurd patchiness of the sensory world. In the same manner, the third order of reality enveloped, interpenetrated, and gave meaning to the second. It contained 'occult' phenomena which could not be apprehended or explained either on the sensory or on the conceptual level, and yet occasionally invaded them like spiritual meteors piercing the primitive's vaulted sky. Just as the conceptual order showed up the illusions and distortions of the senses, so the 'third order' revealed that time, space and causality, that the isolation, separateness and spatio-temporal limitations of the self were merely optical illusions on the next higher level. If illusions of the first type were taken at face value, then the sun was drowning every night in the sea, and a mote in the eye was larger than the moon; and if the conceptual world was mistaken for ultimate reality, the world became an equally absurd tale, told by an idiot or by idiot-electrons which caused little children to be run over by motor cars, and little Andalusian peasants to be shot through heart, mouth and eyes, without rhyme or reason. Just as one could not feel the pull of a magnet with one's skin, so one could not hope to grasp in cognate terms the nature of ultimate reality. It was a text written in invisible ink; and though one could not read it, the knowledge that it existed was sufficient to alter the texture of one's existence, and make one's actions conform to the text. I liked to spin out this metaphor. The captain of a ship sets out with a sealed order in his pocket which he is only permitted to open on the high seas. He looks forward to that moment which will end all uncertainty; but when the moment arrives and he tears the envelope open, he finds only an invisible text which defies all attempts at chemical treatment. Now and then a word becomes visible, or a figure denoting a meridian; then it fades again. He will never know the exact wording of the order; nor whether he has complied with it or failed in his mission. But his awareness of the order in his pocket, even though it cannot be deciphered, makes him think and act differently from the captain of a pleasure-cruiser or of a pirate ship. I also liked to think that the founders of religions, prophets, saints and seers had at moments been able to read a fragment of the invisible text; after which they had so much padded, dramatized and ornamented it, that they themselves could no longer tell what parts of it were authentic. * The Invisible Writing (written in 1953).