Similarly Rick Ryals, an autodidact whose father was an electric engineer, argues that “we are here to do work efficiently, and at the highest level of our technological capability, we create particles that directly affect the symmetry of the universe. That’s something that very few sources can accomplish, and it is directly connected to the structuring of the universe, which is why there is an implication for a bio-oriented cosmological principle.”5 Particle accelerators create energy levels not found elsewhere in the universe except in black holes and supernovae explosions. Based on his study of certain basic ideas to do with the cosmological constant and certain anomalies (e.g., quantum field theory’s prediction that the vacuum energy density of our universe should be about 120 orders of magnitude greater than is observed), Ryals rejects multiverses and tables the idea of a
bio-oriented cosmological principle [that] extends well beyond Earth to include similarly balanced planets like ours, elsewhere in the habitable zones of the universe. This is a falsifiable prediction that strictly constrains the physics to a limited slice of space and time, and it explains the Fermi Paradox as well, since all life in the universe will have appeared at approximately the same time in its history, so we will all be similarly developed, technologically. That also means we will all be performing the same function in the thermodynamic process, and that means that we are a collective force to be reckoned with when it comes to our ability to directly influence the evolution and symmetry of the universe, itself. . . . The most radical scientific implication of a direct connection between carbon based life and the mechanism that defines the structure of the universe, itself, is the evolutionary mechanism, which, when taken inversely, says that the future universe doesn’t eventually die from heat death, and it doesn’t “crunch,” or anything else that has been proposed, rather, it “evolves” toward absolute symmetry, via periodic big bangs, to higher orders of entropic efficiency so that energy truly is conserved in the never ending effort toward absolutely balanced symmetry between the vacuum and matter. The next universe will be just a little bit flatter, (closer to zero net energy), and will, therefore, be that much better at disseminating energy, over a “that-much” longer of a duration, allowing energy to be disseminated “that-much” more uniformly before the next big bang starts the process over again. This can be understood to be a “downhill” process, because it will require less energy to create the next universe if the new universe is structured to disseminate energy more efficiently because it won’t have to work as hard to accomplish this. The physics for this is very simply real particle pair creation from vacuum energy, like you get with Hawking Radiation, which causes the vacuum to become more rarefied and “stretched thin” until this process compromises the integrity of the forces that bind the universe.
Functional questions lead us to think of how parts fit into wholes, wholes that in nonequilibrium thermodynamics are not things but themselves processes. What is the role of a cell in the body, of bodies in populations, of people in societies, of species in ecosystems? Understanding ourselves as exponents of a natural, rather than special teleology, is, I would argue, a scientific satori that gets to the root of the connectedness of all things. It brings together Darwin and Spinoza, Gaia and microbial ecology, phenomenology and materialism.
In Rocks of Ages, Stephen Jay Gould writes that “the conflict between science and religion exists only in people’s minds, not in the logic or proper utility of these entirely different, and equally vital subjects. . . . A blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution emerges. . . . Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values.”6
Rather than consider spirituality and science as “non-overlapping magisteria,” however, I see them integrally linked. Indeed, future diagnostic manuals might diagnose as pathological those who do not integrate the logical and the numinous, as suffering from a malady, not a French sickness of the soul, malaise or ennui or anomie, but a chaotic theopathy, say, some deficit of Whiteheadian cosmonoia.
HOW MANY ANTS I killed yesterday. They were gathered at the ground zero of an organic honey gradient, milling about the sweet outdoor sculpture of a seemingly empty spoon. In a fit of automaticity, I dispatched them from the linoleum countertop with the pullout sprayer, sweeping them to the slippery curvature of the metal sink. They collected in the stainless steel strainer, a few running for their lives up the steep sides. One or two I watched escape, their tiny, agile limbs vigorous as they abandoned their brethren. Today I saved a bee. Caught, it bounced between the panes of a lifted window, unable to solve the simple maze. Deserving to be stung for my sins of the day before, my hand cupped its furry thorax, its forewings aflutter as I solved the maze for it, opening the bars of my fingers and giving it, after a brief hiatus in midair, a tap on the behind to send it flowerward into the spring.
How evil and good of me. But what guided the hand I watched withdraw that stretchable faucet? What thought process or impulse drove me to catch the bee around its thorax and bristling forewings and send it buzzing back toward the sun? As I described in chapter 13, “Kermitronics,” thought is not necessarily under our own control. Real enough experientially, upon investigation real agency may be nonexistent. Neither the mechanical causality of science nor the irreducible stochasticism of quantum flux, nor even the uncanny neo-Cartesian regulation of ourselves as second-order cybernetic machines,7 is enough to save free will. We are still on that Uexküllian ride.
I argued in chapter 2, “Bataille’s Sun and the Ethical Abyss,” that life’s problems come from solar excess: limited materials in a thermodynamically cycling system with evolving intelligence create participants who eventually recognize one another as gradients to be consumed. I don’t see a way out of this situation. It seems, rather, constitutive of our existence, a violence, not so much of metaphysics, as Derrida might say, but of physics. The pedestrian fact is that on a planet of gradient-reducing beings building themselves from a limited material substrate, recycling becomes a necessity, and the most successful gradient reducers become among the most tempting treats. This does not obviate the possibility of compassion, however, the empathy that Karen Armstrong argues is the great common ground of world religions and which, as Saint Francis might add, includes nonhumans. Consider the National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen who, visiting the Antarctic, dove into the ocean beneath the ice in an effort to photograph the elusive leopard seal, bigger than a grizzly bear. To his horror, Nicklen found what he was looking for. Immediately the leopard seal dropped the penguin that was in her mouth, turning toward him. The great mammal, engulfing Nicklen’s headgear with her mouth—perhaps she mistook his head-mounted camera for the head of a strange new species—slowly lowered her giant teeth. Nicklen reports his legs shaking, his mouth dry, and other signs of intense fear. But then, to Nicklen’s great relief, the seal, instead of bearing down and chopping off both head and camera, ended the threat display. She gently nuzzled him, like a dog play-biting; no skin was broken. But it was not over. Nicklen’s new best friend went ashore onto the Antarctic wilderness and returned with a penguin for Nicklen. To the seal’s surprise, Nicklen let the penguin shoot by him to safety. She tried again, to no avail. Assuming him to be unable to feed himself, she repeated her attempts at carnivorous gift-giving, bringing him smaller and weaker seals, partly consumed and dead seals. She appeared disgusted at what a useless predator he was, was desperate to feed him, and panicked that he might starve. This went on for four days. It was, Nicklen relates, an incredible experience. Such food sharing among members of the same and different species makes empathy and aid and spiritual belonging possible, even as it revolves around the sacrifice of excluded others. Excess provides not only for life’s problems but also for its possibilities.
IN CHAPTER 8, “Thermosemiosis,” I argued that behind
our meaning making and goals is already always the in-itself-meaningless state of thermal equilibrium. In other essays I related this direction to psychedelic drugs, writing, and the recognition that human intelligence is already always a product of a far more encompassing, and in the end wiser, ecological intelligence. In chapter 1, “The Human Is More Than Human,” developing the figure Stefan Helmreich calls Homo microbians,8 I looked for symbiotic causes of our human moods, behaviors, and potential evolution. Although not explicit there, it is worth underlining that hypersex, the rampant gene-trading and endosymbiogenetics of microbes, depends on our status as open thermodynamic systems. Organisms, in the West long pictured as self-sufficient, Aristotelian or Linnaean species, as if they were creationistic instantiations of Platonic Ideas, are not. They are energetically and materially open systems. This is no minor point. It means that, when they get up close and microbial, in one another’s faces and bodies, they have the potential to permanently merge. Scintillating solar light, with excess capacity for work, is degraded by trees, reaching toward the sun and aiming their leaves to maximize their capture of energy, most of which is used not for growth but for moving water through the stomata of leaves, which spreads the energetic equivalent per acre per summer of six tons of dynamite. People troll the world, laying cables and looking for petroleum and methane. Social insects feed and kill one another, regulating the temperature and humidity of their hives and hills and mounds. Cells merge, and cells made of cells merge, and organisms grown of merged organisms evolve into societies that verge on becoming organisms at a higher level of inclusiveness and organization once again. Life’s modular basis, in other words, sets up the conditions for merging, for cellular economization, as organisms evolve ever-more-involuted solutions to ever-present problems of limited resources under regimes of excess and energy flow.
THE REINTRODUCTION OF FUNCTION—the reunion of ontos and telos with bios—is as empirically valid as it is spiritually salutary. As evolution connects us to other organisms, thermodynamics connects life to other complex systems. If life has been forged out of the clay of interstellar space, so thermodynamics instantiates a cosmic process of telic gradient reduction. The global system is organismic, and increases in energy efficiency, as well as in perception, add to the biosphere’s ability to seek out and stably reduce cosmic and earthly gradients. This broad thermodynamics of life and its telic roots is, I maintain, after Copernican heliocentrism, Darwinian evolution, and Wöhlerian antivitalism, a fourth Copernican-level deconstruction. Just as vitalism is wrong, and the chemical stuff of our bodies is not special, so mechanism is wrong and the basic process in which we are involved is not special. Thermodynamics is not all-powerful. Everything need not be reduced to or explained solely in terms of it. Telothermy is more like gravity, whose universal application in no way stops birds (whose wing energy comes from mitochondria-studded muscles powered by a redox, or delayed solar gradient) from flying.
But if we were cosmic journalists nursing our floating martinis and looking at old Io from the comfortable cushion of our space station lounge, and we wanted to report early-twenty-first-century humanity’s basic understanding of itself, we could do worse than to answer the five basic questions of that propagandistically pliable medium: who, what, where, when, and why we are. We are organized collections of cosmically abundant atoms, living on a little planet in the inner part of a planetary system, engaged in a planetwide process of intrinsically purposeful energy distribution.
In other words, telic thermodynamics, as Charles P. Snow suggested about the second law, deserves wide understanding among all human beings interested in empirical science and their connection to the natural world. Paraphrasing Darwin, we might say that anyone whose disposition leads him or her to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly not be attracted to the discovery of a vast overlap between human and living purpose and the telic tendencies of nonliving nature.
Although scientifically telic thermodynamics frames Gaia and symbiogenesis, it also illuminates other areas. For example, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Sigmund Freud postulated a death drive. Life was an aberration in terms of inanimate matter; it thus unconsciously longed to return to its former state, to nonexistence.
The drives, Freud wrote, far from tending toward progress, seek “to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were the state of things which had never been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’”
But Freud was perplexed not only at how the sex (and life) drive, eros or libido, could exist side by side with his death Trieb but also at what it was the sex drive was trying to recapture: “What is the important event in the development of living substance which is being repeated in sexual reproduction, or its forerunner, the conjugation of two protista? We cannot say; and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole structure of our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition between the . . . death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold.”9
There is, I think, a simple, nonmetaphysical answer to Freud. Microbe studies, including organisms that have sex only when they are in dire straits and out of nitrogen, suggest fertilization began in multiple lineages among starved microbes, as discussed in chapter 5. If we grant (and it is not hugely generous) a primordial phenomenology to microbes that includes awareness and touch, urges and pains, chemical sensation and some sort of gratification, we can see the roots of a branching ur-drive. The phenomenological correlate to telos is a very basic kind of hunger, which accompanies or leads to destruction of local gradients needed to sustain the gradient-reducing system. Destructive hunger and procreative lust share a common root in gradient reduction.
In this context we might think of Freud’s death drive, a danger to what Derrida wants to say is an archival drive of conservation (which might be allied with the Schopenhauerian will to live, although in a more symbolic register), in terms of an “archive fever . . . [a] limit [which is not] one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges on radical evil.”10
Of course, Derrida is interested in the necessary obfuscations, a kind of philosophical refusal to collapse the wave function, to keep open possibilities and opposites as part of his own deconstructive kabbalistic project, his metaphysical agenda, his fetish of the secret, the promise, and an ever-changing algebraic shibboleth, one might say the magic word, that protects as sacred an activity beyond discrete formalization. As part of a deep project of what might be called an apophatic or general Judaism, Derrida, critical of biologism, nonetheless gives Freud his materialistic due, underscoring that Freud’s explicit distinction of archaeological and “impressive” representations of memory from the actual, spatial, material operations of the brain does not preclude that such possibilities (and by extension, other cognates of Freudian speculation) will occur in “the future of science.11 It is as if Derrida wants to maintain (not negating the scientific register, but certainly not preferring it either) that life in its bodies and in writing is safeguarding a great secret (as if from itself) that is already always in as much danger of being destroyed as it is of being revealed.
Eros and thanatos stem from the common root of a psychrotropos—a movement toward cold (psychros), a dance of the atoms in chemically cycling and near-equilibrium systems, a natural movement to come, if not to order, then toward equilibrium.
And with differences in effectiveness basically correlated to the maturity of subjectively judged beautiful ecosystems—rain forests and old-growth forests more effective than grasslands, more effective than deserts, and so forth—global life, 3.8 billion years strong with no allegiance to humanity, is the most effective dissipative planetary structure we know of. Borneo and Java jungles, for example, dissipate heat equivalent to Siberia in midwinter. This is known from thermal satellite measurements that show what superficially seems the reverse: these jungles are as cold as Siberia in midwinter. The area above them stays cool as latent heat dissipates via evaporation, water recondensing as cloud cover and rain in the atmosphere. The actively cycling rain forests, reminiscent of “purposeful” convection, are the most powerful biological dissipative systems on the planet. Highly species-rich, they also seem to have more long-term potential stability than the human technological monoculture that is tearing them down.
I have argued that both inanimate, near-equilibrium systems and technoscientific nation-states reflect the natural if amoral intelligence of a universe that creates complex systems to do its thermodynamic dirty work. Death, built into bodies as aging via apoptotic, insulin-regulated, telemorase-rationing cells, helps life hone its gradient-reducing function via natural selection, which works not only at the species but at the cellular (e.g., embryogenesis) and neurological (e.g., memes, mnemic algorithms, habits and their neural correlates) levels.
“I WAS A HIDDEN TREASURE and I longed to be known,” says Allah in Sufi scripture.12 Long before Renaissance paintings portrayed cherubic angels flying toward sun-spangled clouds, life was attracted to concentrated sources of energy, moving toward the light. Tikkun olam () is a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing the world,” originating in classical rabbinic literature but popularized by the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria. As the universe continues to explode, we generally move away from radiating stars even as their matter and energy has, as us, come to life. In the material creation as described in the kabbalah, the world is infused with sparks of divine light, and the spirit’s journey is to reunite with its divine source to restore the primordial realm. Here then is a potential story of the spirit in no obvious conflict with the scientific facts. Life and its intelligence, including human technological civilization, serve to equilibrate the environment, becoming enlightened as light itself dissipates.
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 27
