The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

Where was new mystery to be found?

  In the 1920s and 1930s, at the very moment that Techno Age science fiction was mastering space and time with the aid of transcendence based in matter, advanced Western thought had taken a very strange new turn. Atomic physicists, seeking to locate and identify the ultimate fine grit out of which existence is made, fell through matter entirely and out the other side.

  Underlying the visible material world, they found a hitherto unknown subatomic level of existence. This substrate was more fundamental than our familiar realm of being—it was the stuff out of which the things we see and hear and smell and taste and touch are made. But this stuff, whatever it was, wasn’t matter in the usual sense. It was something very different, paradoxical and elusive.

  In our world—as science was accustomed to dealing with it—matter has surface and substance. It can be observed directly. It can be weighed and measured and manipulated. Most important of all, in interactions of matter it is possible to attribute effects to antecedent causes. All of the efforts and successes of material science had been based upon this premise.

  In the microcosmic world, however, none of these things would prove to hold true. As Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant young physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his contributions to the foundation of quantum mechanics, would eventually come to put it: “All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as position, velocity, color, size and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use them of elementary particles.”552

  Here are some of the strangenesses and difficulties that arise in dealing with the microcosm:

  In contrast to the mass and extension that characterize our sphere, the world within the atom would be overwhelmingly empty. The apparent solidity of the things we see around us would be revealed as an illusion.

  In the world of conventional scientific experience, elements are what they are. In the microcosm, however, matter could be energy in another form, light would be simultaneously a wave and a particle, and elements might be transmuted from one kind to another.

  This underlying level of being could not be observed directly, but only by means of its impact upon scientific instruments. But human-made recording devices would be severely limited in what they could report about the microcosm.

  In the subatomic realm, cause-and-effect would not hold true. Here events would occur in terms of probabilities.

  What is more, for scientists to make any attempt to spy upon the workings of the microcosm would inevitably be to influence what was observed. Whatever they selected to look for would absolutely determine the nature of the results they got.

  This new subatomic level of being might not be the old spirit realm. But, clearly, neither was it any simple cause-and-effect, weigh-and-measure world of tangible lumps where the kicking of rocks could serve as a sufficient test of reality. It was a whole new facet of existence.

  It was undeniable that the quantum world did exist. It would be confirmed, in all its strangeness, by experiment after experiment. Its actuality would underlie one aspect of the coming Atomic Age after another, from the atom bomb to the computer chip.

  But what was it that was lurking down there beyond the range of our ability to see and touch?

  Max Born would think that it was probability waves.

  Werner Heisenberg would suggest that it was mathematical forms, which he would identify with Platonic Ideas.

  A.S. Eddington would simply say, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”553

  The kind of understanding human beings were to have of our interactions with this realm of uncertainty and indeterminacy was even more problematic. What were we to make of the fact that poking it with one kind of stick gave one kind of result, and that poking it with another kind of stick would just as consistently yield the contrary?

  The first construction of this to be offered would be the so-called “Copenhagen interpretation”554 of Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1927. Bohr would suggest that quantum phenomena come into being only as they are observed. That human intention partly determines what the structure of the physical world shall be. That the human mind is a creator of reality.

  Albert Einstein couldn’t accept this, and at physics conferences in the late Twenties, he did his best to overturn Bohr. At last, however, he ran out of arguments and had to step back out of the way of the further development of physics.

  Other physicists, however, would be more ready than Einstein to accept quantum mechanics—and to take in stride the fact that to do so was to admit the previous insufficiency and the future incompleteness of modern Western science.

  There was a considerable irony here. Science had routed spirit in large measure by its claim to be able to answer all questions through weighing and measuring. But at the very moment of spirit’s failure, here was advanced science ready to admit that perhaps it had been a bit over-optimistic in the claims it had formerly made. It would appear that there were undeniable fundamental entities that Western science was inherently unable to weigh and measure.

  The old-time language of spirit had largely been left behind during the long passage through materialism, so when the time came for the Twentieth Century physicist-turned-philosopher to step forward and attempt to explain this new-found mystery to the general public, he was unlikely to resort to the bygone vocabulary of traditional religious belief. Instead, he was apt to speak in the contemporary terms of mind and consciousness.

  Here is how Eddington would say it:

  To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by “mind” I do not here exactly mean mind and by “stuff” I do not at all mean stuff. Still, this is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds, but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness. The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the mind-stuff has spun these imaginings.555

  And he would say further:

  “The mind-stuff is the aggregation of relations and relata which form the building material for the physical world.”556

  We might compare this to A. Merritt writing in The Metal Monster in 1920, half-a-dozen years before the devising of quantum mechanics:

  Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything—man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitation of that which it animates, and in essence the same in all.557

  The answer that scientists like Bohr and Jeans and Eddington would come to give to Merritt’s question would be: “Yes, indeed. Allowing for poetic expression, this is very much the way we suppose things to be.”

  But there should be no surprise that they and Merritt should perceive things in such highly similar terms. In the early Twentieth Century, a considerable number of Western artists and scientists were beginning to look to consciousness as an emerging name for mystery.

  This new awareness of mind as an unknown—perhaps the fundamental unknown—was an almost inevitable result of the failure of spirit.

  Mind had figured centrally in the origin of the modern Western adventure back in the Seventeenth Century. It was a series of three vivid dreams on the night of November 10, 1619 that prompted the young René Descartes to begin the radical philosophical inquiry that resulted in the foundation of the modern scientific method. And, even before he made his basic division between matter and spirit, Descartes’ initial conclusion in his seminal work, A Discourse on Method (1637)—the first principle of his philosophy—was “I think, hence I am.”558

  In elaboration upon this, Descartes would go on to say:

  I . . . concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that i
t may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.559

  This is where modern Western science would begin: with one man’s dream of himself as being in essence a disembodied thought—a placeless, immaterial atom of consciousness observing itself and the material world around it, including its own accidental outward trappings of flesh and blood—and that man’s ability to convince others that they were creatures of this same kind.

  Until the 1920s and the advent of quantum physics, the dream of complete objectivity would be a continuing unexamined assumption of modern science. Western scientists would believe that they could stand outside materiality and observe it without affecting it, or, for that matter, being affected by it.

  But the immaterial pea of consciousness at the center of things, watching and thinking, would be largely forgotten or ignored. Indeed, as the Western concentration upon the study of matter came to prove more and more fruitful, there was a tendency on the part of the heirs and successors of Descartes to identify completely with matter and to lump mind with spirit as an ephemerality that was outside the scope of legitimate scientific investigation. Mind was something that couldn’t be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. At best, it could only be inferred. Perhaps it was some kind of effervescent froth bubbling up spontaneously out of matter. Or maybe it was all an illusion. In any event, to a good simple materialist, mind was a very doubtful area of inquiry.

  Psychology—a word that was used to mean knowledge of the soul before it was adapted to changing times and employed to mean the study of the mind—was the last of the major scientific disciplines to be established, arising in the Nineteenth Century out of natural philosophy and medicine. And, perhaps because it was so lacking in material substance and so vulnerable to suspicions of being spiritualism in covert guise, psychology struggled all the harder to establish itself as serious exact science.

  Thus it was that in the early Twentieth Century psychometricians would come forward with tests that were claimed to measure human mental capacity with precision. And by the early Twenties, the victory of matter over spirit would even lead to the establishment of one American school of psychology, the behaviorists, that would attempt to model itself upon the prototypical hard science—Nineteenth Century cause-and-effect physics.

  The behaviorists would recognize no necessity at all for the hypothesis of mind. They would completely repudiate both consciousness and purpose. Instead, they would presume to account for all human behavior in terms of external stimulus-and-response.

  The founder of behaviorism, Dr. John B. Watson, would say: “Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.”560

  At this very moment, contemporary physicists like Eddington might be rising to declare that the Nineteenth Century verities on which the science of behavior had so recently been founded—materialism, mechanism, determinism and objectivity—actually amounted to no more than irrelevant imaginings spun by the underlying mind-stuff. But to behavioral engineers like Watson, or his Atomic Age disciple and successor, Harvard University’s B.F. Skinner, remarks such as this could only appear dismayingly mentalistic, a craven retreat from the clarity and certitude of objective science into some very thinly disguised last-minute attempt to hang on to spirit.

  However, there would be other Techno Age scientific investigators of mind who would be led in the opposite direction from behaviorism by the failure of spirit and the triumph of matter, toward a widening instead of a narrowing of their subject. These would mainly be physiologists and psychiatrists—medical doctors—rather than academic psychologists. These medical men had practical experience of the sometimes untidy facts of actual human thinking and behavior, as well as intimate experimental knowledge of the functioning of the human brain, sense organs, and nervous system, not merely thumbs grown calloused from clicking stopwatches over the heads of laboratory rats being taught to run through mazes.

  The more doubtful spirit came to appear, the less possible these doctors found it to continue lumping the phenomena of mind in with spirit as a convenient way to dismiss them without having to give them serious consideration. To men like this, it was evident that even if spirit were to be thrown out completely as a legitimate explanation of anything and everything, all the strange thoughts, beliefs, practices and happenings associated with the mind would continue to remain as something requiring careful scientific investigation and explanation.

  A. Merritt’s friend and instructor, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, is an example of one such physician. So early in the game was his work done that he wouldn’t be known as either a physiologist or a psychiatrist, but rather as a specialist in nervous disorders. To Dr. Mitchell, it would be apparent that the human mind was a mystery, and he would attack the problem both through the direct examination of the human brain and nervous system and through the investigation of bizarre and anomalous mental phenomena. For example, he would be the first to describe the effects of peyote in a scientific paper.

  Techno Age physiologists would directly address the question of how the brain gathers data from the sensory organs, and at every step in the process they would find limitation and the possibility of error:

  First, years of experimentation demonstrated that the discriminating powers of the human senses are distinctly limited, both in comparison with the sensory powers of other creatures and in comparison with the ranges of data detected by scientific instruments.

  It was also shown that sensory data encountered by human beings had first to be turned into nerve impulses that then travel at finite speed to the brain—and only there become processed into the sights and sounds and smells we believe ourselves to be experiencing directly.

  Physiologists and their psychologist allies would further demonstrate that of the limited data that are received by the senses and passed along to the brain, only a comparatively small portion actually make their way through the mental veils of awareness into conscious attention.

  And, finally, they would prove again and again that human beings could be tricked by illusion, ambiguity, unexpectedness, and their own preconceptions into seeing and hearing what wasn’t there and into misinterpreting what actually did occur. It would become a favored ploy of instructors in Twentieth Century introductory psychology courses to stage some sudden unanticipated dramatic happening as a means of showing students what partial and subjective witnesses they actually are.

  Taken in sum, these various physical and perceptual investigations amounted to a heavy assault on the unexamined bases of modem Western science. Certainly, they cast considerable doubt on René Descartes’ initial conclusion that the essence of a human being like himself was some remote objective intelligence that could operate alone and apart from the body and examine the nature of matter with a rational and dispassionate eye.

  We might recall that Descartes’ initial sense of himself as a disembodied mind had had its origin in a dream—certainly not the most rational and dispassionate of mental states. And, indeed, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud would take studies of the mind into a whole new dimension through a close examination of the unconscious significance of dreams.

  Freud’s study of dreams would convincingly demonstrate their non-rational nature. Beyond this, he would show the existence of a number of mental processes whose existence and import were not known to the ordinary conscious awareness.

  However, Freud’s own explanatory model of what he discovered would still be limited and mechanistic in its origin. He would think in terms of compartments, pipes and valves, as though the mind were a kind of steam boiler, and he would see the new dimension of mind as an overload chamber in
to which materials that the conscious mind was unable to handle, primarily sexual, could be shunted to relieve excessive pressure.

  Freud’s one-sidedly sexual orientation and the narrowness and rigidity of his mechanistic and deterministic thinking would eventually cause all of his earliest allies and disciples to leave him and go off on their own paths.

  In 1912, Freud’s most favored early disciple, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, would break with him after five years of connection. To all appearance, the disagreement would be over the significance of dreams and how they were to be interpreted. But this would only be the outward sign of a more fundamental unspoken quarrel between them about the nature and scope of the new mental dimension.

  Dreams for Freud were symptoms of repressed thought. But for Jung, dreams were messages from the unconscious, not always immediately comprehensible because they were couched in the language of symbol, but nonetheless purposeful in their structure and intention.

  The real difference between the two pioneer psychiatrists, however, was that Freud perceived the new unknown aspect of mind as a subconscious, a closed auxiliary basement chamber. For him, dreams were clues to the sexual sludge that must be cleaned out of the system if the conscious were to function properly.

  Jung, however, visualized the new reaches of mind as an unconscious, a great undiscovered country much vaster in its dimensions than the meagre territory encompassed by the individual conscious mind. Some of what might be discovered there assuredly did consist of thoughts repressed by the individual, but by far the greater part of the unconscious was common to the collectivity of man. For Jung, dreams were messages from out of this darkness, demanding interpretation.

  Dreams would not be his only clues. Jung would look everywhere for points of entry into the labyrinth of the unconscious. He might be thought of as a medically trained investigator sifting through all the purported evidences of transcendent mystery that had been collected by the Romantics during the previous century, but then left to gather dust in the attics of the Western world. Among these were alternate states of consciousness, anomalous happenings like poltergeist phenomena, the expressions and beliefs of past cultures and foreign cultures, literary and artistic symbology, myth and religion.