The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter, what makes life alive? A generation later, the Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman answered with a deeply original proposition: that life is best defined as freedom, that freedom is the boundary between inanimate matter and animacy.

To me, freedom is the boundary condition where matter reaches for meaning — life, after all, is the only component of the universe free to comprehend the rest. And yet all of our technologies of thought have so far failed to discern what life actually is, how it emerged from non-life, and what to look for when we are looking for it in our laboratories and in the great unfolding experiment that is the universe itself. We have sequenced the human genome and discovered the “God particle,” yet genetics and particle physics have found no common language for communicating and harmonizing their respective discoveries to address the complex question the single answer to which is life.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrote. Watching her mathematician brother — the number theory pioneer André Weil — try to reduce the problem of reality to his own science, watching the founding fathers of quantum mechanics do the same, she lamented: “The state of science at a given moment is nothing else but… the average opinion of the village of scientists [who] affirm what they believe they ought to affirm.”

An epoch later, the villages have drifted so far apart as to grow foreign to each other. Gravitational waves, radioactivity, and DNA belong to the same reality — the reality that made life possible — and yet cosmology, chemistry, and biology are too mute to each other to make sense of the deeper meaning behind their respective discoveries. We are still left wondering how reality happens unto life and how life becomes reality.

Art by Komako Sakai for a modern Japanese interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit

Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker takes up these complex and abiding questions in Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (public library).

Trained as a theoretical physicist and disenchanted with her discipline’s insistence that life is a conceptually banal scientific problem subservient to the fundamentals of space, time, energy, and matter, she holds modern physics accountable for providing “a fundamental description of a universe devoid of life” — that is, a description of the universe that negates the very existence of its describers, we who are very much alive. She writes:

We cannot see ourselves clearly because we have not built a theory of physics yet that treats observers as inside the universe they are describing.

Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In this quest to understand ourselves and the universe that made us, she argues, the vitalists of the eighteenth century — who believed that a concrete non-physical element, a “vital spark,” grants life its aliveness — were no more misguided than the modern materialists who believe that life — that poetry, that whale song, that love — is just a property of physical matter. Reckoning with a colleague’s startling remark that “life does not exist,” she considers the deeper logic beneath this koan-like formulation of the great scientific blind spot of our time:

What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter… There is no magic transition point where a molecule or collection of molecules is suddenly “living.” Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience — that we are living — is nonexistent when you look at our parts. If life is not a property of matter, and material things are what exist, then life does not exist.

(And of course, none of it had to exist at all. Life seems to be the imperative of the unnecessary. Long before modern physics, Darwin marveled at how, on this planet shaped by unfeeling forces and moved by fixed laws, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Here was a biologist trained as a geologist shining a sidewise gleam on a cosmological question — a rare vagabond between the villages of science, from a time before they had become separate continents of thought.)

At the heart of the book is the rigorous, passionate insistence that we need a softer and more elastic explanatory membrane between the three hard problems of reality: the hard problem of consciousness (rooted in the mystery of qualia, that inarticulable essence of what it feels like to be oneself, the felt interiority of being alive in a particular embodiment and enmindment), the hard problem of matter (the fact that everything observable arises from the interaction of particles and forces), and the hard problem of life (sculpted of information and an observer of information). Sara writes:

Cast in this way, all three hard problems become one more fundamental problem we cannot seem to avoid any more than we can seem to answer it: Why do some things exist (or experience existence) and not others? It is perhaps the most perplexing question of our existence that anything should exist at all. And if something exists, then why not everything?

By contracting the pinhole of our scrutiny to the question of life, she intimates, we might be able to begin extrapolating an answer to this largest of questions — something that calls not only for new principles but for a new theory of physics and a dismantling of disciplinary boundaries. A century after Weil, Sara points to the same paradox standing between the life of science and the science of life in our own time:

We don’t yet have a general understanding of the category of things that we should group together and call “life.” Therefore either our categorization is wrong or life is not something to be categorized.

[…]

We cannot always see this clearly because of the arbitrary boundaries we set between the current classification of disciplines we think are needed to solve the problem, which are based on paradigms not suited for solving what life is.

Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Observing that “the boundary between the phenomena we want to think of as life and not life is fuzzy at best and may not exist at all,” she considers the present state of our disciplinary parochialism:

Biologists approach the problem by defining life in terms of observed features of life on Earth, which is not especially useful when you’re looking for life’s origins or for life elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiologists need guiding principles to inform how they conduct their search, but they, too, end up being overly anthropocentric in their reasoning: their search is most often directed at signs of life that would indicate biology exactly as we observe it here on Earth. Chemists either think life does not exist or that it is all chemistry (probably these are equivalent views). Computer scientists tend to focus too much on the software — the information processing and replicative abilities of life — and not enough on the hardware, i.e., the fact that life is a physical system that emerges from chemistry, and that the properties of chemistry literally matter. Physicists tend to focus too much on the physical — life is about thermodynamics and flows of energy and matter — and miss the informational and evolutionary aspects that seem to be the most distinctive features of the things we want to call life. Philosophers focus too much on the need for a definition or the flaws of providing one, and not enough on how we can move as a community beyond the definitional phase into a new paradigm.
Nature does not share these boundaries between disciplines. They are artifacts of our human conception of nature, our need to classify things, and historical contingencies in how our understanding of the reality around us has evolved over the last few centuries. That is, they are the product of paradigms established in the past. We are in part pre-paradigmatic in understanding life as a general phenomenon in the universe because there is no defined discipline that can fully accommodate the intellectual discussion that needs to be had about what life is.

1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

The solution to the unsolved problem of life, she argues, may not be one of new evidence but one of new explanation, just as we watched the planets move for eons before we discerned the laws of their motion to concede a heliocentric universe. Without a clear explanatory model for life here on Earth, she argues, we might never be able to detect life on other worlds — the central task of her own science. With an eye to how the new science of plant intelligence deepens the mystery of what a mind is, Sara considers what kindred blind spots may be afflicting astrobiology:

Plants are just one example that makes clear how the boundary of our imagination does not even intersect with what it is to be among the other multicellular life that surrounds us on this planet.

If we cannot even shift our reference frame enough to understand what it is like to be other inhabitants of our own planet, how could we possibly imagine the truly alien? “Truly alien” here should be understood as other life that does not share any ancestry with our own: that is, that has an entirely unique history with an independent origin. There are no aliens on Earth because as far as we know, all the life we have encountered shares a common history. Even artificial intelligences — sometimes described as alien, are not alien; they are trained on human data, which is itself the product of nearly four billion years of evolution on Earth. AI is as much a part of life on Earth as any of the biological organisms that have evolved here.

Art by Pepita Sandwich from The Art of Crying

A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the emergence of a new “mechanical kingdom” extending the kingdoms of biological life into our machines, Sara argues that our mechanical and algorithmic creations may not only alter the definition of life but help illuminate its origins:

The emergence of a technosphere may be precisely what is required for a biosphere to solve its own origins and therefore to discover others like it. To make this transition and make first contact, it may be critical to where we sit now in time that we recognize how thinking technologies are the next major transition in the planetary evolution of life on Earth. It is what we might expect as societies scale up and become more complex, just as life simpler than us has done in the past. The functional capabilities of a society have their deepest roots in ancient life, a lineage of information that propagates through physical materials. Just as a cell might evolve along a specific lineage into a multicellular structure (something that’s not inevitable but has happened independently on Earth at least twenty-five times), the emergence of artificial intelligences and planetary-scale data and computation can be seen as an evolutionary progression — a biosphere becoming a technosphere.

“Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in one of her finest, least known poems. A proper understanding of life, Sara argues, must account for that fact — for the tenacity with which life not only continues to exist despite the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence (which anchored Richard Dawkins’s wonderful counterintuitive insistence on the luckiness of death) but continues to exist in its particularity despite the infinitely many other possible configurations. She writes:

If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to — and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.

Out of this arises a crucial distinction between life and being alive (highlighted in the biological fact that most of you is dead). Nearly a century after cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener made the then-radical assertion that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” Sara adds:

DNA cannot exist unless there is a physical system (e.g., a cell) with memory of the steps to assemble it. All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute “life.” Life is the high-dimensional combinatorial space of what is possible for our universe to build that can be selected to exist as finite, distinguishable physical objects. Being “alive,” by contrast, is the trajectories traced through that possibility space. The objects that life is made of and that it constructs exist along causal chains extended in time; these lineages of information propagating through matter are what it is to be “alive.” Lineages can assemble individual objects, like a computer, a cup, a cellular membrane, or you in this very instant, but it is the temporally extended structure that is alive. Even over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself — what persists is the informational pattern over time, not the matter.

[…]

The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time. The branching pattern at the tips of this structure is what is alive now, and it is what is constructing the future on this planet.

One of computing pioneer Alan Turing’s little-known diagrams of morphogenesis

In the remainder of Life as No One Knows It, Sara goes on to explore assembly theory — a new framework for understanding the complexity of living organisms by discerning the minimal number of steps required to assemble them from the most fundamental building blocks — as a possible solution to the abiding problem of what we are. Complement it with pioneering biologist Ernest Everett Just — one of the first scientists to consider this question holistically — on what makes life alive, then revisit Meghan O’Gieblyn on our search for meaning in the age of AI and Alan Turing’s favorite boyhood book about the strange science of how alive you really are.

BP

The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called “the art of living.”

That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sandwich explores in The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears (public library) — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence.

She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body’s cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those “custodians of the heart,” as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal).

Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can’t produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs.

The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way.

She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were “the humors of the heart,” to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin’s studies of emotional expressions, which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation.
We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world’s largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle.

This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only came into popular use in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.)

This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes:

It doesn’t matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human.

It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris’s death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories.

Because every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita’s interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the beach, crying “with pure love at the grocery store line.”

She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships.

Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions (which makes a cameo in The Art of Crying as one of many celebrations of other artists’ art), then savor the fascinating evolutionary history of dreaming — our other complex language of reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are.

BP

Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for These Luminous Liminal Days Today)

For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment to those unbidden days in it when summer seems to make a brief and bright return — as if to assure us that time is not linear but planar, that life will always recompense loss, that in the liminal we find the immanent and in the ephemeral the eternal.

No one has captured that enchantment more vividly than Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) in a rhapsodic entry from his journal penned one late and luminous October day in his thirties.

Emerson writes:

On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes.

He would later draw on this journal entry for the opening passage of his landmark book-length essay Nature (public library), considered the founding document of Transcendentalism (a term his visionary friend Elizabeth Peabody coined). Following a short poem, the essay begins:

There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.

The phrase “Indian summer” entered the lexicon in Emerson’s lifetime, peaked a century and a half later, and has since been falling out of use in the slow repair work of culture. But we have failed to replace it with a new term for those golden echoes of summer that harmonize the hymn of letting go that is fall. Perhaps “the halcyons” can do.

Complement with ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn, in nature and in life, as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Emerson on how to trust yourself, how to live with presence, how we become our most authentic selves.

BP

The Strength of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy

The Strength of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy

“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her exquisite statement of belief, having lived through two World Wars and stood with the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War and used her own art as an instrument of cohesion and translation between selves. In times of political crisis, we seem to forget that societies are made of selves, are made at all — that they are collaborative acts of the imagination, works of the creative spirit emanating from the collective conscience of this relational constellation of individuals. As such, they require of us a deep and imaginative sensitivity to other selves, to what it is like to be someone else — that hallmark of our humanity we call empathy.

The English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) takes up these questions in an essay titled “What I Believe,” originally written just before the outbreak of WWII and later included in the out-of-print treasure Two Cheers for Democracy (public library) — his 1951 collection of essays based on and building upon his wartime anti-Nazi broadcasts.

E.M. Forster, queer and contemplative

A decade after D.H. Lawrence extolled the strength of sensitivity and a decade before James Baldwin observed in his timeless essay on the creative process that “society must accept some things as real; but [the creative person] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen,” Forster writes:

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research (or they may be what is called “ordinary people,” who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbors.) All these people need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.

Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.

But more than thriving in democracy, creative people — who are people of deep sensitivity to the world outside and the world within and the worlds others carry — make democracy thrive. Half a century before the word “empath” entered popular use, Forster upholds just that kind of person as the pillar of a harmonious society that serves and is served by the highest human potential of its citizens. In a passage of staggering pertinence to our own time, to this world once again teetering on the event horizon of totalitarianism in countless countries, he writes:

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke… Their temple… is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure.

Detail from the art in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina, created between 7,300 BC and 700 AD.

Because democracy starts “from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization,” the relationships between individuals — that living reliquary of the Heart’s affections — are the golden threads that give the whole tapestry its shape and vibrancy. (This is why, as Hannah Arendt so incisively observed, dictators prey on loneliness.) With so little left to believe in when the world falls apart, Forster argues that what we can still and always have faith in is one another. With an eye to our personal relationships as “something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty” despite how opaque we remain to ourselves and each other, he writes:

Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a ‘Person,’ and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we cannot. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not unchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Redoubling his insistence on the power of personal loyalties — which, in their contrast to political loyalties, embody Bertrand Russell’s poignant distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge” — Forster adds:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

A country — a civilization — is only possible if we don’t betray each other. In consonance with his visionary contemporary Donald Winnicott, who listed reliability among the key qualities of a healthy mind, Forster writes:

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract… It is a matter of the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is natural warmth… One can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.

Complement with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy and Jenn Shapland on the power of a thin skin, then consider the radical act of choosing to love anyway.

BP

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