Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (23 page)

Bacteria are omnisexual. Genes received by bacteria in one generation are passed down indefinitely thereafter during cell divisions. The discovery that most of the DNA in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms is “redundant,” coding for no known proteins, suggests that it may be left over from the merging of stranger bacteria whose incorporation produced superogatory information, genetic “deadwood.” An example of bacterial recombination is the evolution of penicillin-resistant staphylococci. The gene that directs the synthesis of an enzyme that digests penicillin probably arose in soil bacteria. But via phage-mediated omnisexual exchanges, staphylococci have incorporated such resistance and survived the hospitalization of their hosts. Omnisexuality makes bacterial boundaries plastic and forces us to view bacterial cells not in isolation but as the cell of an extremely diffuse yet continuous Gaian body. Indeed, Sorin Sonea has postulated that such horizontal gene transfer among bacteria qualifies them as a single superorganism whose body coincides with the surface of the planet.
24

Aside from fictions of Gaians using bacterial omnisexuality to remodel their bodies after the image of beauty or strength or even the demihuman metazoans of Greek myth, where does the confluence of bacterial omnisexuality and evolving notions of the human body lie? Whether discussing the disappearing membranes of endosymbiotic bacteria on their way to becoming membrane-bound organelles, or the current changes within the global human socius, the rectilinear notion of the human self, the bounded, stands challenged today from yet another viewpoint, that of the new biology. This zoological “I” is open to radical revision.
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How does a concept of the individual that leans toward the physical model of bacterial omnisexuality and aesthetic model of a
différance
differ from the “encased self” model of zoocentrism? One example is that used by Burgess—the artist whose production, genius, or gift results not from her or his own body but from the interference patterns generated by a series of symbiotically living forms (spirochetes in this case). The disease that causes discomfort and near madness is also a symptom of a musical disturbance of former ecological harmony, of what was once environment,
oikos,
but is now neither home
to
nor home
of
but rather body. As an organism’s connections to the external environment grow, that environment becomes its body. Like the snail whose house is carried on its back, the “case” of the “self” has been moved, through an incorporation of what once would have been called inanimate matter—admittedly, organically worked and reworked. The boundaries of selfhood are expanding. In microbial ecology, the “I” is literally a figure of large numbers. Pieces of the self—from plasmid and viruses to laboratory-spliced genes and prostheses, from milking machines to mechanical and real hearts—are obvious examples of a circulation of elements of subjective identities always already undergoing active (de)composition. Because the self is not closed but open—for the relations of the elements of physiological identity and psychological subjectivity link up with all matter through all time—it would be hasty to dismiss the general medieval scheme of microcosmic correspondence as mere superstition. Nor, of course, is this in any way to suggest a one-to-one linkage or reliably complete mapping for the series prokaryote–protist–person(a)–planet.

Today, for humans, the body and the self are most clearly in a state of fundamental Heraclitean change. The proverbial river is recognized as a conduit in the circulatory system of a being that has exerted control over the composition and redox state of its atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
26
Ostensibly, human bodies are integrating newly evolved and evolving viruses, only some of them, such as herpesvirus, identifiable from their pathogenicity. The majority of viruses and bacteria circulate around the biosphere and technosphere harmlessly and unnoticed, joining together fragments in
jamais-vu
combinations. Humans, too, are not merely
zoe
or metazoa, in the sense of bare life, or mitotically cloned cells differentiating from an embryo into tissues. We are metametazoa, metazoans whose industrial pollutants, ecological impact, and telecommunications have not only altered the shape of life on Earth but forced us to recognize the environment of the sum total of life on Earth as a totality with shared destiny, as a single, integrated, sensitive, and sensing system.

Life, according to my mother, is
bacterial.
And this bacterial world, according to Lovelock, has a life span. The biggest challenge to life over the long run has little to do with the paltry meanderings of human beings. It comes rather from the source of all life, the Sun. According to astronomical calculations, the core of the Sun is expected to swell as helium begins to fuse with carbon in nuclear reactions, luminosity increases, and the Sun becomes a “red giant.” To forestall a dangerous heating of Earth attendant with the death throes and rise in temperature and expansion of the Sun would likely involve carbon dioxide. As is widely known, carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse gas” whose presence in the atmosphere heats Earth by trapping infrared radiation. Gaian scientists believe that (over the long run) life has managed to sequester increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to counter the effects of a Sun that has been growing steadily more luminous since the inception of life on Earth. The carbon dioxide that has vanished from Earth’s atmosphere exists on the terrestrial surface in the form of carbon-containing minerals and carbon-based life-forms. If the biosphere has indeed been removing CO
₂
keeping itself cool, Gaia’s future as a terrestrial being extends only some hundred million years: there is only so much carbon dioxide that can be removed from the atmosphere to counter the increasing luminosity of the Sun (and this, of course, assumes a total reversal of the recent increase in atmospheric CO
₂
, because of human industry).
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Although imminent from a geological point of view, a hundred million years is about twenty times the average life span of a vertebrate species. It is almost certain that by this time
Homo sapiens
will have become extinct or speciated. Humanity as a species is no more distinct than animals as individuals, and I have tried in this essay to use the new biology to relativize that zoocentric bedrock, the bounded, autonomous self. In a certain sense, this relativizing represents a preliminary sacrifice to the Sun, whose red giantism “we” at least will have escaped.

CHAPTER 13

KERMITRONICS

LIKE THE MIME IN A CIRCUS
who pretends, from the dirty floor, to balance the high-wire walker, or the clown who, twirling her fingers with a gleeful simper, seems to send the acrobats falling head over heels in their aerial somersaults, before reaching through thin air to catch a helping hand, so we may be pretending that we are running the show. Only in our case we don’t seem to know we are pretending. The performers wear no special clothes. They are not paid union dues or the celebratory object of a special occasion. The big top, far from being the circumscribed arena of a circus tent, is the surprisingly vast if more intimate space of our own head.

The fact that, under experimental observation, tiny foraminifera select certain sizes and colors of glass beads to build their living skeletons, shows that even these tiny creatures have choice. But is it free? Doesn’t a computer have choice as it goes through the complex sifting, winnowing process of its electronic operations?

In 2002 I impressed undergraduate students in an English class in Danville, Kentucky, who’d read my cowritten work (with the plagiarized title)
What Is Life?,
in which life is defined as “matter that chooses.” I know that they read the book because they looked genuinely surprised when I admitted I no longer knew if I believed in free will. Three and a half centuries before recent experiments that seem to prove him right, the philosopher Benedict de (or, in his Jewish appellation, Baruch) Spinoza argued, on the basis of logic and intuition, that we do not really have free will. Rather, we are simply not aware of the causes of our own thoughts and behavior. Observing those thoughts and behavior, we jump to the conclusion that we caused them. And, unlike that clown, who entertains us but is not fooled by her pretending to control the trapeze artists, we fall for it, again and again, spellbound by a show that seems to work itself, with neither clown nor safety net.

“So the infant,” Spinoza writes, “believes that he freely wants the milk; the angry boy that he wants vengeance; and the timid, flight. Again, the drunk believes it is from a free decision of the mind that he says those things which afterward, when sober, he wishes he had not said. Similarly, the madman, the chatterbox, and a great many people of this kind believe that they act from a free decision of the mind, and not that they are carried away by impulse. Because this prejudice is innate in all men, they are not easily freed from it.”

Lift the book, put it down. Decide, decide not to decide.

Although now I can see that “choosing” does not necessarily mean “freely choosing,” I might have to change my mind again, whether I choose to, sensu stricto, or not. There is no question that we feel we are free, up to a point, but there is no proof for it either: we may just be unaware, as Spinoza clearly explained three centuries ago, of the causes of our behavior. It is what my mathematician friend Steve Shavel calls “the last Ptolemeic.” Like the idea that we are the center of the universe (as we were in Ptolemeian astronomy), the idea that we are the originators of our own thoughts and behaviors is one we humans don’t want to give up.

Indeed, it is an insult. I can look out my window and
see
the Sun come up in the east. In the same way I can
feel
that it is my free decision to choose this very specific and, hell, sesquipedalian word. How dare Spinoza, let alone Sam Harris three centuries after the fact, call into question the subjectively obvious reality of my own freedom.

I remember my astonishment upon visiting my father’s house above the gorges of Lake Cayuga in Ithaca, sitting on his plush black leather couch before a glass coffee table in an open room and “proving” my freedom by lifting a water glass of my own volition.

Although the discussions I had with him sometimes hid our emotional attachment and conflicts under the umbrella of intellectuality, this particular conversation seemed to be all, or mostly, business. I was in the company of a red-headed girlfriend who was a great admirer of science and thrilled to meet my famous father. I was feeling good about myself not only because I was with her but because I had just finished a book,
What Is Life?
that, unlike some of my other attempts, finally seemed to be a successful blend of science and Continental philosophy. Influenced by Heidegger’s student, the philosopher of biology and scholar of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, the book made a strong argument that one of life’s signal traits was its sentience and, part and parcel of that, its existential power over itself, its power to choose.

The friend took what I then thought was the underdog position in her discussions with me. Determinism was such a powerful scientific principle, and the causality of chemical and physical links so powerfully explanatory throughout nature, that there did not seem, that we had no call—other than the usual hubris—to exempt our selves from these causal networks. If I thought that I, like Samuel Johnson rebutting Bishop Berkeley’s idealism with the kick of a real rock, was going to lay to rest scientific determinism simply by picking up a glass and saying, “I decide,” I had another thing coming to me.

Just because it seems that Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, just because it is comforting to think that I am controlling my actions, doesn’t make it so.

Niels Bohr, who argued with Albert Einstein’s famous determinism, going so far as to say that Einstein should quit telling God what to do, also said, “There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

Can free will and its opposite both be true? Another great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, seemed to think so:

I think we may be able to make sense of this seemingly bizarre statement if we consider time. The past seems solid to us, impermeable, closed. The future, however, the now on which we are on the edge, upon which I am as I hesitate midstream in the finishing of this sentence, seems open, liquid—not closed but close, alterable by thought, permeable by whim.

But can this be so? The past was once the present; they are part of the same process . . . so maybe the difference we see is an illusion, somehow to do with time. If we were raised up to another dimension, then maybe the differences between the great truth of freely deciding (if only to a minor degree our own movements and cable channels and friends and foods) and being cryptically forced to do things would be rectified. The mystical
coincidentia oppositorum,
the unity of opposites, would be realized—not by a logical contradiction but by a shift of perspective.

It would not be the first time appearances were found wanting. Any number of optical illusions show that shapes and sizes can differ from our perception; Benham’s wheel, with only black and white curved stripes, produces light browns, reds, and greens that quickly vanish when it stops rotating. Because of the equidistance of our ears, we easily can mistake a sound in front or directly on top of us for one behind us.

But in general we realize we have been fooled only when one or a number of senses contradict and correct the initial illusion. Thus, if you insert your pencil into a glass of water, it will seem to be bent because light refracts it. To prove this isn’t so you only have to touch the pencil or remove it from the water. The separate senses provide redundancy, giving us a generally coherent picture of the world and allowing us to revise anomalies when they arise. When we can’t, as when a magician does a sleight of hand, we may conclude that our senses, perhaps purposefully misdirected, have misled us.

Giuseppe Trautteur, a physicist at the University of Naples, is interested in what he calls the “double feel” of free will. On the basis of logic and experimental evidence, Trautteur accepts that free will is an illusion, but he argues that it differs from other illusions because, unlike them, it cannot be directly tested. For example, we check with a ruler that the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion are actually equidistant, or with our hands that the sight of a pencil apparently bent in a glass of water is in fact an optical illusion. There is no such recourse to redress the strong feeling of free will that, however, we can learn to experience doubly. Experientially it is there, but cognitively, as we investigate it, it begins to fade. Trautteur calls “double feel” this experience “of a conscious subject who feels he is performing a free action and at the same time is ineluctably convinced of the illusory nature of free will.”
2

It is interesting to speculate how Spinoza, who seems to have been the first person to have logically deconstructed free will, came to his conclusion. Deeply influenced by René Descartes, Spinoza turned the dualist on his head. He was what I would call a Cartesian monist: someone who accepted Descartes’s influential separation of reality into “thinking stuff” (
res cogitans
) and “extended reality” (
res extensa
), but then put the two—mind and matter—back together again. The speculative answer to my question is rather obvious: in recombining the artificially separated mind from matter, Spinoza returned to it the attribute science had granted matter, considered causal, “mechanical,” explicable by laws of physics. Reunified with matter, mind, including God’s mind and humanity’s, became as causal as the motions of the planets or the eternally valid relationship of two lines.

Descartes, you’ll recall, who was into anatomy, speculated that the pineal gland, at the time known only from human brains, to be a sort of hotline to God and free will. For Descartes, humanity shared in the divine ability to choose outside the causal network of science. The world of things was separated from the world of thoughts, which we alone possessed in the animal kingdom. It excused our use of them, unfeeling brutes, investigable automatons. It also allowed us to examine the material world as a mechanism. This seems to have been a sort of compromise with the church, concerned about the increasing successes of the scientific method and its encroachment into the sacred realms of the heavens and life.

Spinoza’s monism owed much to Descartes but was more consistent—and it had far-reaching political and scientific repercussions. I knew Spinoza was a huge influence on science: he was a great favorite of Einstein and I remembered that my father, an atheist, said he believed in the God of Einstein and Spinoza—which is, in a sense, to say that he did not believe in God at all, because, depending on how you read him, by “God” Spinoza means Nature—not just visible Nature but nature as timeless and infinite, the impersonal, certain, necessary, eternal, and true realm accessed by the mathematicians and geometers. Spinoza extended Descartes’s realm of geometry and necessity to include the human mind and God. He basically took back what Descartes had granted to the church. There were no special allowances where the realm of necessary relationships and causality did not apply. In fairness, Descartes, having learned from the examples of the tortured Bruno and the imprisoned Galileo, was trying to save his ass if not his soul. Spinoza, who translated into Dutch one of Descartes’s works, was probably not as worried. He also may have been braver. By evening out the playing field, by removing the get-out-of-necessity-free card that Descartes (smoothing over potential problems with the church, by avowing an exceptional status to humans) reserved for people, Spinoza collapsed the Cartesian dualism that still affects us, between the
res extensa
and the
res cogitans,
material and cognitive reality. In doing so, he unified a world that had arguably been illicitly split. Which is why I think it’s fair to speak of him as a Cartesian monist. He was playing the same game as Descartes, but he got rid of the special rules, the anthropocentric cheating!