Ecological Intelligence (9 page)

Time, then, is not what we think it is. According to our conventional view, only the present is real or special, but when viewed from this other, objective dimension, the past, the present, and the future are equally real and present, says theoretical physicist Paul Davis. In other words, time does not flow and not only is our notion of yesterday, today, and tomorrow an illusion, but there is also no such thing as the present moment either. He points out that the arrow of time might indicate the future, but this does not imply that the arrow is moving toward the future any more than a compass needle pointing north indicates that the compass is moving north. Instead, as difficult as it might be for us to grasp, “all of eternity is laid out in a four-dimensional block or field, composed of time and the three spatial dimensions” says Davis. This is a reminder of the block universe that Greek philosopher and mathematician Parmenides had intuited nearly three thousand years earlier. Does this mean we must throw away our clocks? The answer is no. We sense time psychologically. Yes, it is likely, under certain conditions, that time might lose its separate identity from space, but it is important to recognize that this does not mean that time is identical to the three dimensions of space, says Davis. Time and space enter into daily experience and physical theory in distinct and measurable ways. This distinction, he says, is important in the everyday world of the human animal, for it underpins the key notions of cause and effect, preventing them from being hopelessly jumbled.

A
t the beginning of the 1920s, writes Paul Johnson in
The History of
the Modern World
, “the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism”—the notion that anything goes. No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God, believing passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong. He also believed that Nature was teleological or purposive. “God does not play dice with the universe,” was his famous response to his friend Neils Bohr when the latter questioned him about the seeming randomness of cosmic events.

In modern science, randomness versus purpose in Nature is hotly debated. Both sides of the argument have merit. “The manifestations of life, its expressions, its forms, are so diverse that they must contain a large element of the accidental,” wrote distinguished scientist and biologist Jacob Bronowski in his book
The Ascent of Man
, “… and yet the nature of life is so uniform that it must be constrained by many necessities.” Who can argue the seeming randomness of an asteroid collision with the Earth, and yet who can deny at least a hint of purpose in the ongoing cycles of life and death and the seasons of every living thing? Who knows, Nature might indeed have a purpose, but it is certainly not in accordance with what the human animal would like it to be.

If Nature does have a purpose then we have to accept that we are a part of it. If not, then it is likely that we will give it one. It is part of the psychological integrity and survival of our peculiar species. For example, why is it that whenever there is a call to assist in the preservation and conservation of an endangered species, men and women rally to this call? If it is the purpose of Nature for animals to go extinct, then why not let the animals go extinct? Why not let the wilderness vanish? Because there is something in the human psyche that says no. It would seem that there is something in us that acknowledges the purpose of a whale, an elephant, or a butterfly. But what purpose? At a lecture at the University of Cape Town in 1982, author Laurens vander Post answered this question pointedly. Referring to the psychological integrity of the human being, he said, “The conservation of animals and plants is more important to human beings than we are to them. These forms of life are vital for our survival.”

Roderick Frazer Nash, a former professor of history and environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, framed it differently during a lecture on the philosophy of wilderness in 1987. He invited listeners to think about the values of wilderness (which in the same lecture he had previously outlined factually) in terms of an analogy with a woman who asks, “Why do you love me?”

Try telling her that you worship her, that you cherish the life you have lived together, that she is necessary for your mental welfare, that her presence in your life makes you different, that in her own special way she is beautiful, that she inspires you to be creative, and that she challenges you and offers you an alternative to the way most other women are in the world.

P
ushing the envelope of human consciousness does not come with-out a price and neither did the formula E=mc
²
. That same equation, filled with mathematical and poetic insight, was pregnant with a mushroom-shaped shadow that was to become the blueprint for the atomic bomb and nuclear war—grave and gravid stuff. It is no wonder that Einstein, at the end of his life, said that there were times when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker. However, in support of a great man, let us look again at that equation.

E=mc
²
was in fact a multiple pregnancy, incubating the exciting field of quantum theory, a system of mechanics based on the wave-particle duality of matter and radiation. The duality phenomenon is also known as the observer effect. In other words, light can be seen to travel in waves or particles, depending on the intention of the observer. The theory introduces us to the concept of an invisible field to explain the astonishing, nonclassical behavior of subatomic particles. As if connected or supported in a field of interaction, the behavior of these particles is such that there seems to be no usual cause-and-effect relationship between them. In other words, their influence, one upon the other, is instantaneous. Absurd? Read on…

Another characteristic of the behavior of subatomic particles is that they manifest in quantum leaps. This is another way of saying that there is no apparent movement of the particle from point A to point B.In what could be a hint of what the poets refer to as a web of life, a particle therefore manifests or unveils itself at point B as if it had always been there. Then there is the observer effect, a phenomenon reminding us that the very act of observing particles causes them to manifest. The act of observation creates the spacetime event, telling us that every subatomic particle exists firstly in a virtual state, the actual state manifesting itself in accordance with the intention of the observer.

S
tanding on the shoulders of Einstein, German physicist Werner Heisenberg proposed his uncertainty principle, a theory informing us that we can know the motion or velocity of an electron and we can know its position, but we cannot know both at the same time. This principle predicts that the harder one tries to scrutinize the movements of a subatomic particle, the more elusive it becomes. The mere act of focusing on the particle is enough to disturb it. This conclusion was based on the understanding that waves of light could not be emitted at an arbitrary rate but only in “packets” called quanta, and that each quantum had a certain amount of energy that was greater the higher the frequency of the waves. Stephen Hawking provides one of the most accessible explanations of the uncertainty principle in his classic,
A Brief History of Time
.

In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately. The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle. Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and this will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distances between the wave crests of light, so one needs to use light of a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely…[but] one cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use a quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Moreover, the more accurately one measures the position, the shorter the wavelength of light that one needs and hence the higher the energy of a single quantum. So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount. In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa…Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world.

Ultimately it is impossible to know exactly how the constituents of matter are behaving. “As soon as I say: IT IS RE AL, it vanishes,” said Octavio Paz when asked to define the essence of poetry. And then there is Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who raised a glass of wine to toast his wife: “I know you so well,” he said, “that I haven’t a clue who you are.” The physicist and the poet…I wonder which is which…who spins around whom? Such is the language of poetry and of physics.

T
he “hidden invariables” of relativity and quantum theory preceded the “hidden order” of what is known in physics today as chaos theory, a fascinating discovery of the nature of turbulence, irregularity, and randomness in our lives. Invariably defined as an absence of order, we do not sit easily with the notion of chaos. However, it now appears that chaos, when looked at differently, can be seen to have its own dynamic, its own order, and that there are special patterns of regularity in what we perceive as being irregular or random. It would appear that strange laws of chaos exist behind most of the things we consider remarkable about our world—the human heartbeat, human thought, storms, the structures of galaxies, the creation of a poem, cloud build-up, traffic congestion, the impact of elephants on woodlands, the rise and fall of wild-dog populations, the spread of a forest fire, a winding coastline, and even the origins and evolution of life itself.

Depending on the intensity of one’s focus, what might appear as an orderly situation at one level of magnification is turbulent, irregular, or chaotic at another. Psychologically, any prolonged focus on any one thing, be it a person, a fantasy or a situation, is a good definition of a neurosis, a reminder that we have to learn how to vary the focus if we are to see the bigger picture in our situations. “Do no thing in excess,” says Apollo. Vary your focus every now and then. Do some scanning for a change.

Chaos theory says yes and no. It reminds us that whatever interpretation we make about our perceptions of the world we can be sure that there is information missing. It tells us that the truths we seek can never be fully grasped. It reminds us also of the transformational significance of the missing information, of the dormant treasures within it—when we are open to it. It is clear to me that pre-Christianera Greek writer Xenophanes, in this two thousand-year-old untitled poem translated by Karl Popper, understood the significance of missing information and of uncertainty…

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

All things to us, but in the course of time

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods

Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.

For if by chance he were to utter

The final truth, he would himself not know it…

Because quantum theory appeals to that which is deeply intuitive in us, Einstein initiated a revolution that would challenge the way we think about ourselves and about our world. It was an invitation to think differently about space, time, and uncertainty. And yet most of us find this extremely difficult. Why? Because it is inconvenient, because we’ve gotten used to living in an egooriented, three-dimensional world where the past is behind us, to be forgotten, and where the future is out of our hands. For many, the only time that interests us is now. The only space of concern is the one we occupy. Usually, it doesn’t matter what happens in the rest of the world or to the environment, unless or until it affects us directly. Sadly, this attitude has been central to the perpetuating causes of our current environmental crises. It is nothing short of what can be described as a lethal environmental lethargy. It is easy to plead ignorance with regard to what we are doing to the land, the sky, and the seas, but it does not make us innocent. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance has been the catalyst in practically every environmental mishap of this past century.

It is time to take Nature seriously—to develop a sensitivity not only to our macrocosmic world of cause and effect, but to other realities also, to the world of the small, where uncertainty and the observer effect is taken personally. It is time to stop squirming away from the uncomfortable realization that we live in two worlds: a three-dimensional world of measured meaning and another, a curving, four-dimensional world of uncertainty. Absurd? The answer is no. It is no more absurd than the proven theory that light possesses both the qualities of waves and particles and that it can be any one of two things at the same time.

The thorns of the ziziphus remind us that we live a dual existence. The DNA molecule itself, the essence of biological life, comes as a double helix. Ours is a world of process, of paradox, a dual world of macro and micro space, of signs and symbols, of clockwork reality and of another, equally important reality, where time and causality have a different meaning. If we are genuine about rediscovering ourselves in Nature, then there is only one thing to do. We have to commit ourselves to the process. We have to hold the tension that comes with a dual existence, no matter what. If this sounds true, then “Say yes quickly!” urges the poet Rumi. “Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about.”

I
nside you there’s an artist you don’t know about? If this rings true then it is likely that you are interested in that other vast field of uncertainty—depth psychology.