Weird Squared

Let me now attempt to sketch how, say, a crocodile, might be explained by the weird theory that an order of intelligence, an order of souls, may have invaded the order of matter. Crocodiles are a neat and also difficult example because they appear (to us) as vicious and ugly creatures that prey on innocent zebras and wildebeests. I think you know where I am going.

Serious problems arise when we contemplate this theory in any kind of detail—indeed the same problems arise no matter how we picture the agency behind living, embodied entities. One is that intelligence seems to be required for the arrangement of matter into effectively functioning and self-reproducing chemical machines. The only alternative explanation we have, if not intelligence, is the operation of sheer chance in a cosmic space where movement is possible. But the complexity of life is so great that the odds against this explanation are impossibly high, the time demanded impossibly long. Quite an extensive literature is available critiquing the theory of evolution based on chance. In popular parlance, this is the problem of a hundred monkeys, pounding a hundred typewriters, accidentally producing the collected works of Shakespeare.

Instead of belaboring an explanation based on probability, let’s assume that intelligence must be at work. The dictionary defines it as a power to apprehend facts and their relationships. If you unpack that definition, you ultimately get consciousness. But what we actually see in nature is end-seeking entities that seem to operate without consciousness, at least as we understand that word. How can these observations be reconciled?

I would propose that seeing things at the right scale might turn out to be helpful. I offer an analogy. Would you say that the City of Detroit is intelligent? Obviously by Detroit I don’t mean any official representative of it—not its mayor or its city council. I mean the city itself. The City of Detroit itself is most definitely real. But it is not, actually, in the category of things usually thought to be possessing or lacking intelligence. Next question. Could the City of Detroit have come into being without intelligence? It is literally made of objects all of which clearly testify to the presence of intelligent agents. I think you also suspect where I am going here.

Now to extend this. I claim to be an intelligent agent, but my effective reach diminishes a great deal away from my immediate surroundings. I’m served by highly developed modern transport and communications systems, but I can only form the vaguest comprehensive consciousness of anything as big as Detroit. If asked what Detroit needs or what may be wrong with it, I’m capable of speculation, but individually I cannot do much about it. And if we enlarge the scope, my already nonexistent powers diminish at each step: Michigan, the United States, the Western civilization… I’m less than a molecule at these scales.

Now I turn to an order of intelligence interfering with, or invading, the order of matter. Suppose that this process began at a very small scale—say at the atomic or subatomic level. Why there? Well, it may have begun there because a very subtle power, the power of immaterial intelligence, may only be strong enough actually to influence matter at its lower manifestations, down there where minute quanta of energy are moving. Let us say that souls, intelligences, encountered matter down there in the tiny, examined it, differentiated this from that, drew inferences, understood this, understood that—and, again at the very small scale, began a process of experimentation. Let’s further assume that they found this environment difficult to work in—too much flux, huge, coarse, violent energies, etc. And let us assume that an entire community of such beings, attempting to get a foothold, messing with matter as best they could, fascinated by it—or, alternatively, unable to escape it—at last succeeded in delimiting the disturbance of the material flux by building a spherical container inside of which the flux is low. Here, inside the proto-cell, they next began to optimize this interesting world. The first problem, of course, would be to continue to maintain the wall that keeps things relatively peaceful inside. If we image the scale in the right way, the agencies would be small compared to the proto-cell. And in the same way in which I barely understand Detroit so they, also, barely understood the cell but, collectively they maintained it for their own purposes.

But how do you get from here to crocodiles? It’s not a very great jump. It strikes us as outrageous to imagine an intelligent order creating a biosphere that is hierarchically organized so that the higher feed on the lower—so that crocodiles waste innocent wildebeests so that the green, ugly, scaly things can laze in the sun satiated. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It’s entirely possible that an intelligent order, limited in its ability to perceive, can produce vast structures that live destructively on others, the others also created by other groupings of the same intelligence. The inhabitants may not be aware of what they’re doing. The crocodile, of course, is a later creature, but its machinery, thus its brain, is still quite limited. The information that flows from it to the inhabitants is not very useful.

Another analogy. When our military in the righteous pursuit of that sacred duty, national security, vast distances away, in brightly shining aircraft (don’t they resemble a little the white teeth of the crocodile?) rain death and destruction on villages in the border zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan, hunting some Al Qaida operative, and producing regrettable collateral damage in the process, is the beast that does this, the United States of America, really conscious? Is any collective really conscious? Are there, perhaps, awakening souls inside the crocodile who mildly mourn the wildebeest?