Let Us Start With Phytoplankton

I have problems imagining that the life process had a plan, complete in every detail, before the work of its creation started. But let’s give it a try. For that purpose let me borrow Plato’s Demiurge and imagine what he might have thought. The Demiurge did not create, of course; he merely produced—from preexisting stuff. And having life process in mind— imagined from the outset as ranging from high to low, and how each part would be maintained—the Demiurge, looking around, would have noted that while bodies of water held plenty of good things, a good place to start, and water itself a right handy material, in future, he thought, higher life would need oxygen for its internal combustion—but there was none of it in the atmosphere just then. Oxygen was there, to be sure, but bound up with hydrogen and carbon. So the Demiurge began—the plan already in his head. He said: “Let us start with minute creatures in the ocean. That’ll give us some practice. They’ll feed on carbon dioxide; their wastes will be oxygen; the gas will rise up and enrich the atmosphere; that will serve those other creatures still on my drawing board.” And the phytoplankton came about…

Now the Demiurge is not a communicative sort. This utterance was quite unusual. His ways are right mysterious, and hence we don’t know much about the phytoplankton. Are they, like, people? Or are they machines? Or something in between?

If they are machines, well, so be it. But if they are something in between, how do we picture them? Do they “have a life”? A big problem arises here. “Having a life,” for me, is not merely to have a succession of feeling states. I have them too, to be sure, but the crucial difference is that I am aware of them—while simultaneously being outside the process. If phytoplankton have feeling states yet they are unaware of having them, they lack all thinkable reality for me—except as things. I like to think that they do, too, have a life—but I manage that by projecting something into these creatures for which I have zero proof—except their own end-seeking motions. But those motion are ascribable to unconscious feelings states. Outer life, yes; inner life? No.

Therefore, of course, Descartes saw only automata. So why does that displease me? It shouldn’t. It’s logical. Well, I cannot find any reason whatsoever for an automaton unless it serves some purpose that lies outside of it. We make a mechanical frog that hops across the table. Why? Our own amusement. The Demiurge, if he had a purpose—beyond amusement—must have had the higher animals in mind, one supposes. But for them to be viable at all, a whole ecosystem had to be created. Indeed the whole planet had to be transformed.

But then, what about man? If humans were the end product, the Demiurge was up against it. He could make little machines in which chemical signals (call them feelings) cause different parts to respond to other chemical signals which cause pre-programmed appropriate behavior, much like what we see the mechanical frog doing as it responds to the spring inside—and hops. The Demiurge, to put it mildly, is severely challenged—being only able to use existing materials. How then can he make a human, the only creature we genuinely know to “have a life” as we have it. What is that something? And if it is in us, is it absent in the phytoplankton? So what is life?

I wish the Demiurge would speak. But he is so astonished by what he has made, he has fallen entirely silent. Or was he perhaps merely what his name actually originally meant in Greek, a “public worker,” thus someone out to do a job for a higher authority? He made the machines. But when he was out to lunch, the boss came in and breathed life into them? It’s a hypothesis.

The Attraction of the Natural

Traveling in the Borderzone in contrast to visiting occasionally—which is all a busy life permits—means to be alone or, what amounts to the same thing, to be interested in odd matters most people can’t or don’t bother to fathom and think kinda weird. Here comes one of those. I’ve long found the naturalistic far more attractive than the arbitrary explanations of reality. On the one side things evolve, flow, change, emanate. On the other God created everything. Mind you, the poetics of Genesis manage to do both. Its leading verse contains the latter in a sharply rendered concept (“created”); its second the former as wondrous images:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

The naturalistic view is that paragraph if stripped of any conscious agency, a meaning that the word “created” unmistakably carries. The first sentence would be missing; the second would replace “Spirit of God” by “energy.” Energy introduces motion without endowing it with the features of a person, an agent.

The attraction of the natural arises in me because that’s what I see at the large scale—thus, say, looking out at the sky, with or without a telescope, or down at the earth from orbit. The sun is blazing but nothing tells me Why. It is so great that, when it finally goes into its death stage, it will extend out and way beyond the earth. The earth will simply melt away in its heat. And yet this thing is but a microscopic little thing in one galaxy—and our galaxy is one of countlessly many. From space, at least by sunlight, the earth may have a vague green sheen, here and there, but life, as such, is quite invisible, the merest rash a few degrees of centigrade, either way, would rapidly eradicate. Nothing about this gives us any explanations, and the scale is such that it is incommensurable with the human—or even the blue jay-ish.

The maddening aspect of the naturalistic, however, is that it simply doesn’t cover everything. It works up to the level of life. The chaos can yield different kinds of atoms that will then attract or repel each other and thus form various bodies by a cosmic evolution provided that the chaos is moved by “energy.” To be sure, by adding motion, as such, we are already introducing an agency, by the back door, as it were, but never mind. What the naturalistic does not cover, not at all, is the life phenomenon. And least of all human self-awareness.

Pantheism is great at a distance but becomes very problematical up close—thus when we encounter either end-seeking form-preservation or consciousness. What all modern naturalistic systems attempt, vainly, of course, is to explain how the lifeless can suddenly take on life, the purposeless develop purpose, and the mindless evolve mind ex nihilo. These explanations have trended from the mechanistic to the ever more ephemeral. Each advance in physics has had its corresponding exploitation by cosmology. Thus we have the clockwork universe, then atoms, then quanta, then morphic fields, and last complexity, whatever that is, sort of floating in the air or hiding in the core of reality, with a tropism for increasing itself; until minds form.

Temperamentally I am a naturalist. But when it gets down to decision time I’m forced, by the very logic of things, to side with the arbitrary, which is to assert that the only way we can squeeze any meaning out of this chaos is to discern invisibly behind it a genuine conscious agent. Its flowing garments, while they may not be fully alive still carry a kind of impress or memory of their creator, and that emanation itself is what makes the natural world magical and attractive. But there is something inexpressibly more wondrous beneath.