It appears inconceivable — that every thing we all know, every thing we love, every thing that ever was and ever might be, banged into being from the singularity, and out of that near-nothingness arose mitochondria and music and “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” all of it conspiring in the wonder of consciousness — the universe’s approach of comprehending itself.
Down right here on Earth, as if the way life evolved weren’t miracle sufficient, we have been handed down by billions of years of evolution the miraculous benediction of brains — these densely networked crucibles of thought and tenderness, out of which our capacity for transcendence arises.
In an uncommonly poetic passage from his novel The Echo Maker (public library), Richard Powers traces the evolution of that benediction, from its mobile beginnings to its existential finish:
Power fell on an historic cell; the cell registered. Some prodding set off a chemical cascade that incised the cell and altered its construction, forming a forged of the indicators that fell on it. Eons later, two cells clasped, signaling one another, squaring the variety of states they may inscribe. The hyperlink between them altered. The cells fired simpler with every fireplace, their altering connections remembering a hint of the surface. A couple of dozen such cells slung collectively in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, midway to figuring out. Matter that mapped different matter, a plastic document of sunshine and sound, place and movement, change and resistance. Some billions of years and a whole lot of billions of neurons later, and these webbed cells wired up a grammar — a notion of nouns and verbs and even prepositions. These recording synapses, bent again onto themselves — mind piggy-backing and studying itself because it learn the world — exploded into hopes and goals, recollections extra elaborate than the expertise that chiseled them, theories of different minds, invented locations as actual and detailed as something materials, themselves matter, microscopic electro-etched worlds inside the world, a form for each form on the market, with infinite shapes left over: all dimensions springing from this factor the universe floats in. However by no means sizzling or chilly, strong or gentle, left or proper, excessive or low, however solely the picture, the shop. Solely the play of likeness lower by chemical cascades, at all times undoing the state that did the storing. Semaphores at evening, cobbling up even the cliff they signaled from… Unsponsored, unimaginable, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile.
Complement with the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas’s forgotten masterpiece The Fragile Species and the fascinating science of how we think not with the brain but with the world, then revisit Powers on the power of music, living in bewilderment, and how to begin rewriting our planetary future.
