What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with Saint Augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels.

Time is the most fundamental common denominator between our existence and that of everything else, it’s the yardstick by which we measure nearly every aspect of our lives, directly or indirectly, yet its nature remains one of the greatest mysteries of science. Last year, we devoured BBC’s excellent What Is Time? and today we turn to seven essential books that explore the grand question on a deeper, more multidimensional level, spanning everything from quantum physics to philosophy to art.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

It comes as no surprise to start with A Brief History of Time — legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s 1988 masterpiece, which is commonly considered the most important book in popular science ever published and one of our 10 essential primers on (almost) everything. In it, Hawking attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, blending the rigor of a brilliant scientist with the eloquent ease of a masterful storyteller to invite even the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.)

With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there, and where we might be going.

Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:

If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”

FROM ETERNITY TO HERE

In From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, CalTech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll — who might just be one of the most compelling popular science writers of our time — straddles the arrow of time and rides it through an ebbing cross-disciplinary landscape of insight, inquiry and intense interest in its origin, nature and ultimate purpose. From entropy and the second law of thermodynamics to the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe to quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, Carroll weaves a lucid, enthusiastic, illuminating and refreshingly accessible story of the universe, and our place in it, at the intersection of cosmology, theoretical physics, information theory and philosophy, tied together by the profound quest for understanding the purpose and meaning of our lives.

This book is about the nature of time, the beginning o the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality. We’re not thinking small here. The questions we’re tackling are ancient and honorable ones: Where did time and space come from? Is the universe we see all there is, or are there other ‘universes’ beyond what we can observe? How is the future different from the past?” ~ Sean Carroll

Sample Carroll’s entertaining and enlightening storytelling with his excellent talk from TEDxCaltech.

Full review here.

TIME

Our experience and understanding of time need not be confined to science. Time chronicles the extraordinary work of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, who for the past three decades has been defying the Western art tradition of creating work that outlasts the artist’s lifetime by instead creating exquisite temporal sculptures out of leaves, twigs, petals, ice, sand, feathers, water, stone, and other fragments of nature. These ephemeral, lyrical miracles, spanning Canada, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, and Holland, are left open to the forces of time and change, and are captured here in 500 magnificent photographs, most of which taken by Goldsworthy himself, alongside thoughtful meditations on the vision for and mutation of each piece.

Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.

[…]

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.” ~ Andy Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy was the subject of the excellent 2001 Scottish-German documentary Rivers & Tides: Working with Time — here’s a short excerpt for a taste:

BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS

Despite a title that reads like a sensationalistic Huffington Post linkbait headline, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by CalTech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne is the most ambitious account of spacetime from Einstein to Hawking since Hawking himself. (Who actually penned the excellent foreword to the volume.) Originally published in 1994, the book offers an articulately illustrated journey into the fundamental ethos of astrophysics — Einstein’s theory of relativity — and how mankind arrived at what we assume to be the most accurate model of physical reality. Intertwined with these triumphs of science are the implicit controversies and contradictions that bedeviled the process — Einstein, for instance, didn’t believe that stars could collapse under their own gravity and curve the space around them so much as to cut themselves off from the rest of the universe, but a number of other physicists eventually proved these black holes were in fact an inevitable consequence of his theory.

From the pioneering work of the scientists who shaped the field, including Einstein himself, to modern-day mind-benders like black hole mechanics, Thorne covers an extraordinary range of disciplines and subject matter, managing to make it all absorbing and intelligible without dumbing down or compromising the spirit of science.

The theory of black holes was developed before there was any indication from observations that they actually existed. I do not know any other example in science where such a great exploration was made solely on the basis of thought. It shows the remarkable power and depth of Einstein’s theory.” ~ Kip Thorne

INTRODUCING TIME: A GRAPHIC GUIDE

We’ve previously explored 10 masterpieces of graphic nonfiction and just last week swooned over this graphic novel biography of iconic physicist Richard Feynman, so it’s only fitting we explored time from within the genre. Granted, philosophy professor Craig Callender’s Time: A Graphic Guide isn’t exactly a graphic novel, but it does borrow from the genre’s signature visual storytelling to explore the history of time with a fascinating philosopher’s lens, from Augustine’s contention that there is no time to Newton’s fluid time to the static time of Einstein to the contemporary theory that there is no time in quantum gravity, coming full circle. Callender covers a wide range of facets — clocks, psychological time, entropy, spacetime curvature, the Big Bang, Gödel, endocrinology, and just about everything in between — to deliver a sum total of illumination that will leave you with newfound awe for the intersection of philosophy and science.

THE TIME PARADOX

Stanford social psychologist Philip Zimbardo is best-known as the mastermind of the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which revealed one of the most gruesome glimpses of human nature in the history of social science. (Zimbardo recently launched The Heroic Imagination Project in an effort to use what psychology knows about good and evil to harness the human potential for good.) In The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, Zimbardo brings his social psychologist’s lens to the phenomenon of time to explore its importance in our lives, why we systematically devalue it, and how to enlist insights from psychology and behavioral science to optimize our relationship with time. He segments people into past-, present-, and future-oriented based on our time-perspectives, and offers insights into how each type experiences the four central paradoxes of time he identifies.

Sample the book with this charmingly so-bad-it’s-good trailer:

Our ability to reconstruct the past, to interpret the present, and to construct the future gives us the power to be happy.” ~ Philip Zimbardo

THE THIEF OF TIME

The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination, originally featured in our 5 cross-disciplinary perspectives on procrastination, is an absorbing anthology featuring essays by a wide range of scholars and writers spanning the entire spectrum of theoretical and empirical.

Procrastination is familiar and interesting but also puzzling. Although it is generally perceived as harmful and irrational, recent studies suggest that most of us procrastinate occasionally and many of us procrastinate persistently. Not even saints are immune. Saint Augustine records in his Confessions how, after years of sexual hedonism, he vowed to return to Christianity and prayed for chastity and continence — ‘only not yet.’ Although he ‘abhorred’ his current way of living and ‘earnestly’ wanted to change his course, he kept deferring any change until ‘tomorrow.’” ~ Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White

From the morality of it (is procrastination a vice?) to its possible antidotes (what are the best coping strategies?), the book is an essential piece of psychosocial insight. That is, if you get around to reading it.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

The most famous philosopher of the Victorian age, Herbert Spencer, coined the term "survival of the fittest", tried to apply the concepts of evolution to human society, and was described by Charles Darwin himself as "twenty times my superior." He was also a shameless hypochondriac, a sadistic prankster, and liked to dress in a one-piece suit that made him look like a bear.

On The Origins Of Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was born on April 27, 1820 in Derby, England, the son of William George Spencer, a religious dissenter with a love of learning and an anti-authoritarian streak. The older Spencer instilled these values in his son Herbert, teaching him the basics of scientific empiricism while his friends in the Derby Philosophical Society - an organization founded by Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, and of which George Spencer was secretary - gave the younger Spencer lessons in biology, particularly the proto-evolutionary ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin.

Beyond some math and Latin lessons from his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, the rest of Herbert's education was completely self-taught. Herbert Spencer had a remarkable ability to extract all possible information from a chosen text, carefully picking out readings that would expand his understanding of a given topic. He also gained as much information as he could from those he spoke with, folding the knowledge of all those he met into his own rapidly growing intellect.

Spencer bounced around a few jobs, finding success as a young man writing and editing various radical journals advocating for free trade. His ideas were a mix of cutting edge economic theory and proto-Darwinian notions of evolution, which together he used to chart the future of humanity. In 1851, he published Social Statics, which danced around the concept of "survival of the fittest" that he would coin fifteen years later. Consider this passage, which melds social theory with notions of Lamarckian evolution:

"It is clear that any being whose constitution is to be moulded into fitness for new conditions of existence must be placed under those conditions. Or, putting the proposition specifically - it is clear that man can become adapted to the social state, only by being retained in the social state...Only by the process of adaptation itself can be produced that character which makes social equilibrium spontaneous."

Man Of The Salon

As Spencer gained so much of his knowledge from those he conversed with, it was hugely important for Spencer to pick the right friends. On this point, he was helped by Social Statics publisher John Chapman, who brought him into contact with an intellectual salon full of the United Kingdom's most radical thinkers. Interaction with these men and women cemented his political philosophy, a libertarian system that believed the natural progression of humanity would make all government wither away. To this end, Spencer at times advocated for universal suffrage for women and children, and he argued for the nationalization of land to diminish the power of the aristocracy.

The salon's ranks included the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, literary critics and religious skeptic George Henry Lewes, pioneering sociologist Harriet Martineau, and writer Mary Ann Evans, better known as pseudonymous Silas Marner author George Eliot. Spencer became particularly close to Lewes and Evans, and Evans even once proposed marriage to him, although Spencer turned out to be just one of several men who did not reciprocate her more romantic feelings.

Lewes and Evans helped bring Spencer's thinking to the next level, and the result was 1855's Principles of Psychology, in which Spencer argued the workings of the human mind were fundamentally knowable through application of natural laws. This pronouncement staked out a position in extreme opposition to that of religious orthodoxy, which maintained certain parts of the world - the human consciousness chief among them - were inherently beyond the understanding of science. This made Spencer's book unpopular with the establishment, and it failed to achieve much critical or public support. Still, Spencer was just getting warmed up.

The Other Father Of Evolution

As early as 1852 - seven years before Charles Darwin went public with his evolutionary theories in On the Origin of Species - Herbert Spencer sketched out the basics of evolution and natural selection. His basic idea was that human development was naturally progressive and everywhere increasing. This optimistic view led him to what he termed "evolution", arguably making him the real popularizer of this term, not Darwin. The key distinction is that Spencer could not advance an actual theoretical framework for this evolutionary process, which Darwin was able to do with his notions of natural selection.

Spencer's philosophy became hugely popular, offering the growing intellectual class a ready-made substitute to conventional religion. His system suggested everything from biological evolution to the laws of thermodynamics could be used to predict the future of humanity and, more specifically, the future perfection of humanity. The cosmos existed to promote human happiness, as far as Spencer was concerned, and the laws of nature were universal in their reach.

But let's focus on Spencer's take on evolution, because it could take years to unravel his entire argument. It's important to keep in mind that Spencer was not simply taking Darwin's ideas and applying them to society as a whole. It's an understandable mistake - indeed, what other assumption is possible when Spencer is generally credited as the inventor of something called "Social Darwinism"?

In actual fact, Spencer was more comfortable with Lamarck's earlier notions of acquired characteristics, which hold that how particular organs or traits are used during a person's lifetime can affect their physical makeup and then be passed down to their children. Darwin's idea of a directionless evolution, in which there was no endpoint but simply adaptation to changing environmental niches as governed by natural selection, was not an easy fit for Spencer's earlier ideas, and it was only with some reluctance that he incorporated these ideas into his work.

Survival Of The Fittest

Spencer's most famous idea is encapsulated by "survival of the fittest", although it's often mistakenly attributed to Charles Darwin. Spencer came up with this iconic turn of phrase in his 1864 book Principles of Biology, in which he writes:

"This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection', or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."

Darwin would then use the phrase himself in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, although his use was only metaphorical, and not intended as a scientific description. Indeed, the term doesn't really capture the evolutionary process, as it's not just the fittest that survive to reproduce - it's all organisms that are fit enough to not die young, which has led later biologists to suggest "survival of the fit enough" is the more accurate term.

Besides, Spencer's use of the phrase might have been redundant, a mere tautology. He seemed to use "fittest" as "best-equipped to survive", which makes the phrase "survival of the best-equipped to survive" a bit useless. Still, though his ideas proved a clumsy fit for the actual science of evolution, they captured - and still capture - the public imagination, and they proved to be much better fits for Spencer's primary concern, which was an evolution-based theory of society.

A Word About Social Darwinism

In general, Spencer's positive reputation is as the coiner of "survival of fittest" and as the popularizer of Darwin. His negative reputation comes from his attempts to wed these ideas to society at large. Social Darwinism - the term generally applied to Spencer's sociological efforts - is often thought of as apologism for the wealthy, as it says those who are successful in society are those best-adapted to it, meaning the poor are less fit to survive in society.

It's an understandable misconception, and other philosophers have advanced ideas more along those lines, but that wasn't really what Spencer was driving at. The main focus of his social evolution was focused on the state itself, which he basically believed evolved first to give society structure, and then withered away as the members of that society were sufficiently evolved to do without it. (This is, like most paragraph-long summaries of a lifetime's work, something of an oversimplification. But it will do for our purposes.)

As we previously mentioned, his writings proved staggeringly popular, and he became the most famous philosopher of the Victorian Age. He became an international inspiration for revolutionary groups looking for an innovative system that could replace their failed states, and his ideas were influential in various movements as far away as Poland, China, and Japan. No less than Charles Darwin called him "twenty times my superior", and wrote these glowing words:

"Every one with eyes to see and ears to hear (the number, I fear, are not many) ought to bow their knee to you, and I for one do."

Spencer was often compared favorably to Aristotle, and there's a decent argument that he was, in his own time, the most famous philosopher ever. But as interesting as Spencer's ideas were, the man behind those ideas was often far more fascinating. Let's now consider just who Spencer really was...because he was a strange man indeed.

The Hypochondriac And The Hammock

Herbert Spencer was never particularly healthy, and his constant intellectual exertion took its toll on his frail physique. Of course, no one was more keenly aware of this than Spencer himself, who spent the final decades of his life an incorrigible hypochondriac, constantly complaining of various illnesses that no doctor could ever diagnose. Chief among these was "the mischief", an odd sensation he sometimes felt inside his head.

Amazingly, Spencer was by far the strongest member of his family - tragically, he was the only one of William George Spencer's nine children that even reached adulthood. He was known to be a chronic insomniac, which kept him in a state of perpetual exhaustion that limited his ability to work to just a few hours a day, and he suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. These bouts didn't do wonders for his social skills, as he often took to wearing earplugs whenever he felt over-excited...particularly if he was on the verge of losing an argument.

Traveling was a particular ordeal for Spencer, and he was constantly convinced that any coach ride would spell his doom. Indeed, he would frequently demand the coachman pull over so that Spencer could check his pulse, just to be absolutely certain he was still alive. The fact that the coachman had responded to him at all should have been proof enough, really, but Spencer was nothing if not thorough.

Train rides weren't much better. Spencer kept two men on constant retainer to help him whenever he got on a train. One of the assistants was in charge of his traveling hammock, which would be set up in his compartment and Spencer would clamber in, where he remained for the length of the stay. The rest of the work consisted of moving all his luggage, which included several rugs and air cushions meant to increase the comfort of the trip.

But the strangest part had to be how Spencer was dressed. He had designed a rather ridiculous-looking one-piece, overall-like costume, and this became his preferred thing to wear. It was designed to reduce the great effort it took to wear all that excessive Victorian attire, as Spencer now had no need to wear boots, socks, pants, shirt, or a coat. There was a trade-off though - Spencer looked like a big brown bear whenever he wore his overalls. On second thought, maybe that wasn't really a trade-off.

Is It Water On The Brain?

Still, Spencer wasn't so obsessed with his health that he couldn't enjoy himself. He could have a wicked sense of humor, as a fellow academic named Trimbell discovered. Hydrocephalus, better known as water on the brain, was one of the most feared conditions of the Victorian world, and it wouldn't be until the 20th century that medical science came up with effective treatments for the disease.

Hydrocephalus occurs when an unusually high amount of cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the cavities of the brain. Although it mostly affects a small percentage of newborns, it is possible for adults to acquire the condition well. The condition is known to be extremely painful for any adults who contract it, and the damage it does to the brain can seriously affect thought and behavior.

So yes, that's the condition Spencer decided to convince his colleague Trimbell that he had. After outlining these symptoms and pointing out a swelling head was the first sign of hydrocephalus, Spencer started to sneakily add strips of paper inside his friend's hat. Every day Spencer added another tiny strip of paper, each time making the space inside the hat a little smaller and a little tighter for Trimbell's head.

Spencer was playing a long game here - it took weeks for Trimbell to realize that his head was "growing", but once he realized he was most distressed at how fast his water on the brain was progressing. If there was any justice in the world, Spencer's longstanding hypochondria should have been the result of poor souls like Trimbell exacting their revenge, fooling him with a set of equally fraudulent maladies that would be impossible for doctors to detect. Maybe they can throw that in when Hollywood makes the Herbert Spencer biopic.

Spencer's End

As Spencer's health deteriorated, so too did his optimism in humanity. Spencer, once a champion of political ideals that fell somewhere between liberalism, libertarianism, and outright anarchy now drifted rightward towards reactionary conservatism. Spencer had always championed the progressive character of humanity, the notion that human minds and societies were always improving so that, eventually, no government would be needed. But, as his friends died off and he became increasingly isolated and lonely - Spencer was a lifelong bachelor - he became disillusioned with this view.

In a sense, the philosophical underpinnings of Spencer's politics hadn't really changed. He had been distrustful and skeptical of government his entire life, but what had once been a more abstract critique became increasingly focused on the policies of Prime Minister William Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of the Liberal Party. Spencer's once revolutionary views slipped away one by one - he now opposed suffrage for women, and he now sought to protect the rights of traditional landowners against what he saw as the rising tide of socialism.

On one point, Spencer's old anti-conservatism remained, but it made him staggeringly unpopular. Spencer remained staunchly anti-military and anti-imperialism, and his final days were spent bitterly critiquing the Boer War. His once near universal influence was already on the wane, and a public that had once seen Spencer as the philosopher now dismissed him as a bitter old crank.

Survival Of The Fittest Reborn

Spencer died in 1903. He was cremated, with his ashes interred in London's Highgate Cemetary. In an odd coincidence, his gravestone faces that of Karl Marx. It seems appropriate that, even in death, Spencer would be provided with someone with whom he could have a fierce philosophical argument.

The backlash against Spencer, which had already begun before his death, reached its apex in the early 20th century. The most popular philosopher of the Victorian Age was now dismissed as a clueless buffoon whose works were little more than an unintentional parody of real philosophy.

In his 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought, historian Richard Hofstadter did what is known in academic circles as ripping him a new one, blasting Spencer as "the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic." Even more damagingly, it was Hofstadter who popularized the notion of Social Darwinism. It's an idea that, yes, is an important aspect of Spencer's work, but it's just one part of a rich, complex philosophical doctrine that often gets swept aside in modern discussion.

The last few decades have been far kinder to Spencer, and he's enjoyed a positive philosophical reappraisal. Although his personal fame has long since been eclipsed by Charles Darwin, his ideas are arguably still better known than those of the father of biological evolution. After all, ask a random person on the street what's the first thing they think when you mention "evolution." (Note - please don't actually do this. They might be busy.) Some will say "natural selection", yes, but just as many will say "survival of the fittest." Even if most people don't know the real context of that phrase, it lives on in our cultural lexicon.

And Now, At Last, The Paper Clip

There's one other notable story about Herbert Spencer that we haven't yet touched - that he invented the paper clip. This is more or less an urban legend. The first paper clip is generally credited to the American inventor Samuel Fay, who panted the bent wire paper clip in 1867. His was one of about fifty paper clip designs patented before 1900, although none of them are actually all that similar to what we use today.

But where does Spencer enter into all this? He did mention in his autobiography that he had invented what he called a "binding pin", which at the time was distributed by the firm Ackermann & Company. An appendix to his autobiography includes a drawing of the pin, and it doesn't really look much like what we now consider a paper clip. It does look like cotter pins, sometimes known as an R-clip. You can see one above.

Of course, it is a perfectly workable design, and Spencer's apparent invention (there's technically no proof for his claims outside his autobiography) is one of the earliest known examples of a cotter pin. And besides, it was meant to hold together sheets of paper, so if we're being technical about this, it could certainly be considered a paper clip, even if it doesn't really fit the more precise definition of the term.

So now, if someone ever tries to impress you by mentioning that the "survival of the fittest" guy invented the paper clip, you can kindly correct them and tell them the real story of Herbert Spencer. Personally, I'd advise starting with his bear-looking one-piece.

We’re deeply fascinated by how the human mind makes sense of the world, and religion is one of the primary sensemaking mechanisms humanity has created to explain reality. On the heels of our recent explorations of the relationship between science and religion, the neuroscience of being human and the nature of reality comes The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life — an ambitious new investigation by evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering, exploring one of the most important questions of human existence:

If humans are really natural rather than supernatural beings, what accounts for our beliefs about souls, immortality, a moral ‘eye in the sky’ that judges us, and so forth?”

A leading scholar of religious cognition, Bering — who heads Oxford’s Explaining Religion Project — proposes a powerful new hypothesis for the nature, origin and cognitive function of spirituality. Far from merely regurgitating existing thinking on the subject, he connects dots across different disciplines, ideologies and materials, from neuroscience to Buddhist scriptures to The Wizard of Oz. Blending empirical evidence from seminal research with literary allusions and cultural critique, Bering examines the central tenets of spirituality, from life’s purpose to the notion of afterlife, in a sociotheological context underlines by the rigor of a serious scientists.

Eloquently argued and engagingly written, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life provides a compelling missing link between theory of mind and the need for God.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets us know we're doing something right and helps keep the lights on.

Science fiction takes us out of our own time and place, and confronts us with alien objects as well as incomprehensible future artifacts. By doing this, argues Daniel Rourke, SF brings us closer to seeing things as they really are.

Mid-way through H.G.Wells' The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders his machine's ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed to inhabit strands of history plucked from time's grander web. Unable to grasp a people's history – the conditions that determine them – one will always misunderstand them.

Archaeology derives from the Greek word arche, which literally means the moment of arising. Aristotle foregrounded the meaning of arche as the element or principle of a Thing, which although indemonstrable and intangible in Itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that Thing. In a sense, archaeology is as much about the present instant, as it is about the fragmentary past. We work on what remains through the artefacts that make it into our museums, our senses and even our language. But to re-energise those artefacts, to bring them back to life, the tools we have access to do much of the speaking.

Like the unseen civilisations of H.G.Wells' museum, these Things in Themselves lurk beyond the veil of our perceptions. It is the world in and of Itself; the Thing as it exists distinct from perceptions, from emotions, sensations, from all phenomenon, that sets the conditions of the world available to those senses. Perceiving the world, sweeping dust away from the objects around us, is a constant act of archaeology.

Kant called this veiled reality the noumenon, a label he interchanged with The-Thing-Itself (Ding an Sich). That which truly underlies what one may only infer through the senses. For Kant, and many philosophers that followed, The Thing Itself is impossible to grasp directly. The senses we use to search the world also wrap that world in a cloudy haze of perceptions, misconceptions and untrustworthy phenomena.

In another science fiction classic, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem considered the problem of The Thing Itself as one of communication. His Master's Voice (HMV), written at the height of The Cold War, tells the story of a team of scientists and their attempts to decipher an ancient, alien message transmitted on the neutrino static streaming from a distant star. The protagonist of this tale, one Peter Hogarth, recounts the failed attempts at translation with a knowing, deeply considered cynicism. To Peter, and to Stanislaw Lem himself, true contact with an alien intelligence is an absolute impossibility:

"In the course of my work... I began to suspect that the ‘letter from the stars' was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the coloured blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is ‘on his mind', so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves."

— Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

In HMV and Lem's better known novel, Solaris, the conviction that an absolute true reality exists under the dust of perception leads humanity down ever more winding labyrinths of its own psyche. For Stanislaw Lem the human mind exists in a perpetual state of archaeology, turning away from Itself in search of truth, but time and again finding Itself confronted as the very Thing that underlies the reality it is trying to decipher.

To transcend phenomena, to clear away the dust, one must, according to Kant, think. Thus his Thing Itself, derives from the Greek for 'thought-of' (nooúmenon) and further implies the concept of the mind (nous). Kant's Thing Itself is accessed through pure thought. A clear enough mind, devoid of the bodily shackles of pain, pleasure or emotion, might see without seeing, sweeping away the perceptual cobwebs by guile alone. What Plato referred to as the only immortal part of the human soul, reason, becomes through Kant the dominant principle by which The Thing Itself may be reached.

In the short space I have allotted myself here, I have not the time, or the guile, to fully analyse the Kantian noumenon. Needles to say, countless thinkers, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Hegel to Agamben, have grappled with the suppositions and presuppositions made to cohere and then crumble by Kant's addiction to reason. What interests me about science fiction, and most readily about the works of Wells and Lem, is the attempt made to search for 'The Thing Itself' beyond the mind; beyond the human altogether.

Science fiction allows the creation of an imaginary set of conditions by which the human being may break their most burdonsome shackle: their own mind. Human timescales, bodies, forms of thinking and perception: each of these must be circumvented if one is ever able to grasp The Thing Itself. Kant's principle of noumenon embodies a discourse on the limits of perception that has remained relevant to philosophy for millenia. The paradox of the archaeology – the arising – of an underlying reality is the defining principle of a thousand sci-fi tales.

For Stanislaw Lem our limitations become obvious once we are confronted with the existence of an intelligence which is not human. Lem's novels seek to connect us with the absolute ‘other': that most alien of Things, ourselves. Reality, for Lem at least, is composed in an indecipherable language. Humanity lives in an eternal stasis, unable to circum-navigate the new realities it constantly 'discovers' for itself. And in the end we find ourselves limited by the brains that think us, unable to distinguish the twinkle-twinkle from the little star:

"There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of – and the languages not made by man. In such language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural...

Now to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ‘acultural language' is something more or less like Kant's ‘Thing-in-itself'. One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing."

— Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

This post by Daniel Rourke originally appeared at 3quarksdaily.

I would also recommend picking up his latest novel, Wake, the first book in the WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder) trilogy. I’ve read the book and the trilogy is off to a great start. I will definitely be picking up the other books when they come out.

• Link

This latest book from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, while not quite as much fun as his mind-bending classic, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in some ways goes further and is more focused in explaining how consciousness might arise as an emergent property from the chemistry and biology of the brain. The author’s tone here is much more contemplative, philosophical and personal, while the previous work explored many diverse topics including mathematics, art, music, language, illusions, computational theory, and of course intelligence and consciousness. I would recommend reading the earlier work first, which has become a true classic, but this latest book is probably much more accessible to a general audience.

Rating: 8/10

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing