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THE MIND'S EYE. HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IN A COSMIC CONTEXT

Timothy Ferris (1993)

Each of us inhabits two equally mysterious universes, one outside the mind and the other within it. Since my youth I have tried to understand the relationship between these two realms. Many a night I sat at the telescope till dawn, marveling at the soft pewter glow of the distant galaxies, the glittering gold and silver star fields of the Milky Way, at sun-hugging Mercury, the pearl-white crescent of Venus, or the parchment-sharp rings of Saturn, and wondered what we have to do with all that.

 I have never shared the sentiment that the enormity of the cosmos need make us feel insignificant. The stars are too involving for that; they stimulate our curiosity, arouse us to reflection, nourish our sense of beauty, and challenge our conception of who we are. We feel connected to them, somehow. I do not think this intuition can be dismissed as mere sentiment, for the simple reason that we are able to some degree to understand what goes on out there. We know that iron oxide stains the ruddy sands of Mars, that helium atoms dance in the upper atmosphere of the sun, that storms dot the surface of Aldebaran, and that new stars are being born in the Tarantula nebula; we can predict eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, weigh the great Catherine wheel of the Andromeda galaxy, take the temperature of Triton, and age-date the craters of the moon. Our knowledge of the universe amounts, of course, to an infinitesimal fraction of the whole, but the fact that we can learn anything at all about the stars suggests that thought—and maybe even “intelligence”—is not a purely parochial phenomenon, the product of our one world alone, but may have universal currency.

I envision our relationship to the universe as symmetrical,  ourglassshaped. On one side is the outer realm, inhabited by galaxies, stars, the plants and animals, and our fellow human beings. Most of us (the solipsists aside) believe that this outer world exists, though we appreciate that our direct perceptions of it are limited and skewed. On the other side is the inner realm of the mind, where each of us is destined to live and die; here resides all we can ever know. Through the neck of the glass flow the sense data by which we perceive the outer realm, and (flowing the opposite way) the models and concepts we apply to nature, and the alterations and abridgments we impose on her. We tip this imaginary hourglass from time to time. In the nineteenth century, when classical physics ruled, we tended to think of the sand as flowing almost entirely from the outer to the inner realm, from an objectively real world to our passively recording minds. In the twentieth century the concept of observer-dependent phenomena in quantum physics has shifted our attention to the ways our observations influence how we perceive nature. But so long as there are thinking beings in the universe, neither bulb of the hourglass will ever be empty.

In this book I offer a few thoughts on the relationship between mind and universe as seen through the lenses of two innovative fields of scientific research—neuroscience, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

Neuroscience has begun to reveal some fascinating things about how the brain works, shedding light on the concept of personal identity, the datahandling limitations of the central nervous system, and the way that the brain smooths over its liabilities and discontinuities to sustain a sense of unified consciousness. We are beginning to realize that each of us really does contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it, and that the chorus of voices within was built up over eons of evolution, like geological strata in the Burgess Shale or the White Cliffs of Dover.

SETI, meanwhile, has focused attention on what we mean by intelligence, and whether its like is to be found elsewhere in the universe. Regardless of whether we eventually succeed in intercepting an alien signal from space, SETI will have encouraged us to think about thinking in a cosmic context. In so doing it acts as a mirror; our ignorance of the role of life and thought in the universe forms the blacking on the back of the mirror.

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The universe has four remarkable properties that encourage us to
investigate whether we are alone in the universe. The first is that space is transparent. A ray of starlight can speed unfettered through space for thousands of millions of years, bringing news of events long ago and far away, and the sailing is even clearer for radio waves. Natural radio noise—the chatter of hydrogen atoms adrift in space, the scream of electrons trapped in the magnetic fields of distant galaxies—can pass not only through the virtually perfect vacuum of interstellar space, but also though the clouds of gas and dust that clutter the disk of our galaxy and block the visible light of many stars beyond. These naturally occurring radio emanations need not be especially powerful for us to pick them up; all the energy gathered by all the world’s radio telescopes over the past thirty years amounts to less than the kinetic energy released by a snowflake falling gently to the ground. This suggests that artificial radio signals, too, could in principal be detected across interstellar distances, even if broadcast at modest levels of power. Radio telescopes in operation today could receive signals transmitted by similar instruments throughout much of our galaxy; a hundred billion stars and perhaps half a trillion planets lie within their range. And, since radio waves travel at the speed of light, three hundred thousand kilometers per second, their velocity of transmission is as fast as can be.