The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  Price spoke of an idea's propensity for achieving reality unless inhibited by other ideas. A new idea can be killed by the pressure of inhibiting investments. On the other hand, and happening a bit more as fate, a new idea can breed the very ecology necessary to its own translation, testability, and realization. In the next chapter I will explore this function as seen in the posing of the "empty category" in science, and how this can bring about the content needed to fall the category.

  A person with passionate concern for the successful translation of his Eureka! (itself produced by passionate pursuit of an idea) can transform the very common domain with which adjustment of his new idea is sought. Whether the energy equivalent of ten billion tons of uranium fission will ever be obtained from a single cubic centimeter of empty space, as proposed by Bohm, depends on how passionately such an idea might be sustained and followed by enough people long enough for sufficient realignment of a vast network of assumptions.

  If the current reality cannot contain a new idea, if the current allegiances inhibit the idea and prevent its completing its circuitry and fulfilling itself, never mind. Those current allegiances can be replaced, if slowly, until the new idea achieves its goal and is "real-ized," made real. Einstein's equations helped bring about the current scientific fabric that in turn verified Einstein's equations. New ideas must agree with this fabric or be discarded. On the other hand, for a new world view to develop, Einstein's ideas must be subtly changed or selectively abandoned. Such metaphoric mutations or discards require, however, a certain good taste, an esthetic protocol acceptable to the brotherhood of believers.

  Passionate conviction can change the very adjusted reality with which testable correspondence is needed. The true believer can bring about the very changes and adjustments within his reality that can fit his new idea into the then altered background.

  The double-helix formation for the chromosome gene was proposed as an "empty category" sixteen or so years before it was finally "photographed" and verified. Even then the photography was not direct, but only possible after suitable preparation allowed the photographing of an otherwise unphotographable entity.

  How does the mind arrive at such remote and difficult theories when there is no tangible sign or even rudimentary hint, and when no way exists for verifying even the first part of the newly-forming fabric?

  The Platonic retreat is an accepted evasion: Plato's God built into the mind the hidden idea of how he, God, created the mechanism to begin with. In a kind of Jungian extension of this, perhaps the mind itself, built up from the simplest combinations of a thinking phylum, contains within its labyrinthine corridors a kind of memory of its own structure. Or, of course, we can always attribute these Eureka!s to good, solid, scientific detective work and dismiss the problem.

  Pére Teilhard said that whatever was put together could be taken apart. But our method of taking apart plays an indeterminately formative role in what is then taken apart. The nature of question-answer, filling the "empty categories," indicates that a kind of thinking encompasses the most remote regions of energy organization, much as' Teilhard proposed. And the function of question-answer is an expression of the ontological, reality-shaping process itself.

  Common sense tells us that certain ideas are true because they prove to be backed by actual events; they were obviously triggered by real things. The "light of day" is the final arbiter. The cold facts of real things dispel the illusions of mind, and leave only the hard kernels of clear thinking. Piaget observed that we are continually hatching an enormous number of false ideas, conceits, Utopias, mystical explanations, superstitions, and megalomanic fantasies. All of these disappear when brought into contact with other people.

  They do not all disappear, however; some remain to change the very framework and criteria of what makes real and what makes fantasy. There is more than a fortuitous connection between science fiction and scientific fact, though a one-for-one correspondence would be magic. That which is superstition and fantasy to Piaget was obvious fact to a previous age, and many of Piaget's cherished notions will themselves someday prove amusing and quaint.

  There is a strong possibility that there is no a priori status for any one idea as against another idea. Teilhard observed that nature operates by profusion. According to Nietzche, we hear only the question to which we are capable of finding an answer. A question to which we can respond with a full investment of life and energy will influence our "editorial hierarchy" of mind. Then the kind of data we accept as evidential will be different. We will screen out and let in, interpret and synthesize, on a different basis.

  The success of the atomic postulate influences the way we look on the birth and history of that hypothesis. Our current reality is not just represented as atomic, it is atomic. The atomic hypothesis, therefore, must have been a correct ~'hunch" about a pre-existing state of mechanical affairs. Any other attitude is surely madness.

  Consider, however, that the final fruits of the atomic notion were born from an ecology greatly different from the original grounds wherein the early and tentative questions first appeared. And pursuit of the notion was one of the formative processes in changing the ecology itself. The translations and testings of all the myriad pieces of the puzzle expanded the original basis for possible thoughts about atoms. The expansion of the ecology was the result of both a peripheral and direct play of passionate believers, all those people working out the contingencies and correspondences with reality that would prove necessary for the answer's fruition. We tend to forget that a century and a half separated Dalton's early overtures from the final fruits at Alamogordo, and that Dalton himself was a late-comer to the atomic fantasy. Each of the many people involved could hardly have been aware that they were laying the groundwork for Oak Ridge or Hiroshima. The overall drift of possibility toward such a thing as atomic energy may be seen as a kind of self-sustaining idea seeking its own expression over many centuries.

  Passionate belief is the chief ingredient in any question-answer function. William James referred to "overbelief" as the subjective gloss given by people to an experience or an idea that they felt revealed a universal truth. Laski considers overbelief the most desired answer to an urgently-asked question. Once we have been seized by a question, that is, once we have accepted a question as ultimately meaningful to us, we set about gathering the kinds of material the question needs to build its answer.

  Poincaré was fascinated by the way ideas coalesce in the mind to produce original thinking. He thought of all the related ideas as "hooked atoms," which, in the unconscious work of mind, collide and give rise to new combinations. The process is hardly one of chance, he noted, since the separate ideas involved have been selected according to the definite purpose in mind, and are the ones from which the desired solution may reasonably be expected.

  Wallas distinguished four stages in the process of postulate building: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The preparation period is the seizure by the notion; Laski would call this the asking of the question. This dedicates the mind, rules out conflicting drives, and organizes the energy to the task. Laski's search for materials for answer is the gathering of Poincaré's "hooked atom," feeding them into the hopper with selective care. This part of the process may take many years, as with Hamilton's quaternions, or may be comparatively rapid, as with Einstein's idea.

  The incubation period is the "unconscious work," wherein the collisions of hooked atoms occur. Laski speaks of the fusion of materials, which is an unconscious process. This is the stage I have called autistic, since it grinds along its way without conscious control. The illumination is the Eureka! experience itself, the final fusion of all materials, the breakthrough when the barriers of ordinary logical screening are relaxed.

  Verification involves the translation of the experience, as found in Hamilton's ten to fifteen years needed to work out all the ramifications. This is the point separating wheat from chaff. Laski speaks of the crucial "testing of the answer" to see i
f it can be fitted into the common domain. This is no simple jigsaw puzzle placement, however, but is rather a subtle play of many contingencies.

  Bruner points out that our ordinary experience is a categorizing, a placing in a syntax of concepts. We can explore connections heretofore unsuspected by metaphoric combinations that leap beyond regular systematic placements. In his Essays for the Left Hand, Bruner explores the creative process and ends with a pattern similar to that of Laski and Wallas. First in Bruner's outline, there must be a detachment from the commonplace. (You could not be a follower of Jesus until you hated the ordinary world, rejected it, gave it up as your "systematic placement.") One detaches from the world in order to commit oneself to the replacing of the conventional with a new construct.

  After this commitment of self to the task, the work itself becomes a balance between the passion , which gives a "superior degree of attention," (the capacity for selective blindness), and a decorum that counters the enthusiasms with a "love of form," an etiquette toward the object of passionate effort, and a respect for the materials involved.

  The creative movement, according to Bruner, is rounded out by the "freedom to be dominated by the object." Blake noted that only by a long and intensive training and discipline, getting beyond the mechanics of technique, could the mind truly utilize its imagination. Yet this utilization meant a final breaking with all the forms and boundaries of the very discipline necessary for the ability to develop. The Divine Imagination moves the mind as it pleases, the wind bloweth where it listeth, but only when the way has been prepared by a discipline of mind. In every recorded case of Eureka! illumination, the final breakthrough of the postulate occurs at a moment when the logical processes have been momentarily suspended, a moment of relaxation from serious work.

  If one is dominated by the object of desire, the work of creation takes over, Bruner says, and "assumes the role of dominance." Then the artist or scientist serves the new work. I would add saint to Bruner's listing. In turn, the life, then committed to that line of action, is justified only if the work succeeds. Thus the initial commitment breeds an ever more stringent allegiance and striving for successful completion. The new work is served since the new work serves the life and justifies it.

  Mircea Eliade spent several years in the Orient, studying the Yoga discipline. He was quite struck by it, and his exhaustive book on the subject was sympathetic. He found it an arduous discipline, requiring years of development. The real technique hinges on a mental "blankness" that bypasses the world of "false and illusory notions." Stilling the flux of mental activity is in itself no small achievement. Having done this, the Yoga is convinced that a truth happens to him. What happens is so totally at variance with the "world" that no prestructuring on his part seems possible as a determinant.

  On examination, however, the Yoga system proves to be a clear example of the question-answer function as outlined by Laski, Bruner, and Wallas. Eliade writes that this world is rejected, this life depreciated, because it is known that something else exists. And that something else is beyond temporality, beyond suffering. The Indian rejects the profane world because he believes without question in the reality of a sacred mode of being, and so we find from the very outset what Bruner calls the detachment from the commonplace.

  The commitment to the new construct is adhered to passionately. All around him the Yogin sees his superiors able to do things that cannot be done so long as one remains in the ordinary world. Nothing less than concrete production is ever the motivation or the expectation. By their fruits they are known. Each particular discipline had its particular short-term rewards in addition to the long-range goal of Nirvana. The initiate absorbed an expectancy of the goals as he was incorporated into the system, just as a physics student does. Should the novitiate fail to produce tangible results, his life had failed. His long associative learning provided strong stimulus to overbelief formation in keeping with his traditions. His passion was carefully balanced with his decorum and respect for the tradition. His mind was finally transformed, just as Kazantzakis', Hamilton's, or Einstein's, in respect to each of their disciplines and goals. Where the faith is simple the test of the faith is simple. The Yogln had to produce: walk on fire, produce extraordinary body heat, reverse any of the bodily functions, and in general overcome the ordinary fated necessities of life. Nothing less than actuality was expected, or accepted as proof of "arrival."

  The Yogin's environment was one of expectation of esoteric phenomena, and acceptance of such esoterica is commonplace within that environment. This is no small part of the entire fabric and possibility therein. It took several centuries to build up the kind of scientific environment we have today, the ecology in which the particular esoterica we produce can be thought of, accepted by mind, and brought about. Countless centuries have gone into the production of the sets of expectancies shaping the Yoga's sensory world. And, of course, the realists from our system smugly dismiss as nonsense reports of the non-ordinary reality produced by Yoga.

  Answers arrive through novel media. It is a matter of esthetics what label is given, but the mind's predisposition toward one metaphor and against another has a damping effect on the kinds of possibilities open to it. The English occultist, Douglas Hunt, for instance, relates a story from Benker's Gepenster und Spuk in which a Munich engineer came home one day to find, to his alarm, none other than himself, "seated at the drawing board," busily sketching. This "mirror-image," or Doppelgänger, which has caused some terror through the ages, had worked out the solution to a problem which had worried the engineer for days. The twin-image had supposedly penned out the entire problem, and there it lay before the startled engineer's eyes. The example is given by Hunt as proof of astral projection, exteriorization, or out-of-the-body experience, as it is variously called.

  No scientist could tolerate such occultist terminology or definitions. Hypnagogic imagery, however, is quite respectable. No less than the great Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, otherwise just Kekule, professor of organic chemistry at Bonn from 1865 fill his death in 1896, conceived the theory of the benzene ring, one of the most important theories in all modern chemistry, and one of the most original ideas of modern times, in a hypnagogic state. He actually "saw" the ring in visual image clearly and distinctly right before him, as occurs in all hypnagogic imagery. Surely it took no little doing to translate the strange imagery into terms compatible with his brotherhood, but the nature of the whole experience is typical of most discoveries. In the same way, Descartes appears to have encountered the basic notions of his analytical geometry -- in this quasi-dream state.

  Laski wondered about all those scientific breakthroughs that fail to "pass the appropriate tests" of translation. Obviously they, too, arrive with initial certitude and conviction. We seldom hear of the ones that fail, she noted, though evidence strongly suggests they are in a majority. The question arises why wrong Eureka!s arrive at all.

  Bruner supposes it to be an heuristic device of the mind, leading us on until we finally arrive at proper conclusions. This attributes to the mind a subconscious foreknowledge of the proper answer, which automatically places the proper answer in an a priori state of permanence. Why, with the foreknowledge already there (wherever there could be), would the mind keep stopping at so many false or premature places -- playing tricks on itself, as it were, and hardly just for fun since lives invest in answers and are ruined when the answers prove unacceptable. This further attributes to unconscious processes a value-judging capacity quite counter to evidence.

  Rather, autistic thinking acts on all possibility, without judgment, since value is a capacity of logical reasoning only. The choices for possibility are suggested by the conscious mind's own value selections, and the material with which the autistic synthesis must work are those drawn from the experienced world. Nature operates by profusion as Teilhard said. All answers created are "true" to this nature, but not all will fit the tight limitations of the logical framework of the recipients triggering the v
ery procedure. We might say that an infinite potential casually produces a thousand answers, one of which fits the carefully-defined jigsaw puzzle of the rational mind. A new puzzle could be organized around any of the pieces randomly produced, provided the rational mind were willing or able -- which it is not -- to change its total orientation so casually. All postulates are thus "true" in some context.

  The sum total of the experienced world does not necessarily afford the new knowledge attained by the Eureka! hypothesis. The illumination "given" is generally of a character and nature larger than life, greater than the sum total of all data leading up to it. For instance, you can add the total thought from John Dalton, through Avogardo, Mendelejeff, Arrhenius, Planck, Bohr and all the others of that rich century and a half preceding and contemporaneous with Einstein, and never come up with a final sum that is Einstein.

  There is a catalystic quality in autistic thinking, and this catalyst hinges on its very "non-judging" aspects. The Eureka! is traceable to its parts for genesis, yet is larger than their sum, or else attainment of radically new viewpoints, producing dramatically new results, could become a commonplace formula. The unconscious autistic continuum is a sort of total wealth where all things, or any thing, are true, where the energy of thought and the energy of adhered-to forms of matter appear to merge. There are no polarities in this "ultimate reconciliation of opposites," as those people falling into the mystic states have reported. In autistic thinking nothing is either true or false, it simply is.