Free Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science by Dorion Sagan

hard parts and cells feel like one skin-encapsulated being—but when I think how, when I’m driving a car, a close scrape impinges on me physiologically, giving me a sensation as if the metal to which no neurons are attached were part of my own body, I am persuaded that, when it comes to ego, there is no absolute there there.
    In other words, our bodies are what Samuel Butler, Darwin’s contemporary and author of
The Way of All Flesh,
called microbial “tool-kits.” Butler envisions a day “when all men in all places without any loss of time are cognisant through their senses of all that they desire to be cognisant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge so that the back-country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself—may sit in his own chair in a back-country hut and hear the performance of
‘Israel in Egypt’
at Exeter Hall—may taste an ice on the Rakaia [a New Zealand river] which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house. . . . [This is] the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.” 3
    This is fascinating, for here, circa 1865, Butler—who took Darwin to task for making life too mechanical and got back at him by applying evolutionary theory to machines in order to consider them as natural—extrapolates the telegraph to anticipate the Internet.
    Perhaps the greatest science fiction story would be a literal description of our present reality, but couched in terms that made it unrecognizable until near the story’s end. We love the future because we don’t know what it will be but because we can, to a slight extent, shape it and because in our narratives it is always uncannily familiar. In a linear frame, however, we have to be careful with prediction because it is too often simple extrapolation. Butler may have “predicted” the World Wide Web, but in decades past it was also predicted that every home would one day have its own rooftop helipad and that each town would have its own telephone. Linear extrapolation is doomed because exponential rates of change cannot continue. “Only two things are infinite,” said Einstein, “the universe and human stupidity.”
    But rather than end with a mysticism-friendly scientist, let’s give the “last” word to a science-friendly mystic. In 1974 Alan Watts wrote in an essay titled “Psychedelics and Religious Experience”:
    The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe thus clashes with his society’s concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. . . . There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. . . . The Western scientist may rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego—as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, “I came into this world.” But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees. 4

CHAPTER 4
    STARDUST MEMORIES
    QUANTITATIVELY , dust refers to solid particles with diameters of less than 500 micrometers. A micrometer, also known as a micron, is a millionth of a meter, or 0.000039 of an inch. The eye of a needle is 750 microns wide, enough to get some camel dust through. The diameter of the period that ends this sentence is about 450