On Becoming a Contemporary of the Future
Ars longa, vita brevis
Introduction
This week’s transitional piece links our previous post, the short story “The Philosophy of a Leaf,” to a few of the many themes we’ll be exploring here in Change over the coming year.
First, though, a “spoiler warning”: You might want to read that short story before reading on, or we might spoil a little of the plot for you otherwise.
—The Editors
On Becoming a Contemporary of the Future: Ars longa, vita brevis
The Story of the Story
Our most recent post, “The Philosophy of a Leaf” two weeks back, was the most personal piece I had so far posted here in Change.
Today’s post, revealing how the story forms a segue from the Collingwoodian themes of our most recent nine pieces1 to a few of the themes we’ll be addressing over the coming year, is equally personal.
I want to share with you something of how the story came to be written, what was on my mind when I wrote it, why it took the peculiar form it took and mattered so much to me at the time and even now, fifteen years later, and why I wanted to share it with you here in Change, which understandably may have puzzled many of you.
One reader, familiar with some classical South Asian spiritual literature, contacted me to ask about the source of the tale. He was curious to know whether “The Philosophy of a Leaf” was an ancient Indian tale as he strongly suspected.
The truth is that its origin is purely modern, going back to the time of the last global financial crisis. It was written in July of 2008, just two months before the final market crash, all but unthinkable right up until the moment it happened.
I was myself the frustrated philosopher in the story, or at least I identified closely with the philosopher-protagonist of the story at the time I wrote it. In a number of ways, I was really only writing about myself.
The way the story begins is much the way the writing of the story began.
I was on vacation in Bermuda, somewhere on the South Shore. I was sitting on a patch of grass under the shade of an ancient tree one morning after breakfast, staring out at the glinting blue and turquoise waters of the Atlantic, quite near the beach. Close at hand were dunes and patches of reeds leading down to the pink sands at the water’s edge for which the island is famous.
My “scribbling stick” and paper were less exotic than those described in the tale—mine consisted of a Lamy Pico pen and a Moleskine notebook—so unlike my philosopher-protagonist in the story I didn’t have to venture down into the reeds to be able to start writing. However my experience and frustration were otherwise much as described in the story.
There, overlooking the sea, I had sat down to write, and despite all the philosophical issues I had been wrestling with, even that very morning, I found myself frustrated, feeling that I had at that moment absolutely nothing at all to say. I was comforted chiefly by remembering how the poet and philosopher Paul Valéry (1871–1945) related that it was only when he was sufficiently bored and abstracted that he was able to create.
Anyway, I stared off blankly into the distance, not an idea in my head, in the very pleasant warm sun and cooling sea breezes, until my eyes alighted upon a leaf on the tree beneath whose shade I was sitting—just one random leaf amongst a thousand others, and my gaze just so happened to rest there, and there it stayed a while.
What happened next is just as described in the story (“based on true events” as they say in the movies), and the story seemed to write itself. I felt less like a philosopher or writer and more like a scribe taking dictation.
I dashed off the story from start to finish in a couple of hours at most and I was done by lunchtime, with little or no editing needed (it received only a light edit on the 22nd of September 2008 when I finally got ‘round to typing it up)—unlike the philosopher in the story who took seven years to complete what he wrote, likewise inspired by a leaf.
The role of the leaf in the ancient philosopher’s tale was, quite consciously, an echo of the way in which Proust’s monumental, seven-volume, crowning masterpiece of 20th Century French literature, À la recherche du temps perdu, had been sparked by his reminiscences suddenly brought to mind by the taste of a morsel of petite madeleine dipped in a cup of lime-flower tea.
But as for me, the truth is that, unlike the philosopher-protagonist in “The Philosophy of a Leaf,” it had taken me not just seven years but was to take me more like the biblical number of “seven times seven years.”
For I was thinking particularly, as I wrote, about my life’s work, to which I have been single-mindedly devoted ever since I was a young schoolboy: my work on the nature of change, and on Minimalist Intervention and the radical new scientific epistemology behind it (the story is very briefly told here).
Lost Civilizations?
Now, I gather from the accounts of those scientists who study very early humans, that we have known for some time that people looking quite a lot like us have been around on our planet for at least 2.6 million years, and with the advent of recent discoveries the date has now been pushed back to at least 4.4 million years ago. Indeed it seems that every couple of years the date keeps getting pushed further back by a million years or so when a new archaeological site is unearthed.
But what’s more, according to many of those scientists (and I’ve chatted about these matters with at least one such scientist amongst my colleagues at Oxford not long ago), these forebears of ours were actually fashioning and using tools and mastering fire, and living in organized communities, even developing languages in the modern sense fully as long ago as 2.6 million years back.
Other scholars, more modestly, place the date for some of these developments, including proper languages like ours, only as recently as 1.8 million years ago, while others, more conservative still, are only prepared to commit themselves on this score to a mere 600,000 to 800,000 years before our own time.
In any event, it is indisputable that language, technology, and human social organization go back long, long before we modern humans first made our appearance on earth around 300,000 years ago, that is, perhaps more than two million years before we ourselves showed up.
In short, we now know beyond reasonable doubt that there were language-using, socially organized, technologically proficient humans much like us around for at least a couple of orders of magnitude longer than our present civilization, which we can only trace back in any detail to a mere 5000 years ago or so.
Yet humans appear to have been at much the same technological game as us for a long, long time—perhaps as much as 500 times as long as our own civilization can be traced back, or at least 350 times as long, and even by the most conservative estimates, still a good 125 to 150 times as long. As for modern humans—that’s us, folks—we have ourselves been using language and organizing ourselves into communities and developing technology for at least 60 times as long as our present civilization has existed.
And look just how far we ourselves have been able, in the course of history, to progress industrially and technologically to our contemporary world of skyscrapers, commercial airliners, ballets and symphonies and fine art, 8K UHD2 television, iPhones, the internet, Spotify, genetic engineering, nuclear energy, space travel and artificial intelligence, with no shortage of architectural wonders and sophisticated infrastructure spanning the globe, in less than 5000 years from the Stone Age to our own contemporary global civilization!
Now if, as I pointed out above, humans most likely have been at this very same language-driven, socially organized game of technological advance for at least 125 to 500 times as long as that, how likely is it that ours was the first and only advanced industrial human civilization to have arisen on earth in all that time?
Even absent a nuclear or ecological catastrophe brought down upon themselves by a past civilization that had got ahead of itself in developing its technology before being fully able to understand or control its risks, by most accounts, if all humans quietly died out tomorrow, say from a virus, then with no one around to maintain our cities and global infrastructure, our own “advanced” industrial civilization of 2023 would vanish without a trace within a few thousand years, or at most a few tens of thousands of years for some structures.
The world as we know it would simply start all over again from a state of nature, with no visible sign that a technologically advanced industrial civilization had ever been here on earth.
So another thought inspiring my “leaf” fable too was the idea, found in countless traditional legends in almost every culture in the world, that there have in fact been ancient technologically and intellectually advanced civilizations many times before, in the far distant past, long before our own world.
Some of these ancient legends appear, in their details, to be describing civilizations quite as industrially advanced as ours if not more so, but which came to a sticky end (as well we might too), eventually leaving no trace at all other than legends that they had once existed.
Having said that, astrobiologists such as Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank2 have recently been considering in detail precisely what obscure geological traces we might nonetheless expect to find as evidence for such lost prior industrial civilizations as advanced as ours: “multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy” in deep layers of ocean sediment if we were to bother to look.
Anyway, it was in some such imagined, far distant, lost past civilization that my little fable was purposefully set.
But why did I bother to place it in such a setting? And why was I even interested in such speculative matters anyway, so far outside my own areas of scientific expertise and of no obviously direct relevance to my philosophical interests?
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The New Epistemology: Nothing New Under the Sun
Readers of recent issues of Change will know from Collingwood’s theory of survivals that nothing is ever lost without leaving a trace in human thought. The idea that the wisdom of my fictional ancient philosopher in the story might have eventually found its way many tens of thousands of years later into all the religions and sciences of the world, as I related in my tale, is not at all far-fetched, whatever secrets it was that my philosopher-protagonist’s fictitious voluminous teachings (never spelled out or alluded to in the story beyond his opening reflections) might have revealed about the nature of things.
The interaction in the world of ideas between, on the one hand, the lone individual thinker (partly a myth, but with at least a kernel of truth in it), and the wisdom of the collective on the other, is something that was very much implicit in the story and has been a longstanding preoccupation of mine, to which I shall return later in this article.
The fact that the fictional philosopher’s teachings were all lost, but not really lost at all, was very much in my thoughts at the time I wrote the story, partly as a kind of consolation, haunted as I was at that time by my recent re-reading of Marcus Aurelius’s meditations on the vanity and transitoriness of all human works and achievements, no matter how momentous they once seemed or even truly once were. And there was certainly an element of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” running in my head:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
But I had good reason for such arguably morbid preoccupations, which were highly relevant to my own scientific and philosophical work, and to the pages of Change.
For much of my life’s work, indeed from its very inception, has been devoted to tracing and preserving the now almost completely lost, even if quite recent, scientific and philosophical traditions that embodied our new, uniquely powerful, “challenger-epistemology” that we have called “E2”—an epistemology which forms the basis of everything here in Change, as well as providing the indispensable theoretical foundations of Minimalist Intervention.
The 7000 carefully curated books in the Interchange Research library, discovered one by one in the course of decades of scholarly and scientific research at Oxford, at Brunel University, London, in-house at Interchange Research itself, and at other academic centres around the world, are but the tip of a very much larger iceberg.
So I feel that much of my life’s work has been the work of an archivist as well as that of a philosopher and scientist—simply trying to keep these ideas alive and accessible as well as developing them further, just as the younger of my current Interchange Research colleagues will be continuing to do for many decades after I myself am dead and gone.
Hence my own quest to chronicle in detail the more than 400-year history of this work, which I’ve been researching since I was a teenager, but which I only started systematically writing about in a detailed monograph about fifteen years ago—a writing project on which I first embarked about six months after I wrote “The Philosophy of a Leaf.”
The writing of that history started when one of my scientific mentors took me aside and admonished me to tell the story of this work and the epistemology behind it, and then to publish it. For he said I had “a moral responsibility” to write the history and (as he put it) “to run it up a flagpole and see who salutes it”—so that those investigators who throughout their careers have felt like lone voices crying in the wilderness will realize that they’ve been in good company all along.
What’s more, they “deserved,” he said, to know that their dissident epistemology had a long and distinguished history behind it—a history of which they already knew only pieces, and where only a handful of investigators still alive today know the whole story, for it cuts across so many wide-ranging scientific fields.
So far, I can only trace the explicit roots of my own radical ideas on change and of our work at Interchange Research through these various scientific fields—with any confidence, at least—as far back as 1620 in any detail, though there are important elements to be found as long ago as 425 BCE.
Most of the work in a recognizably modern form really began with a number of important physiologist-philosophers working in the Germanies of the 18th and early 19th centuries, mainly from around 1720 onwards.
There was a huge renaissance of their work, and of these ideas, amongst a geographically scattered group of important philosophers and scientists working mostly throughout Germany and Austria during the time of the Weimar Republic, until these pioneers were kicked out in 1933 with the rise of Hitler and came to settle in the English-speaking world, mostly in Britain and America.
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Preserving Good Science of Potentially World-Changing Import
In this way there began a concerted transatlantic, largely anglophone scientific revolution, long overdue, in the 1940s and 1950s, starting at least as early as 1926 in New York City but fuelled in no small measure by the war effort. In time it turned philosophy itself on its head, at least for a while, a story which we’ve briefly sketched in earlier pieces here in Change.
This multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary work continued apace until the 1980s, when it began to fizzle out and fade from view, and merely for quite adventitious reasons, which I will be chronicling in my history of these ideas once that work is completed.
Today, sadly, this remarkable scientific and epistemological revolution is all but forgotten. But so it is with scientific knowledge generally. Perhaps 90% or more is lost, only to reemerge much later, or sometimes having to be rediscovered from scratch.
Indeed I do find it extraordinary, and deeply worrying, just how much of this really quite recent scientific work has already effectively been lost, even over the course of my own comparatively brief career.
The relevant books and academic papers published in scientific journals are still safely housed in libraries like Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, and university libraries around the world. But few people are left alive today who still know enough of where those works are to be found, who they’re by, what is in them, how to connect the dots between them, and above all what their overwhelming importance is to solving our contemporary problems, to advancing science and technology, and to transforming our view of reality and human possibility beyond recognition, and indeed beyond anything most people can begin to imagine.
Each of these works got shelved and thereby lost among all the other stuff in print. For every important scientific or philosophical work that formed a constituent part of this extraordinary revolution in ideas, there were 10,000 others bearing a superficial resemblance to it but of no relevance whatsoever, and they typically all got shelved together.
So just like the leaf in my fable, the work of the wisest of the wise sages and investigators who created this 20th Century revolution in ideas were one by one getting lost amongst all the foliage and were destined to be lost forever in this way unless and until someone like you or me happened along, paid attention, and recognized the uniqueness and vital importance of this or that contribution to knowledge.
Many of these largely forgotten works, hundreds of them at least, are even today literally mind-blowing in my view, and in the view of those of my students to whom I’ve introduced them in recent years.
And again, like the leaf in my fable, these important works were imparting their knowledge in a language hardly anyone is naturally equipped to understand anymore, not least because the world has changed so much in the past fifty to a hundred years since they were published.
In an analogous way, it has often been remarked by historians of psychoanalysis that it is almost impossible for us to properly understand the works of Freud and the early psychoanalytic pioneers because the pre-1930s mitteleuropäische culture in which and for which they were written has long since ceased to exist, and without that interpretative context the works can only be misread to one degree or another.
Indeed, similarly, many biologists who fled the Nazis and came to America found that no one amongst their contemporary stateside colleagues could understand their scientific work, so different was it in form and content, and the way in which problems were framed and tackled.
The Interchange Research library grew organically as I pursued my quest for the holy grail of Minimalist Intervention: what I felt lifelong would be—and am still convinced represents—the ultimate technology. I sought out those who had the answers to the questions that would not leave me alone, and I acquired the books I needed for the invaluable clues they contained.
So my “archival” work and my work in the history of science were not merely bound up with, or just an adjunct to, the development of the science behind Minimalist Intervention and my efforts to articulate the new epistemology.
For more to the point, preserving this body of knowledge has been more of a side-effect of its original, principal purpose: which was to draw upon vital past scientific work in the course of taking this scientific movement forward and to the next level in my own original philosophical and scientific investigations.
What was at first a small bookshelf just grew and grew as each question led to the next, precisely in the way Collingwood describes as the essence of any serious scientific work, and was anything but “scissors-and-paste history” of the kind justly derided by Collingwood. This lifelong literature search, a labour of love, was painstaking scientific detective work.
I kept coming across often obscure, neglected and in some cases entirely forgotten pioneering scientists and philosophers, and discovering to my amazement that these people had devoted their lives to learning the very things I most wanted and needed to learn at that point—they had part of the answer to the questions I had been pursuing for decades.
And among my protégés who have been introduced to the Interchange Research library, one in particular—the remarkable young philosopher and scientist Ellen Arkfeld—found to her own astonishment and delight that, all these years, someone has been devoted for decades to assembling a specialist library of all the things she would most like to learn and all the questions she has most wanted to answer.
Indeed from the time all those years ago when she was a student at Oxford researching in this area, Ellen, who has succeeded me at the helm of Interchange Research, had long felt the same as me about the vital importance of this extraordinary body of scientific and philosophical work and the imperative to preserve it for future generations and continue to develop it further.
Ellen has taken on the work of progressing this scientific revolution and, together with her Interchange Research think-tank team, bringing its fruits to the world over the decades to come.
And so, now, Ellen is the philosopher sitting under the tree, and I am the leaf from whom she has taken her cue. In this way, a millennial philosopher and scientist will be leading a team of other millennials and passing the torch on to succeeding generations and keeping this knowledge alive and constantly evolving, extending its scope and power and ramifications, fortifying its foundations and applying its technological power ever more widely to matters of human import.
What was arguably one of the most important scientific advances of the last millennium will therefore be continued and built upon by the next.
To return to a point we made above: The story of the roots of our new and revolutionary epistemology E2, and deeply embedded in its culture, is the interaction between the lone individual thinker and the collective of other thinkers who had likewise thought they were alone.
Between 1920 and 1970, the partisans of the scientific revolution fuelled by the new epistemology worked together across borders in close collaborations lasting for decades, operating in tightly-linked networks of philosophers and scientists from countless disciplines spanning a third of the globe—and remember, this was decades before the existence of the internet, which among other things that we nowadays take for granted would not exist if not for their work.
The delicate, intricate and in some ways intractably mysterious relationship between knowledge held by an individual and that shared by a network of pioneering investigators with typically non-overlapping pursuits and yet a common collective aim, undoubtedly influenced our discovery of the E2 epistemology itself as it emerged piecemeal and implicitly through countless scientific discoveries made individually and collectively, a new epistemology which I was finally able to formulate decades later and put on firm logical and philosophical foundations.
The peculiar way in which a scientific revolution actually takes place—quietly and hidden in plain sight—which I was privileged in my life to witness first-hand at least in its later stages, was also an undercurrent in my little fable “The Philosophy of a Leaf,” and was very much in my mind at the time I wrote it.
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Catalysts in Scientific Discovery, and in Change
In my story, the catalyst that triggered a seven-year work by the nameless ancient philosopher was his glancing at a random leaf.
At the time I was thinking too of Newton, whose theory of gravitation and all the rest of the 17th Century scientific revolution, according to the traditional account at least, was triggered by Newton’s thoughts upon observing the fall of an apple while he was sitting in contemplative mood in an English garden.
August Kekulé (1829–1896) dreamt of a snake swallowing its tail, and that insight gave birth to modern organic chemistry. One oft-cited origin myth of the birth of cybernetics starts with Harry Black reading The New York Times on the deck of the Hoboken ferry on his way to work at his office at Bell Labs in West Street, Manhattan.
But the fictional, philosophical leaf in the story that acted as a catalyst for the birth of modern civilization is also emblematic of one of the fundamental phenomena that my colleagues and I have been studying for decades: how a tiny, irrelevant intervention into any system can be identified in advance, to trigger, with precision, a massive, across-the-board transformation precisely as predicted, and in practically no time at all.
Particularly germane was the notion in the story that, in a way, nothing had changed and yet everything had changed, which is precisely what we have always found true in our own large-scale transformations in the world of affairs.
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Standing Astride the Present
As for the ancient philosopher-protagonist of my tale, and for myself and Ellen, the work of a philosopher, a truth-seeker, is incredibly difficult and endlessly frustrating, and prone to recurrent doubts about the very point of what one is doing.
Wittgenstein thought and wrote and talked a lot about this, telling his friend and protégé Dr Maurice “Con” Drury how the problems he was working on at the time (Wittgenstein’s work on seeing aspects in the 1940s) was so hard because the problems themselves, he said, were “as hard as granite.”
Wittgenstein spoke too about how, to do serious philosophical work and get to the truth of things, you need to be prepared to descend into the depths of “the primeval chaos and feel at home there.” And until you’re done, and often for ages afterwards, no one but you and perhaps one or two others can even see the point of what you’ve achieved after so much struggle.
This was certainly true of no less an investigator than Freud, whose magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams, arguably the most influential work in the entire history of psychology and psychiatry, took more than eight long years to sell out its first printing of only six hundred copies.
Walter Pitts (1923–1969), one of the pioneers of cybernetics, wrote to Bertrand Russell with his compelling refutation of Russell and Whitehead’s entire monumental three-volume Principia Mathematica (completed in 1913), and in response was immediately offered a faculty position at Cambridge by Russell.
In his reply to Russell’s offer, Pitts said that regrettably, his father, a plumber, wouldn’t let him leave home until after he graduated from high school which was still more than five years away. Until that point, Russell could hardly have suspected that he’d been corresponding with a thirteen-year-old schoolboy!
The theory of artificial neural nets, developed a few years later by the still teenage Pitts, he first published in a groundbreaking 1943 paper, work he would go on to develop for the rest of his tragically short life along with a host of other pioneering scientific work.
His magnum opus on a complete theory of N-dimensional artificial neural nets, which according to the very few privileged to have seen it was a work of unparalleled genius and importance, was, sadly, subsequently lost. To my knowledge, in the eighty years that have passed since then, no one else has been successful in developing such a theory.
While Pitts’s paper on artificial neural nets may have been little more than a curiosity when it was published eight decades ago, it was to prove foundational for the global revolution in AI that is changing the world today.
Such diverse 20th and 21st Century technological innovations as modern drug testing methods, cancer-risk prediction, the groundbreaking search engine Autonomy (developed by Cambridge scientist and entrepreneur Dr Mike Lynch FRS), Stafford Beer’s Cybersyn system for the real-time management of the entire social economy of Chile (or of any other country for that matter), the self-orientation of robots in physical space, machine learning, data mining, and the technology behind Uber, to pick just a few examples at random, all owe their existence to a posthumously published 1763 essay by the 18th Century Presbyterian minister and philosopher the Rev’d Thomas Bayes (1701–1761).
To borrow the French intellectual Louis Pauwels’s phrase and concept, for a scientist or thinker today to be a true “contemporary of the future” rather than, like most of our contemporary working scientists and laymen, an out-of-date 21st Century “modern” effectively doing little more than digesting, utilizing, and enlarging upon the rationalistic errors of the late 19th Century, one must stand astride a long, dark age of narrow scientism, rationalism and increasingly bureaucratized scientific research.
Despite remarkable progress in some respects and in some areas of scientific work, recent decades have in many ways been at the same time a Dark Age, rooted, as Pauwels pointed out, in superannuated ideas that became fashionable 150 years ago yet still exert a stranglehold on modern thought.
The “standing astride” in Pauwels’s notion of being a contemporary of the future means having one foot planted firmly in the future (he was particularly intrigued and excited by the latest developments in quantum physics and artificial intelligence), and one foot planted firmly in the past, ready to draw upon past work and to see new significance in the scientific and philosophical breakthroughs of the past, in some cases the distant past, breakthroughs which have been overlooked and whose true significance can only now be appreciated.
The radical work discussed here in the pages of Change, standing astride the present, is aimed at readers aspiring to be contemporaries of the future: It is work that is at one and the same time radically new and unheralded, while being firmly rooted in a very long and glorious, if sometimes convoluted and often surprising, firmly established, richly documented history of scientific and philosophical work going back decades and indeed centuries.
And who is to say that in all the 2.6 million years or more of our life together as people talking to one another, and advancing technology together, these potentially world-changing, radical thoughts have not been thought before at some point in the far distant past? Of course they must have been, and many times over.
We ourselves at Interchange Research are finding more and more traces of these early precursors of our own ideas the more we look back through the thought of long neglected thinkers and investigators.
After all, the forward-looking, future-creating Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries itself was in the first place all about the renascence of the ideas of antiquity.
Nor, the more that medievalists learn, was the civilization of the Middle Ages any less sophisticated or advanced than our own in a number of ways—philosophically and, in certain respects, scientifically and even technologically. Even the darkest of the Dark Ages were not so dark wherever there was, in terms of learning, no shortage of light.
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Schmidt GA, Frank A (2019). The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? International Journal of Astrobiology 18, 142–150. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S1473550418000095