How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence

‘Things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people’s not having, but she couldn’t imagine their not wanting and not missing.

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things.

Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), physicist

4 | Naming creates the world that is to be investigated. The world becomes a world of things, and sometimes, perilously, the world becomes a world of mere things.

5 | The universe exists as a physical object, the physicist Alan Guth claims.

6 | Because they are identical to each other, elementary particles are not things. Being identical, they can have no identity as things: that is what identical means. If there was any way of distinguishing one electron from another, that would be proof that they were not identical to each other. But if electrons cannot be distinguished one from the other, in what sense are they not the same electron? The physicist John Wheeler wondered if all 10

in the visible universe might not in fact be the same electron taking full advantage of that quality of the quantum world that allows a particle to be in more than one place at the same time. It is one of those ideas that feels so true that it must be true, yet Richard Feynman, when Wheeler told him of his idea, took just a few moments to prove mathematically why it cannot be true. Wheeler, however, may yet have the last laugh. A reformulation of general relativity called shape dynamics uses a similar idea. In shape dynamics, shape rather than size is used to relate objects far apart. The theory puts forward the idea that at its beginning the universe had a vast number of dimensions – a consequence of everything being much the same shape. As the universe evolved into greater complexity – more complexly shaped things – so the dimensions of the universe got pruned down to the three that complex humans are aware of. In shape dynamics, three-dimensional space is an illusion, and time the deeper reality that explains the illusion.

For the first time in my life, then, I heard the voice of the One coming from the Many – I who until then had been taught to look for the wonder of infinite divisibility and variety, for the many in the one, the elaboration and detail of a broken infinity. My world, all through my life, had been made of parts ever increasingly divided into more intricate and complex fractions. By our contemplation of pieces of things we had grown to believe that the part is greater than the whole; and so division had motivated all the activities of people I had known, of books I had read, of music I had heard, and of pictures I had seen.

Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962), New York heiress who set up a literary colony in Taos, New Mexico, and married a Native American, from her memoir Edge of Taos Desert

‘This must be the wood’, she said thoughtfully to herself, ‘where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all – because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs – ‘answers to the name of “Dash”: had on a brass collar’ – just fancy calling everything you met “Alice,” till one of them answered! Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.’

She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. ‘Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,’ she said as she stepped under the trees, ‘after being so hot, to get into the – into what?’ she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. ‘I mean to get under the – under the – under this, you know!’ putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. ‘What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name – why, to be sure it hasn’t!’

She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. ‘Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I’m determined to do it!’ But being determined didn’t help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was,‘L, I know it begins with L!’

Just then a Fawn came wandering by: it looked at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn’t seem at all frightened. ‘Here then! Here then!’ Alice said, as she held out her hand and tried to stroke it; but it only started back a little, and then stood looking at her again.

‘What do you call yourself?’ the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had!

‘I wish I knew!’ thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, ‘Nothing, just now.’

‘Think again,’ it said: ‘that won’t do.’

Alice thought, but nothing came of it. ‘Please, would you tell me what you call yourself?’ she said timidly. ‘I think that might help a little.’

‘I’ll tell you, if you’ll come a little further on,’ the Fawn said. ‘I can’t remember here.’

So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight: ‘And, dear me! You’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

Lewis Carroll (1832–98), Through the Looking-Glass

Is love when you don’t give a name to the identity of things?

Clarice Lispector (1920–77), The Passion According to G.H.

To feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, it’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

7 | There are days when I know that the world is made out of things I can reach out and touch, but there are days, too, rarer days, when I know that everything I reach out to is one thing, and then, for a moment, I know that there are no things.

8 | We must learn to be separate. We were born inseparable rom mother and the world. Counting, abstraction, these abilities had to be taught to us. And what we learned was to make a world as if of things.

9 | When King Midas was given the touch, the whole world turned to gold. The power recognised no boundaries between things. Midas breathed out and the air turned to gold. The atmosphere crashed to earth. The light that hit his retina turned to gold. All light and all radiation across the universe were transformed. The universe turned into a block of gold and fell to where?

10 | Atoms are continually on the move in and out of our bodies. Matter flows through us. From the perspective of the constituents of matter we have no boundary as a thing. We are part of a process that flows into everything. The boundaries emerge at different scales. The boundaries are illusions of scale and perspective.

11 | You look at an oak tree. You see its arbitrary boundaries in space: a trunk, roots, branches, twigs, leaves. You acknowledge the tree’s arbitrary beginnings in time as an acorn. You think of all the tree’s acorn ancestors, a line of acorns that stretches back in time to when the tree’s precursors were no longer recognisably oaks, and then to when they were no longer recognisably trees, and so, inexorably, the origins of this tree draw you back to the origins of the universe (and back beyond to the abstractions of the multiverse of random quantum inflation, or whatever the latest modish physical theory might be). And then you trace this particular tree forwards in time from when it was an acorn, and see that it has been woven out of an iterative process of information-exchange between light, water, minerals and the code held in the seed. You see that the tree is all the sunlight that has ever fallen on it, light that has travelled across the solar system, a part of the sun captured and transformed here on earth into chemical bonds and radiant heat.

The tree is the water absorbed at its roots, it is all the water that has transpired from its leaves and been absorbed into the air, all the oxygen and carbon dioxide exchanged. It is the wind that has shaped it, and the parasites that live in its bark, that have mottled its leaves, the cankers and the mistletoe.

It is the birds that nest in it and the birds that have nested in it, even the birds and insects that have briefly landed on its leaves and branches. It is the cows that have rubbed against it, and the initials lovers have carved on its trunk. It is the roots that stretch underground and join the roots of other trees. It is everyone who has ever sat in its shade. Whatever the tree is, it is you who decides where it begins and ends. There are no separate things, only what we make so. And so our investigations of the world begin as conscious human acts of separation made by observers. They begin in subjectivity, that, once the boundaries of our objects are decided upon, we call objectivity. You can say what a tree is and what it means to you, but from the point of view of the world, the world is of a piece and there is no tree.

And then snow descends and unifies the tree into the landscape. Snow unifies the suited tree to the field, even strident modern houses and factories and cars are reclaimed as natural forms, softened and smudged in. Gentle, muffling snow reminds us that the world is one.

The tree is as it is seen and painted by the artist. No one can draw a tree without in some measure becoming that tree, a painter once told Emerson. In a Gainsborough portrait the feathers in the woman’s hat have the same featheriness as the leaves on the tree.

The sunlight measures the tree, as does the wind passing through its branches, and you absorb the sunlight and the sounds and you measure the tree to your own ends. Or at night you make out the tree in a different fashion out of starlight. Even without the sun and stars you might – in theory – be able to measure the tree out of its relation to the particles coming into and out of existence in the vacuum. If the vacuum were truly empty there would be no tree. Yet you are conscious of the tree as a tree, as a unified thing. This is a profound problem.

SECTION 11 (#ulink_dfbf0e49-4493-5de7-b0d9-1c66a7964bb2)

Starting again (#ulink_dfbf0e49-4493-5de7-b0d9-1c66a7964bb2)

1 | Physicists’ seeming obsession with fundamental descriptions takes them as far away from the human condition as it is possible to go, to the beginnings of the universe. Even though they often pretend otherwise – affecting to disdain philosophy – physicists care what the fundamentals are: what the material is that reality is woven out of; whether it is space that is real and time the illusion, or vice versa; whether or not there really are causes and effects; how the world can be all of a piece and yet have things in it. If we are ever to make a human being we will have to abandon these concerns and move closer to our own scale. In this evolving, expanding universe in which we find ourselves we might take everything to be equally existent no matter when it first appeared, or at what scale. Time may be an illusion from a reductive physical point of view, but it is no less real now at this point in the evolution of the universe. There are causes and effects in the human world. Things happen, and we make things. We might take the universe as read and wonder instead how the universe evolved human beings as things in time.

PART TWO (#ulink_6e7a2a43-4110-50f1-bfc8-c66c4808d917)

Who’s there?

The opening words of Hamlet

SECTION 1 (#ulink_25a7c5ad-1b2b-5cf7-8850-050606eeb533)

Matter → meat (#ulink_25a7c5ad-1b2b-5cf7-8850-050606eeb533)

Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing – a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.

Richard Dawkins

1 | These days evolution is invoked to describe not only the evolution of life, but the evolution of the whole universe. Evolution is the story of what happened, in an expanding universe, to those first particles created at the Big Bang.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’

Richard Dawkins