Gaia Theory - Reflections on Life in the Universe (2023)

CHAPTER FIVE1 Gaia Theory – Reflections on Life in the Universe William Grey §1 Introduction We inhabit an extraordinary planet. Our nearest celestial companions – the Moon, and our sister planets Venus and Mars – provide striking abiotic (lifeless) contrasts to the conditions on planet Earth. Just how the Earth got this way, and how it has managed to stay this way, is a fascinating story, some elements of which we are beginning to understand.1 Piecing together the history is a work in progress that will no doubt continue for a long time, and much of the detail will never be recovered. The earliest life forms that we know of were microscopic organisms that left their traces in rocks about 3.7 billion years (eons) ago. This was the beginning of the Archean Eon.2 The robust scientific consensus is that about this time organic chemistry transformed our then lifeless world by somehow generating selfreplicating molecules. These precursors of life, by steps unknown, eventually produced the most remarkable molecule (that we know of) in the universe: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Over an inconceivable expanse of geological time, DNA molecules have managed to construct, through Darwinian selective mechanisms, complex protein structures – which include humans, as well the living world which surrounds us. Always opportunistic, life has become ever more complex and wonderfully adapted to the world in which it exists. According to this orthodox scientific story, life is envisioned as a process which commenced within, and adapted to, an abiotic world. Lovelock’s big idea was the audacious conjecture that life does not merely adjust itself to the conditions within which it finds itself, but collectively responds to, interacts with and systematically 1 Published in Charles Tandy (ed) Death And Anti-Death, Volume 21: One Year After James Lovelock (1919-2022). Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ria University Press, 2023, Chapter 5, pp. 137-171. This offprint includes minor corrections and textual changes. - 137 - shapes the chemical and physical environment on a planetary scale in a way that maintains congenial conditions for life to flourish. Gaia3 theory accepts the Darwinian account of the adaptation of organisms to their environment, but claims that organisms and their environment are closely coupled systems which shape each other.4 The Gaian view is that the biosphere is more than a collection of organisms maintaining their integrity by adjusting themselves to environmental change; organisms also continuously adjust their world in ways that keeps it hospitable for life. Darwin correctly identified competition between individuals for resources as the primary selection mechanism, but his theory was incomplete because it assumed that while organisms were shaped by the environment they played no significant rôle in shaping it.5 Gaia has existed and kept the planet fit for life for about one quarter of the 14 eon age of the universe. A changing but stable state of the planet (homeostasis) has been maintained over this vast period, in particular by biochemical and physical adjustments which are a result of the activity of microorganisms, which have survived continuously throughout this time.6 Gaia maintains atmospheric composition and surface temperature by pumping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and locking it up, using several mechanisms including, importantly, the burial of carbon, the deposition of carbonate shells by marine organisms, and the activity of soil microorganisms which chemically accelerate the rate of rock weathering to form limestone – the silicate-carbonate geochemical cycle.7 Perhaps the greatest problem which now confronts humanity is caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions, which are releasing into the atmosphere prodigious quantities of the fossil carbon which Gaia has prudently sequestered.8 This reckless disturbance (beyond the usual limits of human incaution), combined with land clearing and other unsustainable agricultural practices, is overwhelming the capacity of Gaia's vital carbon pumps. Anthropogenic carbon pollution is likely to initiate a cascade of consequences which – if not addressed – will create an existential threat to human civilization. Lovelock was pessimistic about our capacity to sustain human populations at anything like their present size and level of - 138 - consumption without seriously disrupting the processes on which our individual and collective well-being ultimately depends. In this paper I will discuss the genesis, development, and reception, of Lovelock's Gaia theory, which has significantly influenced the way we think about life on planet Earth – and beyond. Gaia theory is the most outstanding achievement of Lovelock’s long and remarkable life.9 I will also consider ways in which Gaia has stimulated interest in extra-terrestrial life. §2 The genesis of Gaia The idea of the Earth as a living planet occurred to Lovelock in 1965 when he was working in California with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA sought Lovelock's advice about detecting extra-terrestrial life as part of the planned Viking missions to Mars. This led Lovelock to ruminate on the difference between a living and a lifeless planet. Most scientists approached by NASA proposed sensors or experiments to detect organisms such as microbes, or chemical signatures of life. Lovelock reasoned that the presence of life could be detected more decisively (and much more cheaply and straightforwardly) if the problem was addressed on a planetary scale. He came to the conclusion that a living planet could be distinguished from a lifeless planet by the anomalous chemical composition of a living planet's atmosphere. Lovelock approached this problem by adopting a top-down planetary perspective, which is a crucial feature of his formulation of Gaia theory.10 The top-down view is complementary to the bottom-up approach of disciplines such as molecular biology and geochemistry.11 Lovelock stresses the holistic character of Gaia theory in a number of places. Because his concern is to understand living planets as a whole, Lovelock characterized his domain of planetary science as geophysiology.12 Lovelock's top-down approach contrasts with the stance of scientific disciplines which begin their inquiries with an examination of the elementary parts. This latter approach is a Cartesian rationalist reductive form of inquiry which Lovelock believes can be a barrier to understanding the dynamic interconnectedness of biological and physical systems.13 - 139 - A lot of early criticism of Gaia theory came from reductionists, epitomized by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Just as Margaret Thatcher famously opined "there is no such thing as society", Dawkins suggests "there is no such thing as Gaia". Society was an entity which Thatcher saw no need to include in her economic ontology, which consisted entirely of individual agents making their self-interested choices.14 In a similar fashion Dawkins' biological ontology consists of only individual organisms, and their constituent genetic components, acting (wittingly or blindly) in their own immediate self interest.15 §3 Holism, reductionism and hemispheric framing In defending Gaia theory Lovelock stresses the importance of the synoptic 'top-down' planetary perspective for understanding life on earth, which he says is needed in addition to, not instead of, reductionist 'bottom-up' explanatory theories. Dawkins dismisses what Lovelock claims to be good science as "romantic fancy". This difference is partly a matter of temperament, but it also has deep epistemological foundations which are worth exploring. The difference between Dawkins and Lovelock is not simply a disagreement about empirical facts; it is a disagreement about levels of explanation.16 Dawkins is an articulate champion of the reductionist thesis that living structures are to be explained and understood in terms of the laws of physics and molecular biology. The ambition of molecular biology is to explain biological performance in terms of molecular structure, and in an important domain of inquiry it has been brilliantly successful. Dawkins denies that there are 'emergent' properties or higher level structures that cannot be explained in terms of the laws which govern the interaction of molecular component parts. This is a fundamental point of disagreement with Lovelock who claims that reductionists' bottom-up attempt to make sense of complex structures neglects, or misses altogether, systemic features which are vitally important. The difference between holism and reductionism encountered here is a manifestation of an issue that arises repeatedly in the course of philosophical inquiry. It is a difference which arises because of two distinct modes of cognitive engagement manifested in the left and right cerebral hemispheres of our lateralized brain.17 - 140 - Lateralization is a feature of the architecture of even very primitive nervous systems. Its adaptive advantage is that it enables organisms to carry out dual attention tasks which can interfere with one other with potentially disastrous, or even fatal, consequences. Organisms need vigilant general awareness, to detect threats and opportunities, as well as concentrated narrowly-focused awareness to enable them to take evasive action or to exploit opportunities. Vertebrates share a general pattern of brain lateralization, with the left hemisphere controlling routine tasks (such as finding dinner or a mate), while the right hemisphere is responsible for vigilance and emergency responses (such as avoiding becoming someone else's dinner).18 Our cognitive systems have been adaptively shaped not for thinking about the world but for surviving in it.19 Human cognition is an evolutionary legacy which has provided us with an extraordinary capacity for understanding – and misunderstanding. The hemispheres however have different modes of experiencing and understanding the world. Holistic, synoptic attention is (broadly speaking) the province of the right hemisphere while narrowly focused manipulation and detailed attention are (again broadly speaking) the province of the left hemisphere. The ancient neurologically-based cognitive division between focused attention (left hemisphere) and general awareness (right hemisphere) has not just persisted; it has widened. Intriguingly, as the cortex has grown larger the connectivity between the two cortical hemispheres (provided by the corpus callosum) has actually diminished. Their functional domains remain firmly separated.20 Both hemispheres contribute to most cognitive tasks, but there is a division of cognitive labor, and the balance of the contribution of the hemispheres can vary from task to task. However one of the "more durable generalizations" is that the left hemisphere generally attends to items of information in isolation, while the right hemisphere deals with experience more holistically, that is, within a wider context.21 Each hemisphere has a distinctive style of experiencing and understanding the world, but the left hemisphere, which is dominant in the use of language (at least in its routine deployment) undertakes the lion's share of explanation and the generation of theory. - 141 - The dispute between Lovelock and Dawkins, I suggest, can be understood as a difference between the cognitive modes of the right and left hemispheres.22 Dawkins left hemisphere mode is representative of the dominant mode of scientific inquiry – and it is also typically the dominant mode of inquiry of so-called 'analytic' philosophy.23 The difference in the way that the hemispheres experience the world and process that experience, provides insights into a number of – sometimes venerable – philosophical puzzles. Looking at philosophical problems through the lens of brain lateralization is an inquiry which I call neuroepistemology.24 §4 Nagel and objective understanding The difference between holistic thinking epitomized by Lovelock and reductionist thinking represented by Dawkins, represents a conflict – or a tension – in thinking which is explored variously by other thinkers.25 A notable example is Thomas Nagel, who identifies and explores a problematic conflict between subjective (internal) and objective (external) perspectives or modes of experience. The ambition to transcend our parochial personal perspective and achieve an objective, perspective-free – sometimes called 'absolute' – point of view turns out to be problematic.26 Nagel brilliantly explores the difficulty of combining the subjective with the objective over a number of philosophical domains. Objective understanding is valued because it delivers (or is supposed to deliver) an understanding of the world as it really is, independently of any parochial point of view which depends on the contingencies of a subject of awareness. However subjective experience is itself a part of reality, so if the objective view is to include everything it must somehow also include the subjective view which it (the objective view) was supposed to transcend. Nagel suggests that we are creatures with subjective awareness who have developed the idea of objectivity – the idea of the reality of a world which exists independently of our awareness – which can be considered impersonally. When we become aware of ourselves as subjects of experience, we become aware of other subjects with their own points of view, and thereby develop the need for a unified reality which all the perspectives are perspectives of.27 This objective world is thought of as existing independently of all - 142 - subjective perspectives. The discovery of objectivity, Nagel suggests, inexorably leads us to seek a maximally unified perspective-free view. To think objectively, it seems, is to think nonperspectivally. It is this notion of objectivity which generates a transcendental impulse – objectivity comes to be seen as a higher or more inclusive perspective and the attempt is then made to eliminate subjectivity as somehow deficient or epistemically limited. My concern, like Nagel's, is about cognitive conflict, but it differs in important respects from Nagel's account. For Nagel, inquiry begins from a subjective standpoint which he doesn't sharply delineate, but it seems to consist of a set of beliefs and attitudes. Objectivity for Nagel is achieved by a process of step-wise detachment from the contingencies of the self. Nagel's conception of objectivity is a scalar notion – that is, objectivity comes in degrees. When we embark on the journey towards objectivity we progressively discard the subjective elements of the human perspective.28 I will deploy a different dichotomy to Nagel. Instead of Nagel's subjective and objective modes I will consider right and left hemisphere modes of attention and experience. These are related to Nagel's notions: left hemisphere abstract representations are closely related to Nagel's impersonal external objective perspective.29 Right hemisphere experience is immediate, immersive, interactive sensory experience which includes phenomenological exteroceptive 'presencing' as well proprioceptive and interoceptive bodily awareness.30 Nagel's subjective standpoint is constituted by the beliefs and attitudes of the subject, which are a part of right hemisphere experience, but fully-engaged interactive visceral bodily experience is not included.31 Left hemisphere experience, in contrast, is detached and is usually expressed with complex abstract representational structures – mostly linguistic and mathematical. The left hemisphere is the articulate, talkative, confabulating part of the mind, specializing in manipulation (literally and figuratively) and attention to detail. It is a development of the narrow-focus function of the brains of our evolutionary precursors. The signature of right hemisphere cognition is taking a synoptic view and having awareness of a wider context, and this produces a greater capacity for intuitive insight and wisdom than its cerebral companion. The - 143 - all-encompassing planetary perspective of life on Earth provided by Gaia theory is a majestic right hemisphere conception of our planet. Nagel's path to objectivity consists of discarding subjective elements of the first person perspective. The impersonal objective view is valorized because it is supposed to discard the contingencies of the self, and thereby to come closer to objective reality.32 Nagel believes there is an irresistible attraction to the incompatible subjective and objective perspectives.33 We need to deploy each of them to make sense of our lives. According to Nagel human life, with opportunities to exercise autonomy and development, is subjectively experienced as meaningful, but from the detached centerless perspective (the external objective standpoint) meaning evaporates and all significance disappears.34 Nagel is perplexed by the existence of incommensurable perspectives from which the meaningfulness of his life can be so differently assessed. He thinks that it is impossible not to embrace both conflicting points of view, and concludes that human life is absurd.35 There is, perhaps, a more congenial solution, which Nagel does not consider; namely, even if Nagel is right that life is absurd, it isn't obviously categorically absurd, so perhaps we can conclude that life is both absurd and not absurd. We might label this the Walt Whitman resolution.36 From a bihemispheric point of view the move from the personal to the impersonal is a move away from reality. The real world, for the right hemisphere, is a world in which we are interactively immersed. The left hemisphere perspective had better not become a competing autonomous mode of appraisal. Left hemisphere representations focus and refract experience and thereby function as powerful amplifiers of human activity and achievement. All is well provided that they operate harmoniously, with the right hemisphere's full participation. However left hemisphere cognition becomes problematic when it takes off on its own and ceases to be guided and constrained by the right hemisphere.37 The unfolding unity of reality – constituted by the causal connectedness of everything to everything else –is the object of right hemisphere experience; it can be likened to an orchestral performance, and left hemisphere representations can be likened to a musical score. Musical scores are useful because they enable musical performance. They are enriching because, like other left hemisphere abstract - 144 - representations, they foster concrete manifestations – in this case orchestral performance.38 §5 Paradigms and levels of description The disagreement between Lovelock and Dawkins is an example of a recurrent developmental pattern in the progress of scientific theory. Scientific progress is often the result of discovering a significant pattern at new level of description, or by transforming a level of description by introducing a simplifying assumption which makes a problematic domain of phenomena tractable. Considering a problem from a new vantage point can enable a simplification that reveals deep connections. Copernicus's proposal to adopt a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective transformed astronomy.39 Newton's intuition that spherical objects could be treated as point masses at their center led to his revolutionary leap in explaining orbital dynamics. The Earth, the Moon, and an apple could then all be included as part of the same dynamic system – an astonishing right hemisphere synoptic insight. Newton's left hemisphere then had the formidable task of legitimizing this intuitive simplification.40 The Newtonian physical model of the world as shaped matter in motion had a powerful impact on Enlightenment thinking, and played a central rôle in the materialist conception of the world throughout the succeeding centuries.41 Complex systems can manifest patterns of activity with stable processes operating and interacting at multiple levels of organized structure which operating over an enormous range of spatial and time scales.42 Systems that are intractably complex at one level may be straightforward – or less intractable – at another. A good synoptic right hemisphere intuition can be the kernel of a research program. Thomas Kuhn famously distinguished 'normal' and 'revolutionary' science.43 Normal science provides incremental extensions of empirical knowledge – business as usual – while revolutionary science radically reshapes, or opens up, a new domain of understanding.44 Scientific revolutions are imaginative insights that generate controversy and excitement; on Kuhn's account they are signaled by the introduction of a new paradigm,45 which marks a radical reconceptualization of a domain of inquiry. Such reconceptualization is the product of right hemisphere synoptic - 145 - intuition, which is almost always articulated with the use of metaphor. Metaphorical understanding, significantly, is the province of the right hemisphere. Gaia theory is no exception. The biosphere is a living organism is Lovelock's metaphor. In response, Dawkins denied that Gaian control mechanisms could emerge from evolution by natural selection; Gaia is not a unit of selection so the theory is incompatible with Darwinian evolution – as Dawkins understands it.46 Left hemisphere assessment is nit-picking and obsessively pursues precision and clarity,47 and demands necessary and sufficient conditions for concept application. Gaia simply fails to satisfy Dawkins's requirements for 'living entity'. Stephen J. Gould similarly complains that Gaia theory is "just metaphor"; it fails to provide any causal mechanisms, an essential requirement for respectable scientific theories.48 Dawkins and Gould had sharp points of difference concerning the correct interpretation of their mutual hero, Darwin, but when it comes to Gaia theory they are in lockstep as champions of molecular biological and biogeochemical reduction. In this context they share a left hemisphere reductionist mindset which demands that explanation start from constituent elements, and includes only forward marching causal processes. Any structural and dynamic patterns that emerge at higher levels of organization are to be explained reductively by causal processes at lower levels. Complex entities are to be explained in terms of the properties of their constituent parts. Perhaps we can find helpful heuristic models to simplify and explain higher level patterns, but for reductionists these are stop-gap measures. The complete story for reductionists is a left hemisphere story which can be found (if it can be found at all – it may be beyond our technical or conceptual reach) only at the lower physico-chemical structural levels of organization. Emergence and teleological processes are anathema. An alternative right hemisphere mindset – which I will sketch but not defend in any detail – conceives reality as a complex dynamic multilayered multiply-interconnected unfolding noveltygenerating creative process.49 There are many levels on which we struggle to gain some epistemic purchase and make sense of this 'blooming buzzing confusion'.50 It is a marvel that we make sense of any of it at all, and astonishing that we make as much sense of at - 146 - least some of it as we actually do. It is also unsurprising, given the complexity of the world and the limitations of our bihemispheric cognitive system, that there are so many daft, short-sighted, and counterproductive views, and so much individually and collectively self-destructive behavior. Complex dynamic unfolding process constitutes the world. Scientific explanation for Dawkins and Gould privileges physico-chemical levels of organization. Reductionists favor the Cartesian approach of constructing theory on the basis of incorrigible simple elements. The Cartesian metaphor for knowledge is an edifice, a foundational structure on which knowledge is built. Upper levels rest on the lower elemental foundations: biology is explained by chemistry, which is explained in turn by physics. If you are constructing an edifice the bottom is the right place to start. But knowledge isn't like an edifice. If you want to explain complex aspects of biological performance it is unhelpful to begin with atomic structure. And if you want to explain cognitive processes don't start with neuronal interactions. As an Irish neuroscientist might put it: "if I was going to get to consciousness I wouldn't be starting from here". The meaning of neuronal interaction can only be discovered if you begin inquiry at a higher level of cognitive processing. The rôle that neurons play is only manifested and only visible at higher levels of neural organization. A biological example of pattern emerging at a higher level of organization is provided by bird flocking. A murmuration of starlings is a spectacular display of collective and coordinated behavior of perhaps thousands of individual birds, which together form a pulsating, swooping, living, marvelous harmonized whole. The collective precision and coordination of the flock prompted some ornithologists to suggest that the birds must use some sort of telepathic communication to signal their flight intentions. The aweinspiring murmuration patterns however turn out not to be the result of telepathy, but simple decision-making processes of individual birds who constantly adjust their flight path according to the position and trajectory of their seven nearest neighbors. The patterns can be explained as a product of each bird following a simple set of rules. These rules can be applied only at the collective level. It would be absurd to try and explain the pattern in terms of the cognitive - 147 - processes of individual birds. The murmuration pattern is an emergent property. We seek causal explanation at a physico-chemical level to explain and control phenomena. But we depend on experience from the wider contextual (right hemisphere) view to identify the patterns that we seek to explain. Lovelock's metaphor of the Earth as organism suggests a way of looking at the world that invites, and has produced, empirical research. If living systems act in a collective and coordinated manner to maintain vital parameters like atmospheric composition, ocean salinity and temperature, we are curious to find the mechanisms. The right hemisphere intuition demands a systematic left hemisphere evaluative investigation.51 Darwin's theory began with an intuitive insight which can readily be expressed metaphorically: organisms are one family. That isn't a metaphor that Darwin chose, although according to his theory every organism is related to every other organism by descent (with modification) from a common ancestor. We are all cousins; but some, indeed most, cousins are very distant. It is unsurprising that Darwin avoided this metaphor; the Darwinian family includes a lot of squabbling, violence and predation; lions lying down with lambs are the exception rather than the rule. There is much internecine strife. Darwin's Victorian contemporaries were also alarmed about the consanguinity with even our very close cousins, the great apes.52 The coordinated knowledge, which constitutes science, is formed by combining right hemisphere observational perceptual intuitions and abstract linguistic (and mathematical) left hemisphere theory. As with every great innovator, Darwin's genius was bihemispheric. His right hemisphere intuitions about the relatedness of all members of the living world were accompanied by years of painstaking left hemisphere confirmation his theory with his detailed study of, inter alia, pigeons, barnacles and earthworms. Darwin's theory was disruptive and distressing to Victorian sensibilities. Instead of divinely created in the image of God, it turned out that humans are just another primate – precocious, flexible and adaptive, to be sure – but continuous with and not spiritually distinct or separate from brute creation. Just an animal with peculiar traits, such as the rationality.53 Victorians were deeply disturbed by the Darwinian view of the world. The lay community, - 148 - in particular, was appalled and any support that Darwin got came from his scientific allies like Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker and his great champion Thomas Huxley. Darwin had anticipated a hostile reception to his big idea, which caused him to delay its publication for twenty years. Its publication was eventually precipitated by a letter he received from Alfred Russel Wallace who had independently worked out the principle of natural selection and had written to Darwin to seek his advice about publication.54 The greatest opposition to Darwinian theory came from the religious establishment. Since the Enlightenment religion had played a decreasingly effective rôle in satisfying the right hemisphere's hunger for a deeper connection to a greater world.55 The difference between Darwin and Lovelock in their public reception is that whereas Darwin severed a (rather shaky) link to a realm beyond the quotidian world of human experience that religion offered (or at least claimed), Lovelock presented an enlarged conception of our world – Gaia – which enriched our understanding. Gaia reimagines the world to which we are already connected, and occupy. Gaia is alive and beautiful and working hard to look after us, fine tuning our chemical and physical environment by a diligent, continuous cooperative effort. We are well-supported by homeostatic feedback loops which maintain the vital balance of conditions on which we all depend – or at least Gaia would maintain a habitable planet if it weren't for all the anthropogenic disruption. Don't wait for Paradise in the hereafter; look after Gaia and we can have Paradise here and now at home on Earth.56 Lovelock's vision provides nourishment for hungry right hemispheres seeking synoptic connection to a bigger and better world. And unlike the better world talked about in churches, you don't have to wait until you are dead in order to see it. Gaia has the big advantage that you can see her just by looking out the window. Gaia is irresistible. And in 1968,57 astronaut Bill Anders took an immortal image of the face of Gaia on the Apollo 8 lunar mission. Gaia – the beautiful integrated totality of the biosphere –could be viewed for the first time from a genuinely planetary perspective.58 Gaia has been derided by critics because of its religious or spiritual appeal. However before Gaia is convicted of guilt by association we should take a closer look at the appeal of religion. (I - 149 - will consider this in more detail below.) Gaia does not appeal because the theory has a religious element; it is powerful because it has right hemisphere appeal, which is precisely the ground of the appeal of religion. The left hemisphere perhaps can live by bread alone, but the whole person – which includes the right hemisphere – cannot; the whole person requires more nourishment. Another synoptic right hemisphere view of life-in-harmonywith-nature is the 'Land Ethic' articulated by American forester and conservationist Aldo Leopold. Leopold's metaphorical framing of ecosystems is to portray them as land communities, whose constituents are a diversity of human and non-human biotic citizens. The community can flourish as long as stable patterns of functioning are maintained. A well-functioning community depends on sustainable 'fountains of energy',59 which must be maintained by respectful behavior which observes biologically sustainable limits. Thoughtful lived experience in the land community is the way we learn what these respectful limits are. The Land Ethic is guidebook for land use, setting out the principles which need to be respected to be responsible and productive members of the biotic community. 60 Like Lovelock, Leopold articulates his conception with a powerful synoptic metaphor. Lovelock's geophysiology takes a planetary perspective. Leopold's perspective is more modest: Leopold thinks like a mountain.61 §6 Gaia and Huey Lovelock has taught us that using 'Gaia' to name the collective composite which constitutes life on earth helps us to think globally about the planet on which we exist; a planet which develops and is maintained by self-regulating processes which it is (to put it no more strongly) prudent not to disrupt without some very careful thought. Is there a cosmic counterpart to Gaia, a collective totality of everything – the totality of the whole material universe? We can suppose that there is. I will name the material totality of everything 'Huey'. Huey is the parent of Gaia (so to speak).62 Huey started with a bang – a Big Bang – about 14 eons ago. Since that inception Huey has been differentiating and spreading, and becoming progressively more complex. It took Huey about 380,000 years to become visible, a momentous developmental stage which - 150 - we can now catch a glimpse of through the James Web Space Telescope.63 For the first few eons of Huey's life – his infancy – the possibilities of structural complexity were mostly limited to stellar, galactic and super-galactic structures. But after the formation of second generation stars – which could benefit from the chemical evolution of elements from first generation supernovas and the mergings of neutron stars – there was a reasonable abundance of most stable chemical elements – including oxygen, nitrogen, and most importantly, carbon.64 These essential building blocks enabled the emergence of structures with new levels of complexity – really interesting levels, such as the level of carbon chemistry. Life as we know it became possible. Among Huey's progeny we can include Gaia. Terrestrial life is the product of an evolutionary process which has continued for nearly four eons, about a quarter of the age of Huey. Over this immense period Gaia has fashioned a varied succession of life assemblages, the result of adaptation and selection which have operated from the beginning. We know that the chemicals on which life depends are abundant in the universe, and there is therefore every likelihood that there are other islands of organized chemical complexity existing on other worlds which inhabit 'goldilocks' zones near other stars similar to the zone occupied by Gaia in relation to our Sun. Such zones provide conditions congenial for generating, supporting and developing life.65 Because such zones almost certainly exist there must be many other Gaias. Self conscious intelligence however is a very recent acquisition by Gaia – an eye-blink geologically speaking – and not only has its tenure been short, it may also be ephemeral. Acquiring the capacity to modify one's domestic ecosystem rapidly, violently and globally may be a maladaptive trait which quickly eliminates itself from the gene pool. If the history of Gaia is representative of evolutionary patterns elsewhere,66 we would expect there to be a much greater abundance of systems with simple life forms (such as prokaryotes, or their alien equivalents), fewer systems with more complex single celled organisms (such as eukaryotes or their alien equivalents), and still fewer multicellular assemblages. As complexity increases to include sentient, and self-consciously intelligent life forms, the number of - 151 - alien systems which include such entities may become vanishingly small or even, as some suspect, disappear altogether.67 The search for alien life is far more likely to succeed if we look for simple life, which there is a good chance of detecting from the chemical signature of an anomalous atmosphere. In this way we may be able to detect the presence of simple life forms on distant exoplanets using high resolution spectroscopy. We should take 'distant' to mean exoplanets not just within our galaxy, but within the local neighborhood of our galaxy, that is, within at most a few thousand light years.68 Gaia has existed for eons with an anomalous (chemically active) atmosphere. The atmosphere has undergone radical change, but it would nevertheless have been detectable, in its various guises, by the advanced technologies of any distant alien intelligence with the interest and the technological capacity to undertake the search.69 This is a multi-eon temporal window for detecting chemical signatures of 'primitive' life forms, and it provides much more favorable odds for successful life detection than the search for anomalous electromagnetic signals – the technological signature of alien intelligence. Finding any signal from extra-terrestrial intelligence is a very long shot. The history of Gaia suggests that even if extraterrestrial life is abundant, extraterrestrial intelligence is probably rare in the modest regions that are causally accessible.70 The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) has so far been unsuccessful. The failure to find any evidence of intelligence has been called the Fermi paradox.71 It's a big galaxy with lots planets with the right chemicals; why hasn't anyone been in touch? The question is an interesting one to ponder, but it's a puzzle, not a paradox.72 Can we quantify the problem and develop some rough estimate of the number of Gaia's out there? Huey after all consists of billions of galaxies, many consisting of billions of stars. It seems inconceivable that there is only one Gaia. We are naturally curious to find out if there other Gaia's out there. The Drake equation is a formulation of what we would need to know to estimate the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. It was devised by Frank Drake in 1961. The number civilizations is the product of seven variables. We have some chance of forming a rough estimate of two of them.73 But we have no clue - 152 - about the values of most of the variables. The equation doesn't answer the question; it tells us rather that with our current technology we have no way of answering it. There have nevertheless been attempts to estimate an answer. A 2020 study, on the basis of some heroic assumptions, estimated that there may be 36 active communicating intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy – assuming life to have arisen elsewhere in a similar manner to its formation on Earth.74 Suppose that estimate is reasonable. The galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and its volume is such that if 36 technological civilizations were spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy, our distance to the closest of these civilizations would be about 17,000 light-years.75 If we were to detect a signal from a civilization 17,000 light years away – which is right on our doorstep by cosmic standards – it could not initiate interactive communication. The signal would arrive from the distant past; it would be comparable to discovering a trace from an ancient civilization on Earth. The causal separation between us and our nearest, but still very distant, hypothetical cosmic companions is vast; 17,000 light years is an insurmountable barrier to communication, which is a prerequisite for community. There is nothing that any intelligence so distant could do or say to address any of our concerns, and there is nothing that we could share that would help them to shape theirs.76 Sending a message would be sending a time capsule into the distant future. There is no guarantee that a message of greeting that we sent would find the target civilization still extant by the time it arrived; and even if it did arrive, and was received, and understood (each of these steps posing a formidable challenge) there is no guarantee that anyone would still be around back at home here to receive a reply, supposing that one was sent. Any exchange with this hypothetical civilization takes thousands of years. We can think cosmically, but there is no alternative to living locally. The authors of this study say that discovery of intelligent life would be an encouraging indication that technological civilizations are capable of great longevity. They infer from this that if we were to find that there are no active civilizations in our Galaxy it would indicate that the tenure of technological civilizations is brief, and this would be a bad sign for our own long-term future. However this - 153 - inference is unwarranted. Failure to receive a signal is not evidence that there have been technological civilizations which have failed. There is no way of knowing this is the reason for the absence of signals rather than there simply having never been any remote civilizations in the first place. It is also conceivable that a civilization, even a technological civilization, might exist without electromagnetic, microwave and radio transmission. Indeed it might turn out that its absence is a desideratum for civilized life.77 The wider the search space for intelligence is expanded the more likely it is that that space will contain intelligent life forms. But the further out we look, the greater the difficulty of detecting any signals of technological civilizations, and the greater their inaccessibility. Given the immensity of space, life, and even intelligent life, is almost certainly abundant. Huey is vast, and contains multitudes. But it is likely that the distribution of life within this immensity is such that it is inaccessible. Stephen Hawking worried about SETI because he thought that contact with alien intelligence might stir up trouble; we might provoke a visit by aliens with hostile intent.78 Hawking's fear about the risk of poking some cosmic Balrog is however groundless. Just as cosmic distance is an impediment to any contact with alien intelligence, it provides a formidable, perhaps insurmountable, protective barrier against any alien incursion. We can relax and bask in the delights of the solitary splendor of the Pale Blue Dot which is Gaia, about which Carl Sagan movingly wrote: Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 79 Gaia is a congenial place, and if we act sensibly and keep it so, there will be no reason to consider the rewardless drudgery of - 154 - attempting to terraform our majestic, but abiotic, celestial companions, the Moon, Venus and Mars. It is unlikely that we could do much there anyway. The chemistry of life is opportunistic; if there was a way to get the sustained carbon chemistry of selfreplicating molecules to set up the creative processes of life in these places it would have happened long ago. Perhaps it did. Life may have started on Venus, and even Mars, but global warming could have wiped it out on Venus; solar output has increased 25 per cent over the last four eons. Martian life (if it existed) may have succumbed to a different insult.80 §7 The Spirit of Gaia Lovelock was disappointed by the lukewarm, sometimes hostile, reception that Gaia theory received in the 1970s from the few members of the mainstream scientific community who paid any attention to it all.81 The lack of interest within the scientific community contrasted with the enthusiastic reception that Gaia theory received from people of faith and members of the counterculture. Gaian theory resonated with unscientific world views. To his bemusement, Lovelock had to field questions about his religious convictions. As a scientist, Lovelock accepted the objectivity of nature as a cornerstone of the scientific method, and his geophysiology was a rigorously scientific study of the processes by which Gaia's stability is maintained.82 Science and religion are, notoriously, very different domains of inquiry with characteristically different sensibilities which have often generated acrimonious disputation. Science seeks explanation and understanding of the order of experienced reality to which we have direct, or indirect, empirical access. Religious belief, in contrast, develops from an intuition that there is a hidden order which can be discovered or revealed, perhaps by some mystical experience or spiritual practice, to which we should harmoniously adjust ourselves; we are a part of a wider reality than the world of immediate experience.83 Those with religious convictions often see mainstream science as blind or indifferent to a vital domain of human experience. Scientists, such as molecular biologists or geochemists, are typically more empirically focused and tend to - 155 - dismiss the religious sensibility as supernatural gobbledygook or superstition.84 William James argued that religious (and metaphysical) belief is generated by the human 'ontological imagination', which is antithetical to rationalism.85 The foundational principle of rationalism, according to James, is that justifiable beliefs must have articulate grounds, that is, they must be located in a framework of clearly statable abstract principles. Physical science, James says, is one of the beneficent results of rationalistic thinking. However when we consider mental life as a whole: … that part of it which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial … it has prestige …loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. Intuitions … come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. 86 The non-loquacious intuitive understanding which is powerful and difficult to articulate is contrasted by James with abstract, clever and shallow thinking. This corresponds very well with right and left hemisphere modes of thinking. James believes that intuition trumps argument: "articulate reasons are only cogent when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusions… Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow."87 In bihemispheric terms, James is suggesting there is a powerful right hemisphere sense of reality which often includes a difficult-toarticulate sense of connectedness, which is impervious to the blandishments of left hemisphere rational argument. Major religions provide a narrative framework to address this felt need but, James says, if the right hemisphere has got religion then the left hemisphere won't be able to talk it out of its conviction; and equally, if the right hemisphere hasn't got the hook of some susceptible intuition, it can't be talked into religion either.88 Humans have a need for connection which includes visceral sensory connection and social connection.89 There is also a need for a wider synoptic connection, an epistemological connection, which may be provided in a variety of ways. It may be described as a 'mystical' or a 'sublime' experience; it resists loquacious left hemisphere conceptualization. Standing in front of a natural wonder - 156 - such as the Grand Canyon, or a masterpiece such as Botticelli's Birth of Venus, can fully and intensely engage the right hemisphere. In the grip of such a powerful immersive experience the right hemisphere has little to say except, perhaps, "Wow!" Anything the left hemisphere may have to contribute is an inadequate, articulate, disappointing trivialization. The right hemisphere's hunger for synoptic connections is strong; Darwin's theory was vilified (and in some places still is) because it threatened to disable a mode of personal connection which was felt to exist between believers and an intensely felt sacred world.90 Darwin's theory disconnected that personal link. The reception of Lovelock's theory was different to Darwin's because it established a personal link: by providing a framework in which a synoptic personal connection is established – not to a supernatural world, but to the quotidian world which surrounds us. Gaia is appealing because it provides us with a sense of connection or belonging to the living planet. We are a part of Gaia and connected to Gaia, and (if we behave ourselves) Gaia will look after us. Some may see this as spiritualizing nature but it need not be interpreted that way. We can provide a purely secular, naturalistic framework which expresses our connection and kinship with Gaia. It can be taken further; we can also imagine a naturalistic, albeit remote, kinship with Huey. Physics, chemistry and biology, even in their most austere and reductive articulations, can provide us with a sense of unity with the natural world. Living systems, including Gaia, are temporary, provisional, dynamic structures whose components were forged inside the furnaces of the long dead stars which created the chemical elements out of which the structures of life emerged. Life is one of the many levels of organization assumed by the world-stuff which constitutes Huey, as it develops from its initial incomprehensible singularity through the primeval fireball of the Big Bang, through the eras of hadrons, leptons, and plasma until it expanded and condensed into the stable nuclei which formed the galaxies and stars.91 As Huey has evolved the stars and galaxies initiated a process of chemical evolution created the possibility of new structures, consisting of tiny and temporary islands of organized chemical - 157 - complexity. One of these poignant oases of complex chemistry is Gaia. There are almost certainly other instances of this fascinating and beautiful mode of organization of the world-stuff of which we are a part, though almost certainly inaccessibly out of reach. Organisms are tiny eddies and whirlpools at the level of organization of the world-stuff which is complex carbon chemistry – dissipative structures flickering for a cosmic moment, like a candle, before the material from which they are constructed decomposes and returns to the dynamic world process from which they emerged, to be recycled in another incarnation. Within the living world of Gaia we have discovered, through the science of molecular biology, that there is a profound and shared unity between all organisms at the microscopic level. All organisms, from microscopic bacteria to blue whales, rely on chemical machinery which is the same in its structure and in its function. The unification of the biological world, which received its first solid theoretical foundation from Darwin, has been deepened and entrenched by the discovery that all living beings are constructed from the same macromolecular components: proteins and nucleic acids. As well as this underlying structural unity, there is a functional unity of all living systems: all organisms rely on the same sequences of reactions for their mobilization and storage of energy and for their biosynthesis of components.92 The work of ethologists has also revealed behavioral analogies and patterns across species, providing another dimension in which scientific inquiry, while expanding our knowledge of the world, serves to uncover deep unities and continuities. Scientific theory based on right hemisphere synoptic intuition, and supported by left hemisphere theoretical articulation, has provided a marvelous conception of our unity and interdependence with the natural world which is rich, powerful, deep and ancient; certainly as, or more, profound and satisfying than anything which has been provided by animistic or pantheistic world views. It is puzzling why science-based views of the world are dismissed as shallow or disappointing.93 Science can provide us with deep and satisfying synoptic connections. We are privileged to be living when the James Web Space Telescope provides us with the means to see more clearly and - 158 - distantly in space, and more deeply time than anyone before us, and which makes us the first intelligence in the world, and possibly even in the Galaxy, to see what Huey looked like way back when the universe was young. Other cultures have identified with their environment through animistic or pantheistic belief; our culture has developed the means for us to identify with and connect with the natural world that is Gaia, and with the cosmos, through scientific understanding.94 The unity of the biological world, and our sense of connectedness with it, has been reinforced and deepened by Lovelock's theory, which supports a powerfully-intuited sense of personal connection with, and interconnectedness within, the biological world. Lovelock connects us not with an inward and spiritual left hemisphere abstraction but with the outward and visible biosphere which is Gaia. BIBLIOGRAPHY Archer, David. 2009. The Long Thaw, Princeton University Press Ashby, Eric. 1978. Reconciling Man with the Environment, Oxford University Press Bergson H, 1934b. 'Introduction (Part II) 'Stating the problems', in Bergson (1946): 33-106 Bergson H, 1946. The Creative Mind, trans MLAndison, Philosophical Library Berne E, 1961. 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The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans, Green & Co; reprinted in James (1987): 1-477 James W. 1987. William James Writings 1902-1910, The Library of America Kropotkin, PE. 1902. Mutual aid: a factor of evolution. McClure Phillips Leopold A. 1949a. 'Thinking Like a Mountain', reprinted, in Leopold (1966): 129-133 Leopold A. 1949b. 'The Land Ethic', reprinted in Leopold (1966): 217241 Leopold A. 1966. A Sand County Almanac, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press - 160 - Lovelock JE. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press Lovelock J.E. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, Oxford University Press Lovelock JE. 2006. The Revenge of Gaia, Allen Lane Lovelock JE. 2009. The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Allen Lane Lovelock JE. 2019. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. Penguin McGilchrist I. 2009. The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press. McGilchrist I. 2021. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2 Vols, Perspectiva Press McIntyre Michael E. 2023. Science, Music, and Mathematics: The Deepest Connections,2nd edn World Scientific Publishing Co Margulis Lynn. 1999. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution, Basic Books Monod Jaques. 1971. Chance and Necessity, Knopf Nagel T. 1986. The View from Nowhere, Oxford University Press Nagel T. 2002. 'The Psychophysical Nexus,' in Concealment and Exposure, and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, pp. 194–235. Passmore J. 1975. ‘The Treatment of Animals’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36: 251-264 Prigogine I. 1997. The End of Certainty: Time Chaos and the New Laws of Nature, The Free Press Prigogine I & Stengers I. 1984. Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, Fontana Sacks O. 1985. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Picador Sagan, Carl. 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House Schnell, AK et al. 2016. ‘Lateralization of Eye Use in Cuttlefish: Opposite Direction for Anti-Predatory and Predatory Behaviors’. Frontiers in Physiology 7: 620. URL = <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5149545/> (accessed on 19 Nov 2023) Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part IV, Chapter I, para. 10. - 161 - Szent-Györgyi, Albert. 1971. The Crazy Ape, Grosset & Dunlap Westby, T and Conselice CJ, 2020, 'The Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong Limits for Intelligent Life', The Astrophysical Journal, Vol 896, No 1, June 15 Whitehead AN, 1929 Process and Reality, Macmillan Whitehead AN, 1933 Adventures in Ideas, Macmillan Whitman, Walt. 1855 'Song of Myself', in Leaves of Grass, Longriver Press 1976, Book III, §51 Williams, Bernard. 1978. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry, Penguin ENDNOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 The sequence of steps necessary for the development of life on Earth is so improbable that astrophysicist John Gribbin (2011; 2018) concludes it is exceedingly unlikely that there is other intelligent life in our galaxy that we could communicate with or contact. I will discuss the so-called Fermi Paradox and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) further below. I will follow Lovelock's example and refer to a billion (a thousand million) years as an 'eon' (Lovelock 1988: 65). This differs from its technical use in geology to qualify major intervals of geological time; when used in this technical sense I will capitalise the word, e.g. the 'Archean Eon'. 'Gaia' is a name of the Greek Earth goddess, which Lovelock appropriated, at the suggestion of author and (then) neighbour William Golding, to designate the organised totality of all living things. In Lovelock (1979) the theory was referred to as a 'hypothesis'. Hypotheses progress to theories when their conjectures are vindicated by successful predictions. Examples of vindicating predictions are provided, inter alia, in Lovelock (1988) and Gribbin (2009). An early definition of Gaia, which Lovelock crafted in 1970 with his microbiologist collaborator Lynn Margulis is: "…a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet." (Lovelock 1979: 11) The conditions that the biosphere regulates include atmospheric composition, temperature, and ocean chemistry. Homeostasis is process by which a disturbed system returns to fixed set point. Lynn Margulis suggests that Gaia's systems are regulated around parameters which can change substantially, a process which she calls homeorrhetic (Margulis 1999). The composition of the Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere have been transformed dramatically in the course of Gaia's 3.5 eon history. They have not been regulated around fixed "set points" But the - 162 - 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 persistence of prokaryotic life over this vast period, and the evolution of a succession of disparate protein structures which survived in the changing conditions of the planet, points to prodigious stability. Gaia has experienced a succession of spectacular insults—atmospheric change, vulcanism, asteroid impacts, and a relentless increase in solar flux. What is astonishing is that Gaia has (so far) always managed to recover from such intense and varied global cataclysm. An excellent long term view of climate is provided by David Archer (2009). When writing Lovelock (1988) atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 340 parts per million (1988: 133). At present (2023) the concentration has risen to 419 parts per million. Gaia buries 100 million tons of carbon every year (Lovelock 1988: 117), which is about 1% of the 9 billion tons of fossil carbon which industrial society burns annually. There is no sign that profligate carbon use is abating. We have burned about 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon since 1751 and of that total about 2.5% was burned in 2022. Lovelock was born in 1919 and died on his 103rd birthday on 26 July 2022 This opposed to "the conventional wisdom of biology on Earth …[that] had always been forced to take a bottom-up approach" (Lovelock 1988: 29). The top down approach considers processes in the context of the whole system. According to Lovelock "the top-down physiological view of life as a whole system harmoniously merges with the bottom-up view originating with molecular biology that life is an assembly made from a vast number of ultramicroscopic parts" Lovelock (1988: 29) "Because Gaia was seen from the outside as a physiological system, I have called the science of Gaia geophysiology." Lovelock (1988: 11) Lovelock suggested that the exclusively reductive approach generates "tribalism that isolates the denizens of the scientific disciplines" (Lovelock 1988: 61); but unfortunately "the habit of reduction dies hard" (Lovelock 1988: 127). Lovelock doesn't reject the bottom-up approach: "the two approaches are complementary" (Lovelock 1988: 29), and he claims that his approach is inclusive: "this book is neither holistic nor reductionist" Lovelock (1988: 13). Adam Smith (1759) deployed his 'invisible hand' metaphor to explain how selfinterested choices can bring about collective benefit. Social well-being can thereby be construed as an epiphenomenon, a beneficent outcome which is an unintended consequence of selfish behavior. Dawkins (1976; 1989; 1998). Dawkins speaks of "the overrated romantic fancy of the whole world as an organism" (1998: 222) which he dismisses as "bad poetic science" (Dawkins 1998: 224). The difference in levels of explanation may lead to disagreement about facts. Lovelock believes there are facts about Gaia which are not visible from Dawkins' reductive level, though he accepts biological and microbiological facts which are manifest within, and central to, Dawkins's explanatory framework of molecular biology. This is big claim which needs a lot more substantiation which I cannot provide here, though I will attempt to do so elsewhere. These differences are explored and explained at length in McGilchrist (2009). McGilchrist has been a major influence on my approach to these issues. - 163 - 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Cuttlefish (invertebrate cephalopods) have the opposite direction of lateralization for anti-predatory and predatory behaviour (Schnell 2016). Functional specialization is a basic design feature which emerges very early in the evolution of nervous systems. The last common ancestor we had with cephalopods lived more than half an eon (500 million years) ago. Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi wrote: "The brain is not an organ of thinking but an organ of survival, like claws and fangs. It is made in such a way as to make us accept as truth that which is only advantage. It is an exceptional, almost pathological constitution one has, if one follows thoughts logically through, regardless of consequences. Such people make martyrs, apostles, or scientists, and mostly end up on the stake or in a chair, electric or academic." A lot of neurons and neural nets exist to inhibit neural activation rather than to promote it. The importance of maintaining functional separation of the two cortical hemispheres is explained by McGilchrist (2009) McGilchrist (2009: 4). McGilchrist repeatedly stresses the importance of not exaggerating the separation of, and the functional differences between, the hemispheres. Reductive objections to Gaia theory have been raised by other critics: I have chosen Dawkins as representative of this group because he writes with grace, power and clarity. Oliver Sacks (1986: 2) wrote: “the entire history of neurology and neuropsychology can be seen as a history of the investigation of the left hemisphere.” Western epistemology is likewise largely the epistemology of the left hemisphere. These problems include consciousness, free will, the metaphysics of time, superstition in general and religious belief in particular, metaphorical meaning, the meaning of life and spirituality. My continuing research interests are focused on neuroepistemological investigations into these, and other, perennial philosophical insolubilia. These include Henri Bergson and A.N. Whitehead. These thinkers did not express their cognitive dualities in terms of brain lateralization, but the distinct mental faculties which they identify correspond closely to the hemispheric cognitive differences. Bergson distinguishes intuition and intellect as distinct mental faculties. Intuition does not merely register experience, it enters into the life of its object establishing a connectedness of the self to the world, an "immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely divisible from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence" (Bergson 1934b:36). Whitehead (1929; 1933) identifies two modes of experience: perceptual and conceptual which, by combining together, generate knowledge. Perception is more than the stimulation of sense organs; it is collective whole body experience, including proprioception. Bernard Williams called the conception of reality as it is, independently of our thought, 'absolute' in his discussion of Descartes' theory of knowledge (Williams 1978: 65-7; 211-12). It is an objective of physics provide absolute representations of the reality. - 164 - 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 It is implausible to suppose that the world is a fragmented collection of independent perspectives, such as Leibnizian monads, although Whitehead suggests something like this when he compares his notion of an 'actual occasion' to a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is 'all window.' (See note 49) Nagel (1986: 5) says: "We may think of reality as a set of concentric spheres, progressively revealed as we detach gradually from the contingencies of the self". This I think is an unhelpful way to think about reality. The correspondence between right hemisphere modes of cognition and Nagel's notion of subjectivity is more problematic "Presencing" is a neologism used by McGilchrist to stress that what is encountered in immersive right hemisphere experience is quite different to a left hemisphere representation; and different from something being "present" or being passively "presented". A right hemisphere encounter with an object is an active and interactive engagement (McGilchrist 2019: 380-3) Or at any rate it is not mentioned. Discarding the personal leaves Nagel with a somewhat anemic left hemisphere world of impersonal abstract representations. For Nagel the subjective view is one from which we compulsively but unsuccessfully seek to escape. Nagel (1986: 214-223). The evisceration of meaningfulness from our lives which results from the compulsive quest to find objective meaning is perhaps Nagel's best and clearest case study of the conflict between subjective and objective perspectives. Nagel rejects the solution that there is something pathologically wrong with his 'objective self', that is, the inner self that views everything with dispassionate detachment: "Our objectivity is simply a development of our humanity and doesn't allow us to break free of it" (Nagel 1986: 221). "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Whitman (1855). Inconsistency is anathema to the left hemisphere but much less problematic to the epistemically exuberant right hemisphere. The Walt Whitman resolution is right hemisphere. The hegemony of the left hemisphere is a central theme of McGilchrist (2009). McGilchrist argues that for the last few centuries human industrial civilization has become increasingly dominated by narrowly-focused left hemisphere patterns of thinking, which tends to be short-term, self-regarding, ingenious, manipulative and powerfully destructive. The survival of a sustainable human civilization requires a lot more right hemisphere engagement. Nagel's valorizing impersonal objectivity seems perversely reminiscent a theory of Plato which would explain the excellence of a symphony to be a consequence of its harmonization with an abstract impersonal Form. Parmenides may have helped to shape this Platonic view (if it is a Platonic view: there are passages of Plato which contradict it). The publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Copernicus in 1543 is often nominated as a date for the beginning of modern science. Gravity acts on all parts of a spherical body, so treating each body as a point mass at its centre greatly simplifies the calculation of the forces acting between - 165 - 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 them. To prove this simplifying assumption was legitimate Newton had to invent a new branch of mathematics, differential calculus (his theory of "fluxions"). Hence Alexander Pope's epitaph for Newton: "Nature, and Nature's laws, lay hid in Night. God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light." Cambridge mathematician and scientist Michael McIntyre has developed models of the Antarctic ozone hole "involving spatial scales from the planetary down to the atomic, and multiple timescales from centuries down to thousand trillionths of a second." (McIntyre 2023: 12) Kuhn (1962) In his play Arcadia Tom Stoppard speaks of the “rare moments when a door is kicked open and a new world is revealed”. This metaphor nicely captures a way in which a new perspective can radically reimagine the world. The Ionian Enlightenment, launched by Greek thinkers of antiquity, and the European Renaissance launched by Erasmus and others, were such a moments. Copernicus introduced new heliocentric paradigm and Newton introduced a mechanistic paradigm that combined terrestrial and celestial mechanics. According to classical Darwinian theory species evolve on the basis of reproductive success of individuals whose traits are most suited to environmental circumstances. For Dawkins (1989), Gaia falls outside the ambit of Darwinian theory. "Crackpot rigor" is a description of left hemisphere representations which are replete with implausible detail. I encountered this term in a critique of abstract mathematical models in economics. Gould, for once, agrees with Dawkins "Gaia, to me, only seems to reformulate, in different terms, the basic conclusions long achieved by classically reductionist arguments of biogeochemical cycling theory." Gould (1988: 339). In other places Gould argues firmly against reduction. In Gould (1983) he defends holism as the sensible 'middle way' between the extremes of mechanism and vitalism. Gould's alliance with Dawkins reductive attack on Lovelock's Gaia theory seems out of character. Major inspiration for this conception comes from Whitehead and (as "creative novelty" clearly flags) Bergson. Whitehead replaces substance metaphysics with his fundamental metaphysical category of an actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring entity; it is a process of becoming, a weaving together of 'prehensions'. Whitehead's philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy: "For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world." My thinking is also shaped by William James The interaction between the biosphere and the lithosphere, oceans and atmosphere (largely neglected by biologists and geologists prior to Lovelock presenting Gaia theory), has been taken up as the discipline Earth Systems Science, which studies interactions between Earth systems, but distances itself from the idea that the Earth can be likened to a living organism. The wife of the Bishop of Worcester is reported to have remarked on the publication of Origin of Species: "Descended from the Apes? My dear, let us - 166 - 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it does not become widely known." The human affectation of rationality was shortly to receive a hammering from Freud. Another shocking discovery of the nineteenth century came from physics: it turned out that the universe is inexorably degenerating into a state of disorder from which there can be no return. Thermodynamically it's all down hill. This rather took the shine off eternity. The basic idea is straightforward and it is unsurprising that someone else worked it out. T.H. Huxley is reported to have remarked after reading Darwin's theory, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that." A paper coauthored by Darwin and Wallace titled 'On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection' was presented to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858. Marx vilified religion as the opiate of the people. But the right hemisphere needs its opiates; simply disparaging the need without addressing it is unhelpful. Marxism has certainly hasn't helped: it has impoverished more lives than it has enriched. So too have many religions. Lovelock presents a more cooperative and supportive conception of the living world than the competitive Darwinian model presented by Dawkins (1976) . Kropotkin (1902) and Gould (1988) also present more cooperative readings of Darwin. 1968 is a year many of us remember with great fondness. For some of us there hasn't been a better year. 'Earthrise', was taken on 24 December 1968. It showed the Earth from a completely new perspective, more fragile, more finite than anyone had seen it before. It is an image so powerful that it ranks as one of the most important photographs ever taken. Photographing Earth was not on the mission schedule and it was taken in a moment of pure serendipity. In order photograph the far side of the moon the Apollo spacecraft had been rolled so that its windows pointed towards the lunar surface. During this time, the Moon was between the spacecraft and Earth, cutting-off radio communication with mission control. As Apollo 8 emerged from the far side of the Moon on its fourth orbit, crew commander Frank Borman rolled the spacecraft to position its antennas for radio contact with mission control. Looking to the lunar horizon for reference he exclaimed: "Oh my God, look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up!" This was a life-changing experience for Borman, which he expressing movingly (though not elegantly): "When you're finally up on the Moon, looking back at the Earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?" Fountains of energy are persisting dynamic states, called 'dissipative structures' by Prigogine (1997). See also Prigogine and Stengers (1984). In Leopold (1966) Leopold's right hemisphere awareness of and engagement with the flow and interconnectedness of living systems is vividly explored. Members of the biotic community form a pyramid of energy circuits, but the biotic community is not reduced to chemical processes. Leopold's concern is - 167 - 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 not with constituents, but with dynamic connections. The chemical processes are a left hemisphere level of structural organization which is useful (to check that we avoid subverting it in various ways) but it's vitally important to see the biotic community as a collection of citizens, and not just a matrix of chemical processes. The first part of Leopold (1966) introduces us to members of his Wisconsin sand county community, and after we have shared their company with Leopold it's difficult see how any uncorrupted right hemisphere could fail to share Leopold's concern for the well-being of the community. 'Thinking Like a Mountain' (Leopold 1949a) is a pivotal essay in the articulation of Leopold's Land Ethic; it helps to explain our obligations to the biotic community. Bergson says that a key to establishing a connectedness of the self to an object in the world is to think inside the object. It takes right hemisphere imagination to occupy the 'other', and plenty of it, if the other is a mountain. Huey is big: cosmologists estimate the total mass of the visible universe is something like 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 kg, but the estimate could be mistaken by up to six orders of magnitude. Being wrong by six orders of magnitude does not matter much here. A significant difference between Huey and Gaia is that anthropogenic activity can change the face of Gaia but nothing we can do has any discernible impact on Huey. Visible light first appeared in the universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This was the time when photons could pause while attached to electrons on atoms. At this time Huey went from being totally opaque to transparent. Today the James Web Space Telescope can look back in time and see energy from those first traveling photons, dated at roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang Astrophysicists have dated the emergence of carbon at about the end of Huey's first eon (Davies RL, 2023) There is also a galactic goldilocks zone: gamma-ray bursts and other violent events make life difficult in the galactic CBD. The galactic "habitable zone” is thought to extend from about 23,000 to 30,000 light-years from the galactic centre. That zone contain fewer than 5% of the galaxy's stars, which are concentrated toward the central uninhabitable zone (Gribbin 2018). The presence of liquid water is widely accepted as crucial for carbon chemistry to build complex structures. We are dealing with a sample where N=1; we have nothing else to go on. Gribbin (2011; 2018) outlines an extraordinary sequence of serendipitous steps that made Earth suitable for our sort of life. Other scenarios could also have enabled life on Earth. But suppose that a Mars-sized planet hadn't collided with the nascent Earth in the Hadean Eon (suppose that it was just another near miss), and so the Moon and the Earth's tectonic crust were therefore not formed. What odds that some other collision would have occurred and done the same job? One wouldn't bet on it. Analysing the atmosphere of exoplanets is fiendishly difficult, and our current technology is unlikely produce definitive spectroscopic evidence for extraterrestrial life any time soon. In 2023 NASA's James Webb Space Telescope - 168 - 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 discovered a rocky planet orbiting a red dwarf star 41 light years away; tantalizingly close but still out of reach for atmospheric analysis. The alien technology would need to be more advanced than what we have at present. Very modest by cosmic standards. If we restrict our search space to 100,000 light years (to include the Milky Way galaxy), and if we take the universe to stretch 14 billion light years in all directions, then the search space we are considering is about one ten millionth 0.00001% part of the universe. That's not much: 99.99999% of Huey is out of reach. Named after the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi who famously asked (in 1950 while working a Los Alamos): "Where is everybody?" A paradox is a problem that arises because the conceptual apparatus that discovered the problem is unable to cope with it. Paradoxes require a revision of the conceptual apparatus. Puzzles are resolved by tidying up the facts. Drake Equation – Wikipedia. We have some chance of estimating the average rate of star formation, and the fraction of those stars that have planets. Westby and Conselice (2020) Planetary living systems however are unlikely to be distributed uniformly throughout the galaxy. They are likely to be located within the galactic habitable zone, which is an annular disk extending from about 23,000 to 30,000 light years from the galactic center (Gribbin 2018). This zone contains fewer than 5 percent of the galaxy's stars: most stars are concentrated towards the galactic center where they are likely to be sterilized by intense bursts of radiation (x-rays, cosmic rays, and gamma rays). If the galaxy has 36 technological civilizations – the estimate of Westby and Conselice (2020) – spread uniformly within the galactic Goldilocks zone, then the average separation between them would be reduced to about 3,000 light years. That's a lot closer, but it is still a gulf of separation which remains, in practice, unbridgeable. It would nevertheless be momentous discovery that would enrich our understanding, just as the discovery of a now extinct civilization can enrich our understanding. Certainly the absence of electromagnetic technology would prevent the emergence of social media, the absence which would have many advantages. Hawking (2010) The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken (at Carl Sagan's suggestion) on February 14, 1990, by NASA's Voyager 1 at a distance of 6 billion km from the Sun (5½ hours at light speed). The image was used as the title for Sagan (1994). The photograph provides a wonderful perspective on Gaia. Sagan's lyrical right hemisphere celebration of the Pale Blue Dot is spoiled, however, by a hubristic left hemisphere vision of a future of human exploration and extraterrestrial settlement on planets and asteroids. This is a dangerous delusion that distracts us from the necessity of looking after Gaia. Sagan's extra-terrestrial future for humanity is not promising. The present cost of sending anything from the surface of the Earth into orbit is about $1400 per kg – and this at a unique period in human history, the brief era of fossil fuel profligacy with abundant - 169 - 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 cheap energy—for the short term. The staggering long term cost is not considered. The economics of space travel (and aviation) based on renewable energy resources is unviable—or at least does not look promising. There is no Planet B. Lovelock became increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for humanity working out a way of living happily and sustainably with Gaia. He wrote: "Unfortunately, we are a species with schizoid tendencies, and like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia may grow angry, and if they do not mend their ways she will evict them" (Lovelock 2006: 47). At the age of 99, he published Lovelock (2019) in which he envisaged humanity creating post-human artificially intelligent 'life forms' that would create a sustainable and biodiverse habitable planet. Lovelock died with the hope that cyborgs would take over and save humanity. "…for the most part the Gaian idea was ignored by professional scientists" Lovelock (1988:31). This is in striking contrast to the explosive reception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, although the revolutionary character Darwin's theory wasn't immediately obvious to everyone. The theory was announced by a paper in 1858 (see note 54) to the Linnean Society whose Annual Report noted that “the year has not been marked by any very remarkable achievement which transforms the subject of inquiry.” Lovelock (1988: 214) "… there is an unseen order, and … our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto" William James (1902: 55) Dawkins (2006) is a high profile leader of the crusade against religion. This is another point of difference that he has with Gould who holds that science and religion are both legitimate 'non-overlapping magisteria', and there is no problem as long as everyone keeps on the right side of the fence. (Gould 1997) James (1902: 72). James (1902) provides a powerful analysis of religious belief which is easily interpreted in the framework of bihemispheric cognition. James (1902: 73). "It doesn’t pass the pub test" is an Australian colloquialism for an egregiously implausible proposition. (Just about anything is up for argument in an Australian pub.) Failing the pub test in Jamesian terms means that an intuition is so strong that rational argument would be pointless. In bihemispheric terms the pub test is failed when a right hemisphere intuition is so strong that any left hemisphere engagement is futile. It was in this spirit that Dr Johnson imperiously dismissed Boswell's attempt to initiate a philosophical argument about free will: "Sir, we know our will is free, and there's an end on it" (Boswell 1949 Vol 1: 363). The contest between left hemisphere argument and right hemisphere intuition is uneven. David Lewis could meet all the objections to his modal realism which hardly anyone accepted but no one could refute. What Lewis found difficult was not the antagonist's argument but the "incredulous stare" (Lewis 1986: 133-5). Lewis's position "admits of no answer but produces no conviction" (Hume 1748, XII, §122, n1) James (1902: 74) "This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it." James (1902: 73) - 170 - 89 90 91 92 93 94 The need for visceral and social connection is deep and deeply connected, and is addressed by central domains of psychology and psychopathology. Their close connection is a central element of transactional analysis developed by Berne (1961; 1966) James does not argue that the right hemisphere view is always superior, only that it is more powerful: "Please observe … that I do not say that the subconscious and non-rational [instinct] is better … and should hold primacy [over reasons]… I confine myself to pointing out that they do so hold as a matter of fact." (1902: 74) Davies, Paul. (1978) Monod (1971) Scientistic world views are shallow and disappointing. I reject the scientistic view that scientific understanding provides the best framework for resolving and understanding every human perplexity: that is reductive left hemisphere view which is manifestly false. My claim is that the natural sciences can provide a positive and enriching conception of natural world and our place in it, and can enhance rather than impoverish our relationship with Gaia. We can seek a conciliatory unification of humans with nature, as John Passmore (1975: 260).expressed it "not by the spiritualizing of nature, but by the naturalizing of man", which can be achieved by engaging with Gaia with both hemispheres. Also suggested by Eric Ashby (1978). The realisation that we are part of the natural world is an essential preliminary to acting wisely within it. This naturalistic conclusion isn't new; it has been affirmed by many thinkers. I have endeavoured to articulate it within the framework of bihemispheric philosophy. - 171 -