Douglas Mercer
October 14 2024
There are only two men in all of history who have entered into the Pantheon Of The Immortals in both Science and Letters: Blaise Pascal and Rene Descartes. As it happens these two men met in September 1647 at the Pascal home in Paris. The two of them could not have been more different: Pascal was shy, diffident, reclusive and sick and given to fantasies of faith; Descartes was a man of the world, outgoing, a gentleman, social, and a skeptic and a fearless adventurer in the realms and domains of all knowledge, come what may; he arrived attired in an aristocrat’s finery in an ornate carriage like a courtier from the stars with an entourage of dozens; and when he burst into the room in full regalia (a swashbuckling sword in tow) trailed by his men poor Blaise was overwhelmed, taken aback, and a little bit scared by all the hubbub and commotion; but after the initial shock wore off the two men sat down to warily suss the other out on the issues of the day which are the issues of our day: the issues of every day. They say the next day Descartes returned to the home to much less fanfare in the guise of a doctor; a ministering angel to care for the body of the sick.
On a September morning in 1647 a carriage drew up before the Paris house of the Pascal family, and M Rene Descartes got out. He looked like a crafty peasant. In fact, at 51, he was the most prominent mathematician-philosopher of his day. His famed Discourse divided French intellectuals into two camps - one either was or was not a Cartesian. Blaise Pascal, 24, was not. He had no argument with Descartes’ axiom I think, therefore I am, but he was less certain about the ability of reason to prove a) the existence of God or b) the non-existence of a vacuum in nature. Surely God was felt, not reasoned; and as for the vacuum - he had himself only recently conducted experiments that seemed to verify its existence. He was none the less pleased when Descartes asked to meet him, and, although Pascal was quite ill, a visit was arranged.
Among many things the two argued over was this existence of the vacuum; Descartes held that nature abhorred a vacuum; in a great historical irony it was Pascal who was the empiricist and he had run experiments: the vacuum existed. It was the only time that Pascal would get the better of his new friend and always rival.
Pascal was a prodigy, at the age of eleven he wrote an essay on the sound of vibrating bodies; at sixteen he wrote an essay on conic sections which gave rise to Pascal’s Theorem; he solved the problem of fluids and pressure with Pascal’s Principle; with Fermat he solved the problem of points and probability thus entailing risk and paving the way for modern insurance; he produced the Pascaline, a mechanical calculating device; he created Pascal’s triangle: he solved the knotty problem of the famous “horro vacui”—that God abhorred a vacuum—by running experiments that showed that vacuums or voids do indeed exist.
Descartes connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry; he created the Cartesian coordinates allowing us to create calculus and map movement over time and space; that is he explicitly showed that mathematics is the language of nature and challenged man to begin to read.
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So run the pair’s bona fides in the Sciences; but we now know that in terms of the end of speculation science runs into insoluble halting problems which entail eternal undecidability; Quantum Mechanics dons the Zen garb and tells us that anyone who says they understand Quantum Mechanics does not understand Quantum Mechanics; when things begin to behave randomly one can only throw up one’s hands. Once one maps the physical universe one runs into a dead end and starts entering into rabbit holes and labyrinths from which one cannot extricate oneself; but there is still the mind lying in wait speculating on it all; and man is the rational animal and man is destined to know; man is not destined to sit on his hands; everything is susceptible to analysis; the core of reality is intelligible; the term of art for this is Absolute Knowledge; one just has to know what is ultimately worth knowing and what is not and how it operates; and get to work and figure it out.
At some point Blaise Pascal’s carriage ran off of a bridge and he nearly died; this was the traumatic incident and the primal scene, what made him afraid and it was what led him in fright and fear to run back to that primal monster: The Good Father, and the Good Mother in whose arms the traumatized patient felt once more at ease and comforted as if an egg or in an amniotic sac, being fed, being given life and toiling not for his bread; it is fear that always does it. He infamously said that when I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. All over Europe the new learning was forcing men to make a choice; back slide into the arms of an erstwhile force, a supposedly prophetic Jewish Sky God where all the mysteries were (supposedly) encoded, or boldly step forth as men: even the great Isaac Newton spent years on a spent religion, poring over the dusky and dusty tomes of The Old Testament, the book of Daniel in particular, mired in pointless prognostications or no value or import, when he might have been mapping more of the universe. John Donne lamented that with each new planet that swam into our ken all coherence is gone; but Keats had the right idea: that the great and creative man had what he called negative capability; that is he was able to thrive in chaos, prosper and thrive in the very midst of uncertainty. Even Kepler could not take the final steps and noodled around with the trinity of Christ as some kind of harmonic convergence of the firmament; and when he found his imperishable laws he exulted he had found the Ark Of The Covenant. But it was that famous school of night who kept the home fires of the Greeks burning (Dee, Bruno, Harriot, Marlowe), who realized that one could not go home, that when the sweet dream of faith was shattered once and for all, and one realized that one had been dealt nothing but a pack of lies, one must go forward only: amidst chaos to find the more intricate and unusual coherence.
In his womb dream Pascal was terrified; they say he had a mystical experience of fire and no one sane doubts its overwhelming reality; but he saw it as the God of Jacob, etc, and kept the paper record of it in his suit pocket close to his heart; it was found on upon his death and countless theologians have stood in mindless awe of it ever since like some moldy relic. He said that heart had its reasons that reason knew nothing of which is mad heresy; the mind is a machine with an infinite clearing capacity and it is a remorseless eating machine; it is the scythe that shows that at its core all is intelligible once it is indelible; one must pursue and wait and not want it all at once as in a cozy dream. And then the man who gave us probability theory gave us the even more infamous wager, to tweak the noses of the libertines: one must be reasonable for if death is the answer nothing is lost; so one might as well put all your chips on Jesus Christ. What has one to lose after all? One’s self respect for starters; and the great future in all respects. In his waning days he said that there is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man and it can be filled by no created thing—but only by Jesus Christ. There is no such thing; there is clearing waiting to be filled with knowledge, terrible or otherwise. And his life shows the eternal truth of that dictum: a mind is a terrible thing to waste. As Claudius so peremptorily said: so much for him. After all he said that nature is comprised of one man learning; it’s not too much to ask to await the results.
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With Rene Descartes we get the first inklings of the future. He said that animals are machines, and he might have included man; and so he hit the bulls eye and the secrets were on the way to being blown. He gave us an unassailable theory of the mind: that when it is operating perfectly it is detached from nature: like a hologram it can range anywhere and all parts are located in each part. It is the head in the vat in the laboratory; it is the collective unconscious of one man learning. One never knows what one can find until one gives thinking a try. Time will tell they say, and I believe them.
“I cannot forgive Descartes. In his whole philosophy he would like to dispense with God, but he could not help allowing Him a flick of the fingers to set the whole thing going but then he had no use for him.”
So said one Blaise Pascal, hugging the shore. The famous fled or absconded god flees and absconds for a reason: to see one man learning. When you stand on the shoulder of giants you see farther than any man and while polishing that pebble on the shore you see that whole known ocean before you. It is why it is always best to come last, to live in the wake of others and read their books, and when the time is finally right conclude. Then the silence of those interstellar spaces make one laugh one’s silly head off. We are after all the start of the coming race; and we found the books written by the olden ones.
Hamlet also was troubled by becoming a king of infinite spaces, he said he had bad dreams—but that was only because he refused to act.
Welcome my friend: welcome to the machine.
We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organization; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
This is wrong; technology may seem to be scary monster we created but it is no such thing; it is a prosthesis. The machines will not run amok; and we will not download our spirits in them. The machines are but a projection of an image in space and time; a statue or model or a mold; we are to observe the machines to see how the god performed in his workshop, to see the very workings and method of the divine spark, having become imitation creators ourselves; this self acting power is the heart of it, when one is able to finally master creation to the extent that one can pull one up by one’s own bootstraps (so to speak) and operate under one’s own steam. For one man must learn and what machine learning shows us is that it us, not it, that is to be the coming race.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Truly philosophic indeed; this is a version of the machine as a monster and what one does to a monster is destroy it; but a machine is not a monster a machine is staging ground; for a machine is a statue or a doll; it is true that the ignorant mass man become a tool of the tool but it was ever thus; technology is the deus ex machina with betokens the final breach of self-consciousness; when if we are canny we begin to peer into the very ground of nature and it’s blue print, to project our images, to create life itself in a workshop called a laboratory; that it causes an eerie vertigo sensation in many is only to be expected; in the uncanny valley of the final ascent many will lose both heart and nerve; but our Aryan race had always had one motto; push through, toil on: and figure it out.
In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist, except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom.
What they will lack is a will, they being programmed; what we will have is the will, or what Pierce terms the Urge, we will then be aligned with the will; and what Pierce calls the successive states that we will continually evolve into is what will make us the successor, the heir, having earned our tuition. It was Kant who gave us the prime directive, the fatal charge: dare to know! So now that one man has learned, and the books have been found by the olden ones it’s time to leave our capsule if we dare, when what we project becomes indistinguishable from what we have been and we enter into time’s final labyrinth.
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Notes:
In the face of this do we do on clinging to the idea that God made us? Or do we realize that it lies within us to make God? By learning to manipulate the space-time continuum man will become God and disappear from the physical universe as we know it. I am conceived in the womb of nature and in the womb of my own mind, in the womb of the universe. I have become a second-generation cosmic being--Donald Crowhurst, late June/early July 1969 on the Sargasso Sea
