At the Edge of le Grand Récit
Descending into a world of pure experience
Being entangled in the cosmos will be a recurring theme in Time as Practice. As science increasingly shows us how thoroughly cosmological we are, and as our capacity for experience becomes increasingly digital, the need for a humanist’s curiosity about what it means to live with others (including non-human others) should become energizing and vital. William James captured the spirit of this as “pure experience.” This post, and others like it, channels James’ spirit as a descent into a World of Pure Experience, or if you like, it descends into Michel Serres’ global intuition.
Let’s start with a descent into le Grand Récit from Michel Serres’ The Birth of Physics…
Take a thing in your hands, anything at all, from the earth, from the water, a stone or an animal. Read this object from the world. Read it as it was written, in the letters of its atoms. Written in its crystalline depths and in its full, smooth molecules, which roll against each other, is how this thing was born, is how it was made part of nature. It is the written memory of its formation, of its emergence from chaos.1
This is a worthwhile meditation from time to time. Serres elsewhere writes about this mode of perception as a “descente dans la durée” (descent into duration).2 These descents function as meditations through our experience. When we make this descent, we find that the things we perceive are a coordination of innumerable oscillating movements into a concrete now.
To say that this coordination adds up to an illusion would be to stop the descent too soon. We would end in either nihilism or a purely aesthetic experience that goes nowhere. This coordination of perception is essential to how we human beings orchestrate our actions to build the world around us, but it yields a certain blindness that is the source of many injustices and unwarranted exclusions and erasures.
In this post, I will take a series of descents into a scene from the California coast shot with my iPhone 14 in July of this year.
A scene from the California Coast near Carmel
Descent through Sight and Sound
Using an iPhone camera to “take a thing in your hands” is not something that Serres could have fully imagined when he published La Naissance de la physique in 1977. It would be tempting call the phone’s video output merely “digital” rather than physical and, therefore, less than real.
That’s not right. This scene, whether taken from the perspective of physiological or digital sight, is physical through and through.
Photons
Actual physical and fundamental packets of electric and magnetic energy (photons) reflect off the myriad surfaces around me. At 186,282 mi/s (299,792 km/s), each photon requires time to reach my eyes and the lens of the phone, albeit it remarkably short.
Descending through these milliseconds, we find that the photons that end up illuminating this scene departed the surface of the Sun 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. Before their liberation into the frozen vacuum of interplanetary space, interactions with countless other particles kept the photons constrained to our star’s interior for tens of thousands or even tens of millions of years. For most of the photons that reach my eyes, primate sight wasn’t even a thing when the journey began.
The modest sliver of the wavelength of photons my human eyes have evolved to detect are soon focused onto my retina, sending electrical signals up my optic nerve and into my brain, where what I see appears as a concrete now and a tangible reality.
Color
The wavelengths of photons reaching my phone and my eyes are the relatively narrow sliver of frequencies that are rejected by the objects they encounter. The foliage is not itself green. This is the power of our perception of color: we don’t see what the object absorbs; we see what it rejects, and we impose what it rejects as its color.
Sound
Every event occurring around me jostles the molecules, causing uneven pressure points that propagate through the air. My ear canal collects and funnels these pressure waves, vibrating my eardrum and causing electrical signals that travel along my auditory nerve where my brain can interpret them as sounds.
Like light, sound takes time to travel, only more slowly at a more mundane 800 mph (1,200 km/hr). The sounds of the seals to the left of the scene arrive even later than the sounds of the waves. The speed of their arrival and clarity of what I hear depends on the wind patterns.
Amazingly, these sounds aren’t a cacophony inside my head. I hear the seals coming from the distant rocks on the left. I hear the waves directly beneath me because this auditory system has evolved to allow me to experience sound directionally and spatially.
Being within Time
I have described a hallucinatory power of perception. However, it would be an unfortunate nihilism to denigrate this power by calling it endemically untethered from reality. That is not the point of this exercise. This coordinating and hallucinating power of perception is built into the workings of our small portion of the universe. It is part of reality.
As Carlo Rovelli puts it,
We must remember that we see this space from inside it, that we are localized. In order to understand time, it is not enough to think of it from outside: it is necessary to understand that we, in every moment of our experience, are situated within time.3
This is the intent of the exercise. To understand experience as “situated within time.” This requires us to descend into the experience of being within time. These are the descents into time that we find in Serres, in Bergson, in Zarathustra. This means taking the concrete now that our perception creates and begin our descent through this perception to broaden our capacity for experience.
The descent shows us that our hallucinating power makes it possible for us to exert effort within our environs. BUT, as William James put it, this power to perceive automatically creates “a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” This blindness is “the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures.”4
Predictive Perception
While my description has laid out a linear flow of time from outside to inside — an inside that could be called Me or aSelf, the movements are far more complex and multi-temporal. Our per-ception is not merely a passive re-ception of signals that are assembled after their arrival. We are, to borrow from Andy Clark, cognitively pushing our expectations into the scene to organize the incoming movements: “Brains like ours … are predictive engines, constantly trying to guess at the structure and shape of the incoming sensory array.” The upshot is that “perception is a controlled hallucination. Our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guessing accommodates the sensory barrage, we perceive the world.”5 This guessing is pushing our vision of things into the world, helping to make the assembly more relevant without waiting for the incoming signals to work themselves out.6
Descent into the iPhone’s Perception
All of this is a mass synchronization of myriad movements, from the digital to the genetic, evolutionary, military, geological, cosmic, and other movements that deliver the entire scene to the moment where I can stand on a trail built and maintained by the California State Parks service, get out my phone, point it in the direction I want, and record the scene that I will eventually write about here.
If I trace just the movements of the phone, I find that the photons are translated into electrical currents making their way through a series of critical waypoints: from the CMOS image sensor to Analog-to-Digital Converter to the Image Signal Processor to synchronization with the audio to storing the the outputs in the phone’s memory. The resulting stored digits are sent as data packets through various government and corporate networks to Apple’s iCloud where it becomes available to my MacBook Pro. This (largely invisible) coordination happens because all of this motion is associated with digital signals coordinating my ownership of these objects. I export the video from my Photos app so that it can be included in this Substack post that also belongs to me.7
Descent through the Unseen and Unheard
There are innumerable movements beyond the concrete now of this video. The coordinating power of perception, while creating a coherent scene for me to see, introduces necessary blind spots into the coherence. To unpack the blind spots, I turn to ChatGPT for some help.
Isxhenta
The Point Lobos website tells me that this area was originally called “Isxhenta” by unnamed “indigenous people.” I ask ChatGPT What is the history of Isxhenta?
The name “Isxhenta” comes from the indigenous Ohlone people, who considered the area sacred. European explorers arrived in the 16th century, and by the 19th century, it was used for whaling, mining, and agriculture. Today, Point Lobos State Natural Reserve is a protected area known for its scenic views, diverse wildlife, and historical significance, managed by the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
The speed with which these sentences move recapitulates the Enlightenment’s composition of time. The sacred practices of a bygone civilization are simply swept away by the rapid movement of exploration that becomes interlocking economic, military, corporate, seafaring, and governmental movements all coordinated in the accelerating quest for historical progress. The path on which I stand and the roads that got me there in my Hertz rental car with my iPhone that I used to navigate are the accelerating mechanisms of this complex composition of time.
Tides
Later, when visiting the cabins of the whalers who made their living here, I learn that this scene was shot during one of the two low tides for the day, which is the result of complex movements showing up inside the concrete now but also somewhat hidden.
My curiosity is increasing in this exercise, so I ask ChatGPT for more help.
How does low tide work? Low and high tides are the result of two tidal bulges caused by the gravitational pull of the nearness of the Moon and, at the antipode, another bulge created by the weaker gravity as the water moves away from the center of the Earth. The position of the Moon and Sun relative to each other will affect the strength of these gravitational bulges.
Photo Credit: blueringmedia
Moon
More curiosity because there are more movements to chase.
How did the Earth get its Moon?
The formation of Earth's moon, known as the Moon, is believed to have occurred approximately 4.5 billion years ago in the early Solar System. The prevailing hypothesis for the origin of the Moon is the Giant Impact Hypothesis, which suggests that it formed from the debris ejected into space when a Mars-sized body collided with Earth. 8
Innumerable movements. The chaotic collision of bodies in motion creates debris. Out of that debris the Moon and the Earth form a provisional equilibrium around a barycenter. I know that this equilibrium is temporary — the moon is moving away from the earth. I ask for help with understanding this process.
How fast is the moon moving away from the earth?
The Moon is currently moving away from the Earth at a rate of approximately 3.8 centimeters (about 1.5 inches) per year. This phenomenon is due to tidal forces and the conservation of angular momentum in the Earth-Moon system. Over millions of years, this small rate of recession adds up, but for practical purposes, it's a gradual process.
I ask ChatGPT to explain the second sentence. I learn that the tidal bulges
are slightly misaligned with the line connecting the centers of the Earth and the Moon due to the Earth's rotation. This misalignment creates a torque that transfers angular momentum from the Earth's rotation to the Moon's orbit. As a result, the Moon gains energy and moves into a higher orbit.
Not only are the tidal bulges the effect of the gravitational durations that cause them, they exert effort back into the orbital durations holding the equilibrium together but altering it in the pure movement of a Lucretian clinamen — the movement of a curve away from its tangent.9
Descent into Pure Experience
Why undertake this exercise? Have I achieved mere intellectual understanding, and is that good enough? Have I simply shown my perception to be a grand illusion? Have I articulated yet another theory of beauty? No. These would yield a terrible misunderstanding of this exercise.
I’ve gained a better experience of what William James argued over a century ago. “We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest … Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey’s end.”10 I’ve also understood what he believed philosophy to be: “it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”
P.S. I’d like to thank my long-time friend, Stephen Melton, for his invaluable help sorting through the physics. You can find his highly accessible explanations of quantum physics on Amazon.
Michel Serres, Birth of Physics, William Ross and David Web trans., 204.
See the opening pages of L’Incandescent. He is clearly channeling Henri Bergson who frequently descends into durée: “But suppose that instead of trying to rise above our perception of things we were to plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it.” From Henri Bergson: Key Writings, “The Perception of Change,” 306. To this descent into duration, we could easily add Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
The Order of Time, Riverhead Books, 2018, page 154.
“On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” The Writings of William James, John J. McDermott ed., page 634. James’ specific argument at this point is about the way in which we identify our particular joys as the center of ourselves, and we universalize them as true for everyone — i.e., my joy should be everyone’s joy. But the broader argument is relevant here: we take what we perceive as the only reality that there is, which allows us to be effective actors in the world. Simultaneously, this powerful practical capacity leads to this certain blindness that is inherent to the ways in which human beings perceive themselves and others in the world around them. James’ morality is to expand this capacity for experience, which is exactly what I’m seeking to do with these meditative descents.
Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind, pages 3 and 14. In a recent talk given to the Royal Institute, Clark pushes these thoughts further. In this talk, he tells us that (quoting Vezoli) “On average, throughout the cortex, downward (inside to out) pathways outnumber feed-forward pathways by at least 2 to 1.”
“The ongoing process of perceiving, if such models are correct, is a matter of the brain using stored knowledge to predict, in a progressively more refined manner, the patterns of multilayer neuronal response elicited by the current sensory stimulation. This in turn underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may be determining much of what we see, hear, and feel” (Clark, Surfing Uncertainty, page 27). In other words, I can find my the button on my Breville Barista Express when I come down stairs in the morning without having to survey the entire kitchen searching for the button that says “On.”
This descent through the technology of the iPhone video has its lineage in Bergson’s debates with Einstein and other physicists and philosophers (notably the great systematizer Bertram Russell). Both camps saw cinematography as a way to explain time, but in opposite ways. Jimena Canales’ The Physicist and the Philosopher provides a comprehensive review of this debate. See especially chapters 24 and 25.
The earliest evidence of life on Earth is 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, so this clinematic collision predates any known presence of life on this planet.
We started with The Birth of Physics, and we’ve returned to it. The clinamen as the minimal angle of declension of a curve from its tangent is the central image of Serres’ Birth of Physics.
The James quotation is from “A World of Pure Experience,” The Writings of William James, John J. McDermott, ed. 206. I’ll sidestep the question of “mysticism” for the moment and take it up later. Suffice it to say for now that mysticism is always offered in a binary (and oppositional) relationship to reason and rationality. It seems to me that what I’ve undertaken here is quite rational insofar as I’ve taken scientific knowledge of how perception, tides, color, et cetera work, and I’ve used that knowledge to better understand how deeply entangled experience is with the cosmos. If that’s “mystical” it is equally “rational.”