The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context

This Is Not the Universe
 
The mind does not understand its own reason for being.
—René Magritte                
 
A picture without a frame is not a picture.
—John Archibald Wheeler
 
 
 
Perhaps you’ve seen the painting: A pipe, depicted with photographic realism, floats above a line of careful, schoolboy script that reads Ceci nest pas une pipe—.” This is not a pipe.” Rene Magritte painted it in the 1920s, and people have been talking ever since about what it means.
 
Did Magritte intend to remind us that a representation is not the object it depicts—that his painting is “only” a painting and not a pipe? Such an interpretation is widely taught to undergraduates, but if it is true, Magritte went to an awful lot of trouble—carefully selecting a dress-finish pipe of particularly elegant design, making dozens of sketches of it, taking it apart to familiarize himself with its anatomy, then painting its portrait with great care and skill—just to tell us something we already knew. After all, nobody really confuses paintings with reality, and the danger that people will try to smoke paintings of pipes or eat paintings of pears does not rank high among the hazards confronting the working artist.
 
Perhaps it was with an eye toward discouraging simplistic explanations of his famous pipe that Magritte returned to the same motif toward the end of his career. In The Air and the Song, painted in 1964, just three years before Magritte’s death, the pipe is found inside a representation of an elaborate, carved frame, as if to emphasize that it is only a painting—yet smoke from its bowl billows up out of the painted “frame”! In another canvas, The Two Mysteries, Magritte is even more insistent: The original pipe painting, complete with caption, is depicted as sitting on an easel that rests on a plank floor; but above it to the left hovers a second pipe, larger (or closer) than the painted canvas and its frame. What we have here is a painting of a paradox. Obviously the smaller pipe is a painting and not a pipe. But what is the second pipe, the one that looms outside the represented canvas? And if that, too, is but a painting, then where does the painting end?
 
We’ve been set on the road to infinite regress. Suppose, for instance, that Magritte had glued a real pipe to the actual frame of The Two Mysteries: Would the genuine pipe qualify as a pipe, or did it become something else once Magritte affixed it to the frame? (The same riddle is posed by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Pad boxes, which are indistinguishable from the Brillo boxes on sale in any supermarket. Had Warhol captioned one with the words, “This is not a Brillo Box,” would the caption be true or false?)
 
It seems to me that the roots of the paradox reside in the concept of the frame. When we look at a realistic painting—Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X and his nephews, say, or Breughel’s Peasant Wedding—we accept by convention that it represents real people and actual objects. When that convention is denied, as in Magritte’s pipe paintings or in the many impossible scenes depicted by his fellow surrealists—locomotives emerging from fireplaces, clocks limp as jellyfish—the point is not to remind us that paintings are not real. That much is true, but trivial. The point is to challenge the belief that everything outside the frame is real.
 
The enemy of surrealists like Magritte, and of artists generally, is naive realism—the dogged assumption that the human sensory apparatus accurately records the one and only real world, of which the human brain can make but one accurate model. To the naive realist, every view that does not fit the official model is dismissed as imaginary (for those who “know” that they err when they entertain contradictory ideas) or insane (for those who don’t). Naive realism is flattering—to set one’s self up as the sole judge of what is actual is to taste the delights of godlike power—but it is also stultifying. Once the realist settles on a single representation of reality, the gate slams shut behind him, and he is doomed to live thereafter in the universe to which he has pledged allegiance. This universe may be elegant and adamantine as the Taj Mahal, but it is a prison nonetheless, and the prisoner’s spirit, if it is still awake, will beat its wings against the bars until it weakens and dies.
 
The truth, of course, is that nobody can grasp reality whole, that each person’s universe is to some extent unique, and that this circumstance makes it impossible for us to prove that there is but one true reality. Even if we could free ourselves from fantasy and delusion (not that to do so would necessarily be a good idea), we could at most agree upon small swatches of reality. Everything thus is framed, cut from its cosmic context by the limitations and peculiarities of our sensory apparatus, the prejudices of our presuppositions, the multiplicity of each individual mind, and the restrictions of our language. We may feel more comfortable with our own frame of reference than with that of others, and assume it to be more valid, but the frames are there nonetheless. There’s no escaping them; the known universe is and always will be in some sense a creation of our (hopefully creative) minds. Magritte made this point overtly in a 1933 painting. It depicts a canvas on an easel that records every detail of the view outside the window it partially obscures, right down to the drifting cumulus clouds. He titled this work The Human Condition,
 
If modern artists have labored to call attention to the fact that our understanding of reality is limited and variegated, so too have modern scientists. Many people are surprised to hear this. They think of science as a collection of hard facts mined from bedrock reality, through a process as uncreative as coin collecting. The scientists, however, have come to know better. Astronomers understand that each act of observation—photographing of a galaxy, taking an ultraviolet spectrum of an exploding star—extracts but a small piece of the whole, and that a montage of many such images is still only a representation, a painting if you will. The quantum physicists go further: They appreciate that the answers they obtain through experiment depend to a significant degree on the questions they ask, so that an electron, asked if it is a particle or a wave, will answer “Yes” to both questions. (I will say more about this in the final chapter of this book.) Neuroscientists studying the other side of the mind-nature dialogue have learned that the brain is no monolith, either. Each of us harbors many intelligences, and insofar as my various minds take varying views of reality—in terms, say, of spatial relationships versus language, or of sentimental versus rational education—I can no more legitimately impose a single model on myself than I can expect to impose it on others.
 
This is not to say that every opinion about the universe deserves equal attention—as if schoolteachers, in much the same way as they are being urged by fundamentalists to teach biblical creation myths alongside Darwinism, should also be enjoined to give equal weight to the flat-earth theory, ESP, or the notion that little Sally in the back row was empress dowager of China in a former life. That no one theory of the universe can deservedly gain permanent hegemony does not mean that all theories are equally valid. On the contrary: To understand the limitations of science (and art, and philosophy) can be a source of strength, emboldening us to renew our search for the objectively real even though we understand that the search will never end. I often reflect on a remark made to me one evening over dinner in a Padua restaurant by the English astrophysicist Dennis Sciama, teacher of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. “The world is a fantasy,” Sciama remarked, “so let’s find out about it.” To me, that heroic statement encapsulates the spirit of science: to seek to learn something while accepting that one will never know everything.
 
Science is young—it has been a going concern for only about three hundred years, and the word scientist itself was unknown before about 1825—yet it has already transformed our world view. Thanks to science, educated men and women can contemplate an astonishing array of invigorating facts—that we are kin to the animals, that the tenure of our species has amounted to but a moment compared to the age of the earth, that the sun is one star among many, and that seemingly solid objects are themselves as empty as cosmic space, strewn with atoms lonely as stars.
 
Owing to its great prestige, however, science often is given credit for understanding more than it really does about what things really are. Actually, science seldom has much to say about what something “is.” Science studies and predicts phenomena, not essences, and to attempt to use it to assert, for instance, that living organisms “are” machines is to choose the wrong tool to do the job. A scientific theory provides a model that enables us to reason about unfamiliar phenomena by translating them into terms with which we are familiar. It is a kind of language, and as such itself exemplifies the dialogue between mind and nature.
 
To clarify what I mean, consider that science rests on a tripod whose legs are hypothesis, observation, and faith.