Infinity's Illusion Read online

  Meanwhile, philosophers, and some scientists, have been warning consistently, for about four hundred years now, that consciousness is a big deal, and that it isn’t even clear what manner of discovery could help to explain it in terms that would fit it into the rest of our scientific-materialist outlook. Descartes, 1649. Leibniz, 1714. Huxley, 1874. Sellars, 1922. Broad, 1925. Davidson and Nagel, 1970s. Goldstein and Searle, 1980s. Chalmers and McGinn, 1990s. McGinn (again), 2000s. And so on. (This short sampler is taken from a much longer list, compiled by philosopher Galen Strawson. He is one of the most eloquent defenders of panpsychism, the view that is part of Murakami’s theory in the story.)

  My own guess is that the current gang of optimists are wrong too, and that the struggle to make sense of the relationship between matter and consciousness will, whether it succeeds or fails, lead us to discover that the world is (hang on to the handrail: here we go again) many orders of magnitude more wild and strange than we’ve yet had the mental elastic to imagine.

  Close your eyes for a moment, and focus on a few of your most ordinary, most everyday experiences. I mean the raw feel of them—their unique, private, qualitative what-it’s-likeness:

  Stepping barefoot on soft grass.

  Hearing a violin in the distance.

  Seeing a white bird in a blue sky.

  Being annoyed by an itch on your shoulder blade; being annoyed even more when you can’t reach the itch; the wave of satisfaction when you finally scratch the itch.

  Searching in a crowd for your friend; becoming anxious, because you don’t see her; that most peculiar, particular, hard-to-define experience we refer to as recognizing her.

  Wanting that last slice of cake; actively resisting the temptation to eat the cake; giving in to the temptation to eat the cake; feeling the moist cake crumbs against your fingertips; feeling the cake on your tongue; tasting the cake; swallowing; gobbling the rest because you’re hungry; being disappointed that the cake’s not as good as you’d anticipated; regretting that you ate the cake.

  Getting cold.

  Getting sleepy.

  Getting impatient.

  Getting “Yellow Submarine” stuck in your head.

  Getting a joke.

  These ordinary experiences make up our world: in a sense that is shocking, when you stop to think about it, there is nothing else. Yet nothing baffles science more completely than what it is for something to be an experience. And it intrigues me to think that each one of these little grains of conscious experience—these qualia—might be a clue, a hint, a suggestion that a deep hidden truth about the universe lies close to us, every single second of our waking lives, just out of reach.

  SOME DATES

  I’ve included here some of the more important dates from The Fire Seekers and Ghosts in the Machine. Once again: most of them are mostly accurate to the extent that they can be—given that all of them are controversial—but there are also what Mark Twain would have called “some stretchers.”

  7,000,000–6,000,000 BCE: Sahelanthropus tchadensis, probably bipedal and possibly our direct ancestor, is present in North Africa.

  6,000,000–4,000,000 BCE: Era of genus Ardipithecus.

  4,500,000–2,000,000 BCE: Era of Lucy’s genus, Australopithecus.

  2,500,000 BCE: Homo habilis, the first known species in our genus; note that this is ten to twelve times longer ago than the first evidence for our species.

  1,900,000 BCE: Homo erectus emerges; it will survive until perhaps 200,000 BCE or even more recently, according to some sources, becoming by far the longest-lasting member of our genus, so far.

  1,800,000 BCE: Some Homo erectus leave Africa, eventually reaching most of southern Asia and southern Europe; possible earliest date for control of fire. (Recent research indicates that Homo floresiensis could have been present on Flores as long as seven hundred thousand to one million years ago, long before our own species left Africa. And genetic studies now indicate that the “hobbits” were not descended from Homo habilis, but probably came from some early “Out of Africa” migration—they are still in our genus, but even further from us on the family tree.)

  NOTE ON WHAT FOLLOWS: It was once believed that humans might have originated in Asia. In the end, Darwin’s guess that Africa was the origin of our species proved correct. However—and despite the standard dates offered below—some new evidence suggests that these early migrants out of Africa evolved into many new species in Asia and that some of them then migrated back into Africa, where they evolved into modern humans.

  800,000–700,000 BCE: Homo heidelbergensis (possibly descended from the earlier Homo ergaster) evolves in Africa; it is the first member of our family with a roughly modern brain size.

  650,000 BCE: Small numbers of Homo heidelbergensis arrive in Eurasia from Africa.

  400,000–250,000 BCE: “European” Homo heidelbergensis is diverging into the Neanderthals (which will eventually range from southern England to southern Spain and east all the way to the Caspian Sea), the Denisovans (in Asia), and almost certainly other species.

  300,000–200,000 BCE: The remaining population of “African” Homo heidelbergensis is evolving into the first anatomically modern Homo Sapiens. (That part of our story underwent a dramatic change while I was doing the final edits for this book. To learn more, search online for Jebel Irhoud Morocco.)

  100,000 BCE: First Homo sapiens leave Africa for the Middle East, and spread north and east into Europe and Asia. (60,000–40,000 BCE was given as a plausible “Out of Africa” date for Homo sapiens until recently. Anything before 75,000 BCE remains controversial, but dates as early as 130,000 BCE are supported by some evidence.)

  100,000–70,000 BCE: Earliest date for interbreeding between newly arrived Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis (and other hominin species?) in Asia.

  70,000 BCE: The Toba “event”—a mega-eruption on what is now Sumatra—is the largest explosion on Earth in twenty-five million years. It ejects over eighteen hundred cubic miles of rock, which is fifty times as much as Thera (1628 BCE) and three thousand times as much as Mount Saint Helens (1980 CE). This causes a catastrophic thousand-year cooling of the world’s climate, and leads to the Pleistocene population bottleneck. Several hominin species go extinct, and others nearly do, including Homo floresiensis, Homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, the “I’iwa,” and Homo sapiens. By 69,000 BCE, there are only about ten thousand Homo sapiens still living.

  65,000–45,000 BCE: The “Great Leap Forward” sees Homo sapiens and others begin to exhibit new capacities in art, music, and symbolic ritual. (Most sources put the Great Leap Forward at about 45,000 BCE. My story assumes it got going much sooner after Toba, but that most of its earliest exponents died out—and did so in places where archaeological evidence for their cognitive changes would not have survived. The exception is the I’iwa.

  50,000 BCE: A recovering Homo sapiens population, spreading west, encounters European Neanderthals.

  45,000 BCE: Homo neanderthalensis nears extinction?

  17,000–12,000 BCE: Possible late date for Homo floresiensis extinction, though most evidence now suggests they vanished as soon as Homo sapiens arrived in the area, which was much earlier; this is also the probable date for extinction of the Red Deer Cave people.

  1890s CE: Possible remnant hominin populations still hanging on in the forests of Southeast Asia, and giving rise to the ebu gogo and orang pendek legends?

  THANKS

  To my agent, Stephen Barbara, for launching the ship. To Kate Egan, for being the editor all those other writers wish they had. To Karla Nahmmacher, for fixing my Spanish, and to copyeditor Kyra Freestar and fact-checker Roni Greenwood for correcting my many other errors. To Jason Kirk, for his good suggestions and enthusiastic support. To the Usual Suspects (Doane Rising, John Atcheson, Elly Hale, and Brad Rodgers) for sustenance of many kinds, only some of them bad for me. To Clarissa Farr, for unfailing sympathy and good advice. And to Kerry Fitz-Gerald, as always, for participating in that bravest, mo
st difficult, and most underappreciated service to literature, being prepared to live with an author.

  Finally, thanks to my readers, everywhere.* It’s a great privilege and responsibility to be invited inside the imaginations of strangers. I hope you feel that I rearranged your mental furniture a little. I hope even more that you like the result.

  * My readers, everywhere—but especially Adriana Belén Soria, in La Paz, because you were the first person ever to say to me (as I checked in to a hotel), “Wait—are you that Richard Farr? Who wrote The Fire Seekers?” Thank you, Adri: fame at last!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © David Hiller

  Richard Farr is the author of The Babel Trilogy (The Fire Seekers, Ghosts in the Machine, and Infinity’s Illusion). Additional works include Emperors of the Ice and You Are Here: A User’s Guide to the Universe. Raised in England’s West Country, Richard moved to the United States in 1984 and has lived in Ithaca, New York; Madison, Wisconsin; and Honolulu, Hawaii. He now calls Seattle home. Find more at www.richardfarr.net.