What this kind of rife pop divination reveals is just how forcibly the future now looms upon us. It is as if we were moving ever more rapidly toward some new technological breakthrough involving information integration that will transform our culture, a transformation not only inevitable but whose shadow is already upon us, stirring us into prophetic thinking. For when else in our history has there been so much concentrated speculation about the very near future? More to the point, if some unimaginable fully integrated state were soon to be reached, whether mediated through networked computers or some other orchestrational medium, then clearly Nature has always been poised to deliver such an output. Maybe this could be considered the ultimate purpose of natural intelligence (or at least part of it), for it would represent the translated rebirth of the Other, the blossoming of the biosphere, a final planetary condition that Nature has determined in some way to achieve.
Most of us, however, are content to allow ourselves to be drawn almost passively along within the River of Life. We build sturdy rafts made of material goods and social status. We surround ourselves with items that our culture injects with value, and these are what keep us afloat. And yet our rafts, no matter how robustly they may be constructed and no matter how much wealth they contain, will eventually be destroyed, eaten up by the process in which they are swept along. No matter how long we try to prolong it, the time allotted to our DNA is finite. We are digitally programmed by natural intelligence to grow old and die, just as surely as we are built to grow through puberty and reproduce. We are patterns of information that swirl into ordered existence, only to break up in the wink of a cosmic eye. It’s a good reason to think more carefully about our personal relationship with the river and where it is headed, for then we might discern our proper place within the integrative flow.
Near the River’s End
We are a conscious species riding on the crest of an intelligent wave, and our collective knowledge represents a kind of growing certainty about the Universe. As this certainty (or information) continues to increase, we will gradually realize exactly why we have evolved. The intelligence of Nature is thus becoming fully reflected through human consciousness and in the knowledge systems of our culture. This really is suggestive of a kind of birth. The creative intelligence “running” the Universe is in the process of radically transforming itself into human culture and into human consciousness, just as a caterpillar radically transforms itself into a butterfly. Natural intelligence is therefore undergoing protean metamorphosis through the process of evolution. As information continues to build up and self-organize within the biosphere, the biospherical system becomes more informed by the natural intelligence that constructed it. If this is so, then the purpose of life and mind might well be to embody a new form of the natural intelligence that commanded life and mind to arise in the first place.
Such a possibility is clearly similar to Fred Hoyle’s speculations. However, I do not believe that natural intelligence is itself descended from some previous form of intelligence. What I suspect is that the entire Universe—Nature and all its information—is a kind of Will (what the spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff called the Will of the Absolute) or Mind. After all, we know for sure that the human brain embodies both mind and will. So if the brain can have two aspects—physical and mindful—then why can’t the Universe? In any case, I am certain that intelligence is a fundamental property of Nature, just as fundamental as the forces of Nature. Indeed, the various forces of Nature can be understood as a primary expression of natural intelligence, its most basic manifestation as it were. And so after fourteen billion years of reality in which the intent of natural intelligence has been steadily realized, consciousness has now emerged that can grasp the curiously profound source of its arising.
It is as if information, like energy, cannot be destroyed, and that the information content of reality, which remains constant, is in the process of reforming itself from moment to moment. If we think of a computer program able to take as input an image and smoothly morph that image into another image (or translate text from one language into another), then the reality process around us can similarly be viewed as a fourteen-billion-year-long translation of the Other from one language-like form into another. That translation will be complete at some point in the future. The felt experience of the Other may therefore represent the process whereby consciousness serves to
The Omega Point
One mystic who anticipated such ideas was the eminent Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was born in 1881 and died in 1955. Unlike many other Christian thinkers, knowledge of the evolutionary process actually increased Teilhard’s faith. Indeed, this explains his scientific interest in fossils and evolution (and, I might add, his excommunication by his religious superiors).
Teilhard believed that evolution was a purposeful process that would reach a climax at some time in the future, this point representing a kind of totally integrated state of life. He called it the Omega Point. This perfect future state was also thought by Teilhard to somehow send influences back in time, as though the Omega Point is an eternal sun able to shine its light upon the four-dimensional surface of human history.
Although Teilhard’s thinking was deeply mystical, some of his work was respected by a number of traditional evolutionary theorists, most notably the biologist Julian Huxley. However, for most hard-nosed scientists who chance upon Teilhard’s work, he remains no more than a mystic dreamer, a refined P. K. Dicksian soul whose ideology is basically unfit for serious consideration. Unless, that is, one has repeatedly experienced the numinous presence of the Other, in which case his ideas become rather alluring.
In
Let us suppose that from this universal centre, this Omega point, there constantly emanate radiations hitherto only perceptible to those persons whom we call ‘mystics’. Let us further imagine that, as the sensibility or response to mysticism of the human race increases with planetisation [the unification of humanity], the awareness of Omega becomes so widespread as to warm the earth psychically while physically it is growing cold. Is it not conceivable that Mankind, at the end of its totalisation, its folding-in upon itself, may reach a critical level of maturity where, leaving Earth and stars to lapse slowly back into the dwindling mass of primordial energy, it will detach itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things, the Omega point? A phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death: but in reality a simple metamorphosis and arrival at the supreme synthesis.{47}
Teilhard’s mention of a cooling Earth was probably a response to the growing realization at the time he wrote the book that the Universe appeared to be “running down” due to the dreaded second law of thermodynamics. This revered law states, in no uncertain terms, that the Universe is “wilting” and faces a heat- death extinction. All of the Universe’s energy, it is said, will eventually be converted into a meaningless expanse of useless heat. Now, that’s a gloomy thought for sure and a dangerous weapon in the hands of our archetypal reductive scientist, who might begin to prod us with it even now. However, according to our reasoning, the Universe must have surely required such dynamics in order to function in the way it has. In any case, evolution circumvents this running-down tendency by building dissipative structures—metabolizing organisms—to convert energy into a usable form. Although closed systems do run down and do eventually reach equilibrium (a boring state in which nothing of interest happens), open systems like the biosphere are able to build up order (courtesy of our generous sun, which radiates energy as it runs down) by giving off disorder (like infrared heat radiation) into space. In this way, natural intelligence has bypassed the specter of the second law of thermodynamics, and information integration through evolution has taken hold. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that naturally intelligent laws have engineered a specific energy flow, or energy current, to the Universe that life must continually “swim” against in order to develop and strengthen itself as it “returns to the source.”
When Teilhard wrote about the Omega Point, he was probably less aware than we are today that the laws of Nature are highly specific and conducive to life. Hence he saw the second law of thermodynamics as a threat to
