Membranes, Alienation, and Nature’s Wild Creativity

The divine power of natural barriers from black holes to skulls

Have you noticed the role of barriers in how the universe produces novel domains of being?

A History of Creativity

We don’t know how the universe was created, but one intriguing model is black hole cosmology, according to which universes form within black holes, from torsion, the twisting of spacetime from the spin of particles. Torsion would theoretically counteract the gravitational collapse of matter in a black hole, preventing the formation of a singularity, and would snap the highly-dense matter outward in a rebound, creating the other, expanding end of a wormhole we perceive as the universe. So our universe might have formed within a black hole in a prior super-universe, and sub-universes may form within black holes in our universe: a multiverse of interconnected universes.

There are other interpretations of the Big Bang, but I raise this one to note the importance of the barrier around the black hole, called the “event horizon.” If our universe is the interior of a black hole in a super-universe, we can never enter the universe that contains ours, although theoretically we might enter a black hole in our universe that contains a sub-universe.

According to the holographic principle, the informational content of objects that fall into a black hole is preserved in surface fluctuations of the event horizon, known as “Hawking radiation.” According to Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape and the black hole complementarity principle, the apparent three-dimensional universe could be a hologram encoded in two-dimensional form in the radiation at the event horizon. The world we observe inside the black hole would be a low-energy level description of the information that’s scrambled on the black hole’s horizon. Information needn’t have a definite location in space, according to Susskind, since it can appear solid from inside the black hole and scrambled from outside.

I’ll return to the holographic principle in a moment, but however the universe was created, the solar system eventually formed from the gravitational collapse of part of a molecular cloud in interstellar space. The collapsing gas formed a protostar and a disc-shaped nebula spinning around that central mass. Over millions of years, the outer gas and particles of ice and dust accreted into planetesimals. After collisions and further accretion, these solid bodies gradually increased in size and formed the planets we see today.

The core of our planet converts convection currents of molten iron into a magnetic field which deflects solar wind and cosmic rays. While the Earth’s magnetosphere thus adds to the barrier produced by the sun’s heliosphere, outside the Earth’s magnetic barrier, astronauts are still exposed to potentially lethal radiation.

Life somehow was created on Earth mainly from carbon and water. Organisms would eventually require ways of replicating themselves, maintaining their metabolism, and sealing themselves within a membrane, and different models of the origin of life posit that one or another of those features came first in a form of protolife. Life might have originated thanks to the spontaneous formation of liposomes, double-walled bubbles or vesicles, from lipids which are fatty acids that have a hydrophobic tail and a hydrophilic head. When placed in water, the molecules spontaneously arrange themselves into the bubble structure, because the tails seal themselves off from the water, retreating to the interior of the bubble.

However life originated from certain proto-organic structures, the first full-fledged organisms were single-celled. A National Science Foundation website points out that, “Earlier forms of life probably needed a membrane compartment for many of the same reasons that modern cells do: to keep molecules that are important for cellular growth and survival readily accessible, and to keep unneeded or potentially harmful molecules outside of the cell.” In particular, without some compartmentalization, the ribosomes or early protein factories wouldn’t know which RNA to copy, and the group of molecules wouldn’t grow.

A key moment in life’s evolution was the Great Oxidation Event, the transition from photosynthesis, produced by prokaryotic organisms in the ocean which generated oxygen as a waste product, to the rise of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere. That oxygen combined with ultraviolet solar radiation and formed the Earth’s ozone layer, which enabled life to diversify into multicellular species on land.

Diffuse neural nets in jellyfish evolved into the central nervous systems we see in most animals today, the first of which was the large ganglion of a worm-like ancestor that lived around 600 million years ago. That common ancestor established the bilaterian or left- and right-sided body-type of the tube with a mouth at one end, an anus at the other and a gut in the middle. The nerve cord runs along the length of the tube, culminating in the brain at the front (the mouth-end).

After the Cambrian explosion of phyla, life diversified into invertebrates, vertebrates, dinosaurs, and mammals. Vertebrates are those animals that have a vertebral column or backbone, and they exhibit cephalization, the centralization of control functions in the head. The skull evolved as an extension of the spinal column to protect the brain. The blood-brain barrier also evolved in vertebrates, in part to block pathogens circulating in the blood from entering the central nervous system.

Those latter barriers enabled the brain to complexify, which led eventually to the human brain that supports a sophisticated kind of consciousness we think of as personhood. The emergence of self-awareness and intelligence produced a Cambrian-like explosion known as the Anthropocene, the human dominance of the planet with a proliferation of artifacts or intelligently-designed forms, including languages, cultures, tools, houses, cities, vehicles, weapons, computers, and so on.

Another crucial barrier in species that sexually reproduce is the womb, which gestates the developing fetus. During pregnancy the uterine walls thicken and form the placenta, which supplies the fetus with oxygen and nutrients.

Social barriers also emerge, comprising groups such as families, clubs, ethnicities, and nations, each with its semipermeable barrier. For example, the law permits for the adoption but not for the kidnapping of a child. If you fly from one country to another, you have to pass through customs at the border. The social barrier is largely ideological (political, legal, religious), but it may also have biological roots such as inborn racism.

Finally, there’s the theoretical barrier of the technological singularity, the point in the projected future when our artifacts become so intelligent that they overtake us and see to their own design and production. Our fusing with those artifacts would produce the transhuman, a species that could render us obsolete.

Creativity by Estrangement

Some of the above is admittedly speculative, but I wanted to run through that history to emphasize the intriguing role of barriers in the universe’s evident creativity. The event horizon, Earth’s magnetosphere and ozone layer, cell membranes, the skull and blood-brain barrier, the uterus, ideology, the technological singularity — these effectively quarantine parts of the universe to allow for the creation of new structures and modes.

In hindsight we can tell something like the above story and show how the barriers and the emergent processes develop, naturalizing them with an all-encompassing conceptual framework. But each barrier corresponds to some unpredictability, because within those borders a new kind of being emerges.

Take, for example, the emergence of consciousness and personhood from the brain. Dualist philosophers have attempted to capture the strangeness of consciousness or “qualia,” with a thought experiment about knowledge. Suppose you learned all the facts in the universe in a black and white room, having never seen the colour red. You exit the room and encounter a red apple. The question is whether you learn something new at that point, whether consciousness, the feeling it’s like to have a sensation, thought, or feeling is irreducible to anything that could be objectively described.

Indeed, the anomaly of consciousness suggests a comparison with the holographic principle. Replace the two-dimensional data on the event horizon with the brain’s neural states. Just as the three-dimensional universe may complement the radiated information at the black hole’s surface, perhaps consciousness is a holographic projection of what’s happening in the brain. When you’re awake and experiencing the world, the conscious states themselves don’t seem like brain states. If you’re tasting asparagus, the parts of the brain that are responsible for processing that taste don’t themselves taste like asparagus. In fact, the conscious experience doesn’t seem to be anywhere at all, which has given rise to the folklore of immaterial ghosts and spirits. Certainly, we have no direct, introspective access to our brain as such; conscious experience seems projected into an independent, mental world, perhaps identifiable with the brain’s electromagnetic field.

Speculations aside, think of the novelty of consciousness from a neurological or evolutionary perspective. There’s no obvious reason why creatures couldn’t carry out their evolutionary functions as zombies. Somehow, personhood is a byproduct of our neurochemistry, and look at the result of that walling off of the brain: again, the brain evolved, complexified, and developed self-awareness and intelligence, which opened up other dimensions of creativity, namely the artificial, the cultural, and perhaps the godhood that lies beyond the transhuman.

To say that one order of reality emerges from another in an unpredictable way is close to saying the former is miraculous relative to the latter. But “miraculous” is freighted with dubious connotations, so instead I propose that we speak of estrangement. It’s not that consciousness has nothing to do with the brain or that the organic processes within the cell membrane have nothing to do with the nonorganic world; rather, the wider world divides and divorces itself from the abandoned part of itself, allowing that part to develop another way of being that calls for an irreducible explanation of the emergent events.

A black hole is estranged from the rest of spacetime, in that whatever’s inside the hole is abandoned. Physical causality doesn’t account for the teleological patterns that occur on the other side of organic membranes. That teleology isn’t miraculous, because we can understand how the apparent designs of body parts and animal behaviour evolve largely by natural selection, and how they emerge from chemistry.

But life’s estrangement from non-life is real. Life may have had an innocuous origin in the spontaneous creation of a fatty bubble that accidentally trapped an early RNA replicase, but once organic evolution got under way, a new order of reality appeared. The organelles in a unicellular organism can be described as physical objects, in terms of their mass and energy, but that would miss their function, their mechanical arrangement, and their implicit antagonism to the environment, to that which is other than that organism. Living things are programmed to protect themselves most of all and to transmit their genetic line. This self-interest is most apparent in our species, which has gone to cancer-like lengths to enhance its living standard and to preserve its dominance at the expense of the many species we’ve hunted to extinction.

Biting the Hand that Feeds us Poison

To say that one level of being is estranged from another is to say more than that the two are separate or even that theories of the two must be incommensurable. The point is that the creativity in question is wild and potentially self-defeating. A universe may thrive inside a black hole, but that universe’s happy womb swallows up the parent universe. Eventually black holes may destroy all of space and time in our universe, just as our black hole womb will eventually collapse along with its super-universe.

The sun that shelters our planet and fosters life’s evolution will eventually engulf the solar system and destroy the Earth. More to the point, though, we vain creatures seek to dominate nature; we bite the hand that feeds us, just as that “hand,” the matter that became our solar system was once part of a molecular cloud that broke off and thus helped destroy the cloud. The primate’s womb is hardly a utopia for the fetus; on the contrary, the two are at war with each other, since pregnancy can kill the mother and “Cells from the invading placenta digest their way through the endometrial surface, puncturing the mother’s arteries, swarming inside and remodelling them to suit the foetus.”

Consciousness isn’t content to be awestruck in observing the world; we use our intelligence to understand how DNA and the brain work, giving us the power to tinker with our genotype and phenotype. We unleash our horde of machines that threatens to ravage the evolutionary process that birthed us.

Moreover, consciousness can reflect the underlying alienation in the universe’s creativity, in the state of existential angst. We threaten to destroy ourselves in horror because of the absurd wildness with which new orders of being appear. Through introversion, asceticism, or artistic rapture we can stand apart from society and occupy a lonely, meta-level of thought as we become alienated from our own mind and public image. Just as evolution carved out a space for the brain to grow in a hollow in bone, the noosphere or the field of conscious experience and worldviews develops the equivalent of a black hole, a niche for stewing in resentment and despair.

The intelligence that empowers us can also destroy us, because that trait was created not by any wise, benevolent deity but by one part of the world’s violent, mindless rupture from the rest. Think of the mass extinctions required to produce the intelligent, sentient primate. Think of the animals that had to be hunted and consumed while they still breathed, for us to evolve, because the ruthlessness and grotesqueness of natural selection seem to be transferred from the solar and intergalactic absurdities. If our universe was created in a black hole that helps destroy our parent universe, we should hardly expect the fruit from that poisoned tree to blossom in a wholesome manner.

These barriers, then, are like the magician’s curtain that prevents the old world from interfering with the new trick, but they’re also reminders that each order of being is dead to the last one. The new worlds are abandoned by the old and left to fend for themselves, and if they should fail the experiment can always be run again elsewhere. God isn’t hidden, after all, nor is divine creativity impossible for us to understand. It’s just that we personify the divine power because of its hideousness.