"The Tide"

The Tide

I am lying on a beach. The waves softly wash upon the sand, soothing my soul as I look up into the sky. This is the place where I was born. It is peaceful, I could have stayed here forever. It is a good place to die, but not just yet. First I feel there is something I must say to you. I wish to tell you of a man I once met. It will not take long...

In the many years of my life, I've met some extraordinary people. Scientists and poets and artists never cease to astound me with their creations or their insights. Such a multitude of brilliant minds as I have seen is difficult to appreciate. Their thoughts are a flood of wisdom and artistry and uncompromising logic, but their stories are entwined in ways they cannot understand. Their motives and innermost purposes are a dark mystery none can penetrate. As I lie here upon the shores where I was born, I recall one man I've met who had peered into that mystery. All the scientists and poets and artists, all the energy expended in the pursuit of truth and beauty, and this rather unremarkable man in the course of a short life stumbled upon the simple answer. So lucky I have been to know him, if only for a few hours. Let me briefly tell you about him, for soon I must close my eyes and drift away into death.

I met him at an airport. Strange how the whims of randomness bring lifelines together for short moments only to tear them apart again. Any anonymous face you glimpse can be a potential significant figure in your life. Any silhouette shut away in a passing automobile could be another Newton, or Jesus, or Hitler. It is only chance that brings you, or the world, to know.

The anonymous face I wish to speak of belonged to a young, unimposing man of some foreign stock, possibly Indian. I don't even remember his name, so his nationality obviously matters little. You may create in your mind any picture that is appropriate to you. Male or female, white or black or yellow, what counts is his thoughts.

He was waiting for an airplane, a delayed departure due to the bad weather. So was I, another plane, but waiting in the same lounge. The conversation started with a cigarette I think, and continued over coffee. It was to be a wait of several hours.

We talked about our families, our jobs, our destinations. He was a sociological statistician, someone who attempts to describe massive social forces such as fads and revolutions through mathematics. He had a wife and a baby daughter waiting somewhere, and was eager to see them. I told him about myself, an aging literature professor on his way home from a holiday spent with grandchildren, a widower.

We got along easily. People are so much friendlier when thrown together into the same misfortune, even a minor one. We talked about all sorts of things, as naturally as if we had known each other for years. I guess we have. We had been talking about my english class when he suddenly asked a silly but strangely chilling question.

"What sort of pronoun would you use to describe the entire world?"

I didn't understand.

"It's nothing. Just a theory of mine... It would take a long time to explain."

I put my feet up on the displaced luggage and stretched out in response. We had plenty of time to kill. He looked uncomfortable, perhaps embarrassed, as if he regretted ever asking the question, but he continued.

"Very well, it goes like this:

"I've spent a lot of time recently applying Bernard's algorithm to modern cultural movements such as the rise of public interest in ESP... Are you familiar with Bernard's algorithm?"

I wasn't. I had never heard of it.

"Well, it's a rather complex statistical method of deriving equations that describe vast pools of any sort of data. The equations can provide models for human behavior on a mass scale, can even predict the future of these behaviors. We know, for example, that the current trend in environmental awareness will decline within about thirty years. I even know why, but I'll get to that later.

"Anyway, these equations get unimaginably huge and complicated. As a matter of fact, I've never even seen one. I use a Cray supercomputer to derive and apply them. Sometimes the equation requires more memory to store than the data it describes. Then you know you're dealing with coincidental circumstance, of no value whatsoever. Sometimes though, combining two equations produces a simpler one. That indicates a correlation, a meaning if you will.

"About a year ago, I did an experiment. I applied Bernard's algorithm to the technological movements of the past 100 years. The result was an expression with about 10 million terms, far simpler than I had expected. So I did it again over a history of 400 years. Surprisingly, the result was simpler still. I found that the larger the time span and sample space studied, the less complex the resulting equation was. Of course, the amount of available data about the distant past is much smaller than the current data, but this can be allowed for. I was working with an estimation, after all.

"So I did it with even larger time and subject samples, and still produced the same trend. It seems the farther you move from the level of the individual observer and toward the omniscient viewpoint, the more sense the world makes."

I told him he's just abstracting himself from the complexity. He's losing a lot of the detail from the picture.

"Ahh, but the shape remains. The meaning becomes clearer once you look past the insignificant."

I asked him what this meaning is, but he raised his hand to stop me. I guess there was more to say before I was ready for that. I could see he was on a roll. He had forgotten the airplane, forgotten the waiting, perhaps even forgotten the destination. He was lost on an obsessive trail of thought.

"I went further then. I constructed my own algorithm based upon this process of generalizing the equations produced by Bernard's method. I came up with a limiting function. This, taken with a temporal parameter of about 570 million years and spacial parameters encompassing the entire biosphere, produce a behavioral equation orders of magnitude less complex than the usual ones. This is always a clear indication of a meaning. Of course, like you said, I may have just abstracted myself away from the reality. So I applied my procedure on more natural, non-biological processes such as erosion and climate development. Here there was no reduction in complexity! Only in the biological realm does this phenomenon occur, and only in the last 570 million years of its history. Further back and again it turns to chaos."

He fell silent. I watched him for some time, while he looked blankly out through the window at the rain outside. A pair of airport workmen were loading nondescript boxes into a vehicle of some sort. What they were doing and why, I have no idea. I'm sure he didn't either. I'm sure he didn't even see them, or the rain, or the window. He was off again on some mysterious mental path, deep in his mind.

I asked him to continue talking.

"Have you ever heard of Schoen's neural approximation?"

I knew it had something to do with artificial intelligence.

"Not just artificial. It can be applied to model even the human mind. It was the mathematical basis for the recent breakthrough in artificial intelligence research, but it developed out of psychophysics. Basically it is a mathematical model for the behavior of a complex neural network. Any such network.

"You know what's coming, don't you?

"I compared my limiting function to the standardized form of the Schoen equation. It was the same thing! Well, several thousand terms were different, but that's hardly significant when comparing such gigantic mathematical structures. There are, after all, differences in physical composition, in psychological basis, motivations, lifespan... quite a difference in lifespan..."

I asked him what exactly he was talking about. He answered me with questions.

"What is awareness? Intelligence? What is it that makes humans sentient? At a certain point of complexity any informational network becomes aware. You can't stop it. I bet that even the telephone network will someday be complex enough to process information on its own.

"What I am talking about is that for millions of years such complexity has been around. It has been growing upon the planet for a long, long time. What I am saying is that everything, all along, really has had a purpose. The living things of the Earth, especially humans, are just part of a collective mind. The One of Zen Buddhism, Mother Nature, God..."

I protested. How did this being evolve? How was it born? How do the millions of creatures that make up its body communicate? How can it think?

"I don't know, but I don't need to know. The equation is enough proof. It shows its thoughts, its moods, habits, idiosyncrasies, its fears... Its motivations are manifested in the migrations of ecosystems. It did not evolve. It developed because of Schoen's Law. As ecological complexity grew, it was born.

"At first, it had no intelligence, no rational thought anyway. It exerted its will upon the creatures, the cells, that made up its vast mind. It created and extinguished countless species and ecosystems. It experimented with various possibilities for millions of years, until it grew lonely. I have seen this in examining the equation when I applied it to evolution.

"The evolution of man was especially interesting. I think it became intelligent about the time that man appeared. It was a long awakening and with it came the loneliness. Intelligence has a single foundation from which countless variations may rise, but all of them require communication with other intelligences. It could not consider the humans for this purpose, any more than we could consider communicating with our cells. Its only hope was in outer space.

"Are you sure you want to hear the rest? You don't look like you believe any of this."

I did believe him, and told him so. I thought it would please and flatter him, but he only grew more scared. I watched his hand tremble as it raised the cigarette to his lips. His eyes stared past the walls, looked upon something huge and frightening.

"It created us. It shaped and twisted its ecological tentacles until humans began to evolve. It planned out all our ancient civilizations, the stepping stones in its ancient quest. Once our cultures grew it could use them as seperate precision tools in the sculpting of history. I've been able to isolate specific motives behind several key events of ancient history, and have seen how it manipulated entire nations to serve its gigantic purpose. Sometimes it even appeared to individuals through hallucinations. That's what religions have been all about. There is a part of the brain, in the right temporal lobe, opposite of Wernicke's area, where spiritual experiences are suspected to take place. I guess that is where this thing lives. I don't even have a name for it..."

I think he misunderstood my silence for lack of belief.

"Why do you think men have fought for centuries? It is for the same reason that wolves hunt deer. It is not to provide meat for young wolves, but to produce better wolves and faster deer. It's a symbiotic relationship. After the development of agriculture, mankind left the turbulent waters of evolution. Now, only other men could keep competition going. War was invented, with progress as its goal.

"Technology is not a tool for war, war is a tool for technology. And I can see that you suspect what the technology is for..."

I waited for him to say it.

"Space. It wants to get off the planet. It wants contact with another being of its magnitude, a brother. We are just its fingers, its cells. We live, die, struggle to win or lose. We build cities and technologies beyond imagination, even its imagination. And all without knowledge of what it is that we strive and sacrifice for. We have no idea of the tide we are swept upon. The racial consciousness has remained a mystery to its cells. How can we ever hope to understand its motives, and to accept its whims as it wipes out nations in war? It doesn't care about us any more than we do about dead skin cells. It drives us to fight for meaningless causes, to die by the hundreds on the deserts and oceans of the Earth. And it drives us into science, hoping to thus understand the cold universe that even it is a slave to."

He fell into silence for a long time then. He looked away again and I stared at his face. It was not just fear in those eyes, it was anger. He hated this thing he discovered, and hated himself for the discovery. There was something else though, that he hadn't said yet. It was something he didn't want to say for fear that words would make it real. So he whispered it.

"And now it wants to die...

"Contact is impossible. Space travel is a dead end. Drake's equation has estimated that on the average there are 1.5 intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy at any given time. That's two hundred billion stars to search through for something that may not be there. Or may die millions of years before you find it. The distances involved here are mind staggering, incomprehensible. And there is no way to travel faster than light to beat these numbers. The physicists have proven that very elegantly about seventy years ago. Therefore, the chances of contact are so small that even statistics would treat them as zero. And this equation will never change. All the thousands of years of human effort, all the millions of years of evolution, have been for nothing. A lost cause.

"That's why the interest in ESP. It tried to look for another way to reach a distant brother. But ESP is just a manifestation of itself, a stray thought shared by two nerve cells. Another dead end.

"And now it wants to just give up and die. It cannot cope with the truth after the aeons of effort. I have studied the self-destructive trends of mankind, the dangerous technologies, the poisoning of the atmosphere. It all points to a clear conclusion: We don't stand a chance. There is no hope when God gives up."

He smiled when he looked at me then. It was a smile without hope, of apology and pity. Understanding passed between us then and he left without a word. His plane had arrived several minutes before, and had nearly finished boarding. He walked away, passed me a final uneasy glance, and melted into the crowd to become anonymous once more.

The plane crashed. The captain suddenly plunged it into a steep dive while the co-pilot locked the cockpit door. The plane fell out of the sky at 300 miles per hour and smashed into the sea. One passenger died without even screaming.

That was a hundred and fifty years ago, but I still have not forgotten it. How well he knew me! I'm sure he even understood my motives behind killing him; perhaps he even saw that in his equation. I do care about them, not as individuals but as a whole. It was better for them to die in ignorance of the forces that destroyed them. I am not without compassion.

It's over now, so what does it matter? These thoughts will die with me and be lost forever in the cruel vastness. I listen to the waves quietly washing upon the shore of the sea that gave me birth, and I close my eyes.

July 1990