Nietzsche had a unique vision that allowed him to see through the beliefs of most people. His writings gave his vision tremendous colour. Painting: Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Factory Chimney, 1910. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain).
“I am not a man, I am dynamite.”
No philosopher has ever been so “right” as Nietzsche. His insights into western civilisation and what it is to be human in the modern world are so on the money, they seem like God-given prophesies.
Nietzsche had an extraordinary insight into human belief systems. He called out the beliefs that held the Victorian world together: official religion, nationalist politics, and faith in science and reason. He was dynamite because he blew those beliefs to smithereens.
What made Nietzsche such a great critic and forecaster for our entire culture? The 2015 book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, examines how some people can be so consistently right about the future, while supposed experts get it so wrong.
Having studied the phenomenon at length, the authors concluded that “superforecasters” are not just lucky. They share traits that enable them to bypass the cognitive biases that cloud the judgement of most people.
We’re all invested in the future and investors too often let emotion guide them. Nietzsche was the ultimate superforecaster because he detached himself from others’ investment in the future.
But how? There’s no such thing as in-born genius. Nietzsche simply had a different vision from most people. The difference is that he articulated it exquisitely in his writings.
There are four traits that enabled Nietzsche to blow our precious beliefs apart and see a clear vision of the future.
1. Questioning widely held beliefs
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”
This is what makes you a philosopher. Bertrand Russell recalled being taught basic mathematics as a child. Two plus two equals four, he was told. He asked: why? Why does two plus two equal four? It just does, he was told. But he didn’t stop asking and went on to write Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, the textbook on the fundamentals of mathematics.
Nietzsche questioned everything he was taught, and then everything everybody seemed to take for granted. His father was a priest, but young Friedrich became the man who declared “God is dead. We have killed him.” The philosopher examined the nature of belief itself. He wrote,
“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
He loathed mob-thinking. He saw German nationalism — pervasive among intelligent people in his time — to be stupid, the same with anti-Semitism — the two things that would scar twentieth-century Europe.
Behind every belief is a goal. Nietzsche was sceptical of widely held beliefs because he mistrusted their goals.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VI, 1913. In just a few years, Kandinsky’s vision took him beyond recognisable things into a realm of abstraction. He transformed modern art as a result.
2. Self-sufficiency
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.”
Self-sufficiency came to Nietzsche in many ways. His idea of self-overcoming, of creating your best self from the chaos within you requires an enormous amount of discipline. To be a Nietzschean is to walk against the herd and out alone in the wilderness. Calling out other people’s bad faith will entail being branded as eccentric or even dangerous (Socrates was executed for questioning beliefs in ancient Athens).
Nietzsche was also lonely. The love of his life, Lou Salome, abandoned him. He became estranged from his family and friends through his convictions. Loneliness can crush many people, Nietzsche confronted loneliness through his choices.
He obeyed himself. His aversion to “the mob” gave him the insight to see the world how it really is. The inconvenient truths that many of us fear so much gave him inspiration to envisage a different world.
3. Everything changes
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day.”
Every civilisation believes it has the last word until it doesn’t. Western civilisation has shown the same arrogance that many dead civilisations have displayed.
Nietzsche had a deep-seated affection for Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher whose work survives only in fragments. Heraclitus believed that the only thing we can be certain of is change. “You never step in the same river twice,” is a Heraclitus phrase that can be applied to the wider culture as well as our individual lives.
We are poor predictors of the future because we are so invested in things remaining as they are. Change is frightening. This is especially true when we benefit from the way things are.
Nietzsche lived at a time when profound change was underway but was yet to manifest itself. Europe and America were industrialising rapidly, cities grew, technology boomed, scientific discoveries were undermining old ways of thinking.
Nietzsche was among a number of thinkers changing the world at the time along with Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and, of course, Karl Marx. In the nineteenth century, the world was a powder keg. Nietzsche knew it was going to blow.
The twentieth century saw wholesale changes: two world wars, the rise of Fascism, the fall of the European empires, Marxist revolutions in Russia and China. It has been the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. Millions died in wars and revolutions. Millions were exterminated simply for who they were.
4. Optimism
“I am a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been… only after me is it possible to hope again.”
You’d think that questioning everything, being a loner and knowing that everything changes would make you a pessimist, but Nietzsche was the opposite.
He ruthlessly called out everything that he believed to be flawed and corrupt in western civilisation’s pillars of progress: religion, science, nation and politics, yet always warned against the nihilism that might come with the vacuum of belief. It is nihilism that made people believe in other mob-mentality goals like fascism and communism.
Instead, Nietzsche looked inwards for meaning, and he urges us to find transcendence in ourselves. He preached for the coming of the “overman” (“Ubermensch”) the higher human that can transcend the human. Optimism and self-belief made him a superforecaster, since pessimism and nihilism cause us to retreat into the comfortable beliefs of the mob.
The overman is the self-overcomer, the self-actualiser that lives beyond mere beliefs and embraces conviction to create their own meaning for life. “It takes chaos to give birth to a dancing star,” he wrote, “and you have chaos within you yet.”
What does this mean for us? A lot. In the same pages as his “dynamite” quip, Nietzsche wrote of a future even more extraordinary than what humankind witnessed in the twentieth century.
He wrote:
“When truth steps into battle with the lie of millenia we shall have convusions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as never has been dreamed of. The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been blown into the air — they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be Wars such as there has never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on Earth.”
The world wars, fascism, the Holocaust, and communist revolutions have come to pass, but is there more to come?
We are dozing on an unexploded bomb. Technologies such as gene editing, robotics and artificial intelligence will pose dilemmas to us that are unprecedented in all history. We will be challenged to define what being human means, what life is, what “rights” are. We’ll need to redefine happiness, democracy and even freedom.
Wildlife and resources are evaporating. What was once called the “Third World” is quickly rising to prosperity and power. Nations humiliated by colonialism will be humiliating their colonisers. The wealth gap between rich and poor is widening faster. There may be revolutions.
Will there be even more suffering? That is up to our capacity to handle inevitable change. That is up to us.
Life is full of polarities that give our existence meaning. We know pleasure because we have felt pain. We revel in beauty because we have witnessed destruction. We experience happiness only because we have known despair. The emotional energies that fuel our lives spring out of this grand dichotomy that separate the light from the dark, the constructive from the destructive.
Sigmund Freud plucked this phenomenon up and out of the great undercurrent of the human experience and awarded these opposing forces mythological labels: Eros was established as the “life instinct” (alluding to the Greek god of love) and, later, Thanatos for the “death instinct” (alluding to the Greek force of death). Freud articulated these two instincts as being hopelessly locked in a state of eternal battle.
Eros encapsulates the will to survival and the desire to create. What blooms out of this instinct are the potent forces of love and ambition that both draw civilization and color it, so to speak. Allegorically, Eros can be expressed as Renaissance art — creations that prioritized elegance, the exquisiteness of the human form, and classical notions of man’s nobility. Eros is both the impulse to sustain (to attain basic necessities of life) as well as the impulse to thrive (to carve higher ideals). Eros is nurturing and stimulating, infused with the precepts of humanism. It seeks to rise out of the muck of chaos and to fashion order. It endeavors to surface above messy animalistic impulses and put something more palatable and more attractive in its place.
Eros is life and love, vigor and purpose, cooperation and civilization.But indeed, all of these ideals are defined by their opposites. The very conceptualization of Eros and Thanatos is based on the necessity of the one to provide meaning for the other. Without Thanatos staring back at us in the mirror, Eros has nothing to push against, nothing to strive for, nothing to sculpt meaning out of. Absent of its shadow, Eros can feel peculiarly antiseptic, plagued by a hollow, soulless quality.
Thanatos, then, can be conceptualized as the grinning skull of death. It is the drive towards obliteration; it is aggression manifest. It is the heady lure of destruction, the greedy pursuit of confrontation with our own mortality. It is flirtation with death; it is a testing of our human ability to destroy that which we have patiently labored to create. It is hatred that once applied, calcifies the world and crumbles it — reducing it to primordial dust. It is the human hunger for gross power, for subversive exploitation. It is decay immortalized. It is tearing down the curtains, stripping off the wallpaper, knifing a gash through the window. It is the drive to return to the dust, the desire to snuff out life — to kill humanity, to kill civilization, sometimes even, to kill the self.Dissolution is the objective of Thanatos — the temptation to revert back to — in Freud’s terms — an inanimate, motionless state.
Eros is the intrepid pushing of new growth through the soil; Thanatos is the snapping of the stem, the crushing of life under the heel, the brutish ripping out of the plant.
Freud is often criticized for his speculative theories that erred on the primitive side of man — that treated individuals as ruled by forces they could neither really see nor wrest control over. He was apt to believe, for example, that the so-called “death wish” wasn’t something that could be transcended. The primeval desire for annihilation could never be blotted out, he thought. His original introduction of this heavy duality came on the heels of his debut of the “pleasure principle” which is famously known as the idea that we humans are wired for instant gratification.
This particular theory maintained that humans were so magnetized to pleasure mostly because such a state was defined by the absence of tension. Tension had to be eradicated in order to experience this elusive pleasure. (Of course, this is technically rather difficult in life and necessitates a constant chase.) Freud mulled over the notion that the “death wish” was so appealing in part because it contained the heady promise of a tensionless state. A truly tensionless state, after all, is only achievable in death.
But such a formulation of the death instinct feels almost too superficial, too forgiving. I think it’s just as true that the drive to annihilate is motivated by a feverish desire to find out just what we humans are capable of. In an urge towards wanting to grasp concrete certainty — that is, to discover in glaring, raw detail the intimate knowledge of our own nature — it could be said that the dark side of human nature is secretly pining to hit rock-bottom — to test the full strength of our own powers, to collapse or kill our way to the very bottom.
It is a goal to strive towards, after all. It promises something in the way of sure knowledge. It promises something in the way of victory. Both of these things are human vices; both are enticing in ways that we cannot fully understand.
We are also, I suspect, wary of our eviler, base impulses. Society suppresses these destructive impulses, effectively pushing them into darkened corners. (Which is exactly what it’s supposed to do and thank God it does.) But because it binds this destructiveness, it also blinds by providing us with only a fuzzy awareness of our destructive drive and attendant capabilities. This, in turn, makes us skittish and curious and in the event that our external world devolves into Thanatos (such as in the case of war) we can fall prey to this skittishness, we can indulge in this morbid curiosity.
War, and this may be obvious, is one of the clearest examples of Thanatos in action. It is the stage upon which the drama of the human fascination with the death wish is enacted in fierce, macabre detail. In war, the strictures that hold society taut in peaceful times snap. Civilized reason yields to the heat of tribal violence. The economics of cooperation are upended, replaced by the careless sparking of mayhem with the enemy.
In war, architecture that bears the mark of human ingenuity and persistence is razed to the ground. Bullets and bombs devastate the physical and the human landscape, ripping holes through the cultural tapestry, destroying that which has been built up over time. The race to the bottom can feel exhilarating to those ensnared in the clutches of Thanatos. To level the world, to reduce it to rubble, to break loose from the bonds of society and to take up that speck of savagery hidden inside the human heart — these things can powerfully grip a people.
In this way, war, for some, can be a letting-loose. It is the blasting away of the societal pact to preserve and to patiently cultivate. Individuals can be sickened by the atrocity of war, by its grisly aspects, by its rejection of Eros. The contrast can be profoundly disorienting. Combat is nauseating for most of those involved, but the environment of war itself has a perverse attraction. War is not an empty, aimless endeavor, contrary to what some might think. It is charged with energy — the drive to destroy, specifically — and is marked not by moral neutrality but by moral perversity.
We as humans are rightly invigorated by the idea that we can test our mettle at reaching our full potential — indisputably a function of Eros. But could it not also be true that we’re unconsciously drawn with dark fascination to our Thanatos potential? Could it be that the two are equally alluring? The brutalities of war represent the ancient vice of human destructiveness being invited to come out to play. The lawlessness can have an enticing quality. War is the devil’s playground — vicious, vaguely apocalyptic and morally toxic.
War, after all, is not always logical. It is fueled by rational motives less than we’d like to admit. It is performed in a manner less neat and orderly than we’d prefer to believe. We mistakenly conceive of war as a callous, businesslike affair but this is not necessarily true. War is wildly infused with emotion. It can trace its origins and escalation all too often to the ravenousness of hate, love, fear, anger — to the swell of emotional intensity. History has never been able to expunge battle from its pages for precisely this reason.
Diverging from war as mankind’s Thanatos instinct writ large, there’s a more existential dimension to the tug-of-war between Eros and Thanatos. What separates humans from animals? It is largely the magnitude of our consciousness. We possess not only the cognitive prowess necessary to comprehend the harsh face of our own mortality but the ability to be keenly aware of our participation in either good or evil. Isn’t this what the legendary story of Adam and Eve’s Fall was all about? Attaining consciousness which shattered innocence. Feeling shame and grasping wrongdoing.Becoming disquietingly aware of human potential that runs in two directions — up and down.
We are motivated to discover what is upstream, to push towards love and human flourishing, accomplishment and virtue. But so too can we be motivated to discover what lies downstream — motivated if only out of a kind of ghoulish curiosity. We do not want to admit that creation and destruction can be equally riveting.
As children, we took pride in building towers, hungrily stacking them higher and higher. But guess what? We derived some kind of glee out of destroying them too — giving them a kick, watching them topple helplessly to the ground.
So too do we flirt with our own annihilation. We cannot help but be imaginatively gruesome in entertaining the different ways we could die, for example. In the words of Stephen King, “Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.” We cannot help but experience a delicious shiver of excitement from a brush with danger.
So too do mental illnesses such as depression smack of the death wish. Depression can be painted as the self-destruction of the self, the regression of self-actualization. The sword of aggression is stabbed inwards, sometimes performing a fatal twist and resulting in the literal elimination of the individual — in the finality of suicidal death.
Thanatos is spellbinding. Its counterpart, Eros, can be equally captivating. But we are always in danger of forgetting this basic nature of ours. We must always be on the lookout, humbling ourselves before the truths that we do not want to own about ourselves.
The business of killing and destroying and wreaking havoc has scarcely let up over the course of history. And this should be telling. The leaps and bounds of human progress were never able to bleed Thanatos of its power. This is because Eros and Thanatos occupy separate poles which humans are ineluctably strung between. Naturally, Eros has never been successful in eclipsing Thanatos. And herein lies the truth: They are both acutely, undeniably legitimate forces that have always been with us and that will never leave us.
The human heart and mind are destined to a grim dance between Eros and Thanatos that will stretch for all of earthly eternity. Being able to gaze forthrightly into the dimensions of both directions and become sharply conscious of our own inescapable nature will lead us to the ultimate acceptance and knowledge of what it truly means to be human.
“Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”
―François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1787), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Wikipedia
Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans. Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a made-up future – and his team had to guess who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.
So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea. Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80 percent accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin.
Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques.
When it comes to spotting liars, the eyes don’t have it. Credit: Thinkstock.
Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. The most famous example is Bill Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky – taken at the time to be a sure sign he was lying. The idea, says Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes some strong emotions – nerves, guilt, perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are difficult to contain. Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-expressions” that might give the game away, they claimed.
Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language. “There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says. And although you may hear that our subconscious can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been disproved.
Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical cues. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray deception. “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says. The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.
If only body language revealed deception. Credit: Getty Images.
Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.
Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work.
Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.
The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses. “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,” says Ormerod.
A psychological experiment in an airport revealed new tricks to spot liars. Credit: Thinkstock.
Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70 percent of the time.
“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most realistic study around.”
The Art of Persuasion
Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.
Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90 percent accuracy; one expert was even correct 100 percent of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80 percent accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.
Are police any better at spotting lying suspects than anyone else? Credit: Thinkstock.
Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”
Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their findings, to make sure that they stand up in different situations. “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,” says Levine.
Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.
There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.
This article was originally published on September 6, 2015, by BBC Future, and is republished here with permission.
We’ve made an artificially panpsychic world, where technology and nature are one.
BY GEORGE MUSSERFEBRUARY 27, 2020 (nautil.us)
Years before smart homes became a thing, I replaced all the switches in our house with computerized switches. At first, it was just a way to add wall switches without pulling new wire. Over time, I got more ambitious. The system runs a timer routine when it detects no one is home, turns on the basement light when you open the door, and lights up rooms in succession on well-worn paths such as bedroom to kitchen. Other members of the family are less enthusiastic. A light might fail to turn on or might go out for lack of motion, or maybe for lack of any discernible reason. The house seems to have a mind of its own.
Under the rubric of “ubiquitous computing,” “smart dust,” and the “Internet of Things,” computers are melting into the fabric of everyday life. Light bulbs, toasters, even toothbrushes are being chipped. You can summon Alexa almost anywhere. And as life becomes computerized, computers become lifelike. Modern hardware and software have gotten so complicated that they resemble the organic: messy, unpredictable, inscrutable. In machine learning, engineers forswear any detailed understanding of what goes on inside. The machine learns rather like a dog: by trial and error, with ample treats. Some systems even have features we commonly associate with consciousness, such as creating models of their environment in which they themselves are actors—a kind of self-awareness.
Gradually, we are turning an old philosophical doctrine into a reality. We are creating a panpsychic world.
HOW ROMANTIC: Few people experience nature red in tooth and claw, or would want to. We romanticize nature, just as we do our advanced technology. So what’s the difference?Quick Shot / Shutterstock
Panpsychism—the proposition that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous—is one of humanity’s oldest ideas. It has cycled in and out of fashion in Western philosophy and has been enjoying a resurgence of late. For many neuroscientists and philosophers, panpsychism will be an essential feature of a theory of consciousness: Whatever mechanism creates the human mind need not be limited to humans.
But I’m talking about a different kind of panpsychism—artificial panpsychism. All the computers with which we surround ourselves are starting to be endowed with a rudimentary sentience. We are placing minds everywhere and instilling seemingly inanimate objects with mental experience. To my knowledge only one thinker—the computer scientist and science-fiction author Rudy Rucker—has described panpsychism as a phenomena we might create, although even he doesn’t think it very plausible. I would go further and say, not only is it plausible, it is happening. By dispersing intelligent artifacts, humanity is awakening the material world.
Traditional philosophical panpsychism comes in multiple varieties, but all have one intuition in common: that subjective experience can’t be reduced to mechanistic physics. Proponents make three main arguments. The first is that there doesn’t seem to be any principled way to draw the line between conscious and non-conscious. If we are conscious, why not a dog? A paramecium? A protein molecule? A proton? These systems lie on a continuum with no obvious break.
Second, panpsychism would solve the hard problem of consciousness. The objective methods of science seem inherently incapable of explaining subjective experience. The scent of a rose or awfulness of scratching a blackboard is not decomposable into smaller pieces, not mathematically describable, and not experimentally accessible. It seems to require a new feature of reality as deep as anything in physics, or perhaps even deeper. Complex minds are composed of simpler ones—“mind dust,” as William James put it. If so, everything in the universe is conscious to some degree.
We are placing minds everywhere and instilling inanimate objects with mental experience.
Panpsychism might also solve a complementary problem: the hard problem of matter. Philosophers such as Hedda Mørch and Philip Goff argue that physics describes what material objects do, but not what they are—their intrinsic nature. Subjective experience might plug that gap, because it is intrinsic. There is something about scents and screeches that is impossible to grasp by reference to anything else; it must be experienced directly. By this argument, everything in the world has phenomenal as well as material qualities.
Third, several of today’s leading theories of consciousness imply panpsychism. One of the most popular, Integrated Information Theory, takes our psychological unity as its starting point. Our sensations form a seamless whole, and brain activity reflects this coherence. When people are awake or dreaming, their neurons fire in a coordinated way; when in deep sleep or a coma, neural activity is fragmented. The theory surmises that an information processing system is conscious to the extent that its parts act in harmony. Anything with parts—which is to say, anything beyond a structureless elementary particle—has the potential to be conscious by this theory. Another line of thinking, based on the free-energy principle put forward by neuroscientist Karl Friston, observes that any self-sustaining structure has to maintain its boundary against external insults, which requires an internal model of the world. That is a core feature of mind.
Whether or not you buy these arguments, and many don’t, you can foresee two types of artificial panpsychism. If it’s true that mind cannot emerge from mindless atoms and must be a new fundamental ingredient of nature, you can imagine mind engineering: assembling components not to perform some function, but to achieve some type of experience. And if not—if we can make minds out of mindless atoms after all—then artificial panpsychism is a straightforward extension of present technology.
Neuroscientists have some evidence for the latter. Consciousness seems to be a specific cognitive function performed by identifiable brain mechanisms that not all species possess. There was an evolutionary rationale for it to develop; it needn’t have been built in from the start. When experimental subjects become consciously aware of something, certain brain areas change in activity; people who exhibit conscious awareness are able to reason across gaps in time, follow complicated directions, and imagine things that have never existed. When they perform tasks without conscious awareness, as if on autopilot, they are limited to reacting to what is in front of them. Consciousness also helps us socially. We are always trying to fathom other people’s thoughts and motivations, and self-awareness may emerge as we turn this ability on ourselves. Other mammals possess these same brain areas and show analogous behavior.
So, consciousness helps us navigate a complex world. And if consciousness helps us, it could help robots and computers, too, giving engineers a practical reason to design it into their systems. Out of philosophical caution, we might still question whether these systems are conscious. That is perhaps unknowable. But if they act as if they are, people will treat them as such. Thus we have both elements of panpsychism. Engineers have achieved the “pan”—they have embedded computers everywhere—and are working on the “psychic.” Mind dust, meet smart dust.
When debating panpsychism, the question is not whether, but when. Either the world already is panpsychic or it will be.
Rucker has imagined such a transformation. In a short story for Nature in 2006, he speculated that brain-to-brain interfaces might be applied to non-human objects. The protagonist mind-melds with a rock.
In a 2008 physics paper, Rucker addressed an objection to panpsychism raised by Karl Popper and others. A mind needs memory. Without it, organisms could only be reactive; they could have no inner life. Yet basic physics is memoryless. How the universe evolves depends only on its current state; it doesn’t matter how it reached that state. Memory is a higher-level feature requiring large assemblies of atoms. Simple structures lack it. How, then, could they be conscious? Rucker speculated that exotic new physics, such as the dynamics of higher dimensions of spacetime, could endow even the simplest system with memory. The cosmologist Bernard Carr has explored similar ideas.
If we could hear machines converse, they would sound like the squeaking and squawking of a rainforest.
Rucker incorporated these musings into his novels Postsingular and Hylozoic. In Postsingular, the world is infested with nanobots that network together into a hive mind. In Hylozoic, the material world itself springs to life as a result of higher-dimensional physics and ejects the nanobots. Rucker depicts two steps toward artificial panpsychism, technological at first, then anti-technological.
The books paint a fascinating picture of a fully sentient world. People can telepathically communicate not just with friends and family, but with atoms, burbling brooks, and the planet as a whole. If your friends come over for dinner, the group forms a temporary collective mind that you can commune with. Every act becomes a negotiation: You had better apologize to the brook for urinating on its bank and talk nice to your hand tools. Say the right words to the right atoms and you can heal wounds or fly like Superman. On the downside, villains can brainwash atoms, unraveling the fabric of reality.
In the world Rucker portrays, you can see the emotional appeal of panpsychism, how it enchants people who find the world of physics cold and impersonal, and how it would imbue all things with moral status. Environmentalists, in particular, are drawn to that. People maybe wouldn’t pollute streams that could talk back. Artists, too, often speak of their work as a negotiation with their materials. “Art is really a cooperative endeavor, a work of cocreation,” wrote philosopher David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, one of the most eloquent evocations of this romantic view of panpsychism.
For Rucker, the second stage in the panpsychic transformation is essential. The world of nanobots doesn’t qualify as panpsychic to him. A philosopher might agree. True panpsychism embeds mind within basic physics; it’s not enough to scatter smart chips like seed corn. On his website, Rucker publishes an extensive series of notes about the backstory to his novels. He writes: “Already my car talks to me, so does my phone, my computer, and my refrigerator, so I guess we could live with talking rocks, chairs, logs, sandwiches. But they’d have ‘soul,’ not like chirping electronic appliances, which is really kind of different.”
But is it? If your house is filled with picture frames, vacuum cleaners, and smart speakers that dim the lights, answer your questions, dodge around your feet, and watch over you, it may well be the suburban equivalent of living among forest spirits. It will not matter where the minds come from as long as they are there.
Imagine being a conscious electron. You have some kind of inner life, but no senses, no mouth, no opposable thumb.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Agriculture de-wilded the meadows and the forests, so that even a seemingly pristine landscape can be a heavily processed environment. Manufactured products have become thoroughly mixed in with natural structures. Now, our machines are becoming so lifelike we can’t tell the difference. Each stage of technological development adds layers of abstraction between us and the physical world. Few people experience nature red in tooth and claw, or would want to. So, although the world of basic physics may always remain mindless, we do not live in that world. We live in the world of those abstractions.
For now, we can just about maintain the distinction between technology and biology. But what seems like high technology to us now might seem like a law of nature to future generations. Having forgotten the origin of the computers that permeate their world, people might take them to be an innate feature of the universe. Their philosophers might well assume that mind is fundamental. (You might also wonder whether alien civilizations, which could be billions of years ahead of us, are invisible to us because they are so deeply woven in the fabric of our reality.)
Digital panpsychism is rather more plausible than higher-dimensional physics, anyway. Rucker magics away the problem of communicating with other minds by making a hand-wavy appeal to quantum effects. But in an artificially panpsychic world, it’s just a matter of wiring. Brain-to-brain interfaces are already under development. Neuroscientists have linked the brains of rats and of monkeys using implanted electrodes and of humans using scalp electrodes and external magnets. Last year, a team of scientists and visionaries speculated about using nanotechnology. As a proof of principle, some conjoined twins share neural circuits: one feels, tastes, and sees what the other does. It is not outlandish to imagine that brain interfaces could be extended to artificial brains.
A brain could also be linked to an artificial-intelligence system by adapting the “chip test” proposed by Susan Schneider. Scientists would swap parts of your brain for functionally equivalent electronic components to see whether it affects your conscious experience. If not, this would demonstrate that consciousness can be implemented in any substrate and is not specific to brain tissue. But it might also be a way to share subjective experiences with our electronic creations.
For Abram, much of the appeal of panpsychism is that it makes us engage with the non-human; it takes us out of ourselves. Artificial panpsychism is starting to do that. Right now, technology is closely tied to specific human needs. But as machines proliferate, they will have their own needs, which other machines will satisfy. If we could hear them converse, it would sound like the squeaking and squawking of a rainforest. An ecosystem is emerging with its own logic that, for better or worse, is not human logic.
You might well wonder whether that is desirable. My family, driven mad by our smart house, certainly would. But if artificial panpsychism has troubling aspects, so does the natural variety. In all the debates over panpsychism, skeptics concede its romantic aspects. Nobody asks whether they would really want to live in such a world.
A panpsychic world is not a warmly embracing community. Unless telepathy really is possible, most minds would be locked in, forming a vast crowd of atomized individuals. Imagine being a conscious electron. You have some kind of inner life, but no senses, no mouth, no opposable thumb. You feel utterly alone. You will have to endure forever; death can bring you no relief. It sounds like the very definition of hell. Admittedly, the electron’s experience is unimaginable in human terms, and we shouldn’t project our own values onto it. But isn’t that what writers and thinkers do when they romanticize mentality?
And there are other issues. Forget about privacy. You couldn’t so much as take a shower in solitude. Moral considerations could backfire. It’s impossible to reduce our environmental footprint to zero, and depending on what kind of mind you think things possess, your every breath might cause suffering. Vegetarians might find that eating tofu is as morally fraught as carving a steak. And as soon as you tell an artist they have to do something—in this case, respect their materials—they want to try the opposite. They might long for the freedom of an insensate world.
The good thing about artificial panpsychism is that it is our choice. If we don’t want to live in a world surrounded by minds, we don’t need to go there.
George Musser is an award-winning science writer and the author of Spooky Action at a Distance and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory. Follow him at @gmusser
Here’s one way I might have screwed up my infant daughter: I let her go way too long without giving her solid food. At a four-month checkup, our pediatrician suggested it was time to change her diet. “You could even try a piece of steak,” she said. This seemed a little much. We’d planned to start with mashed-up peas or carrots or maybe Cream of Wheat; the thought of shoving London broil in her mouth put us off the whole idea for months. Every evening one of us would venture, “Maybe now’s the time to start with solid food?” And then every evening we’d agree to wait. It sounded like a lot of effort, to boil carrots or whatever, after having gotten through the day. Also, what if boiled carrots made her choke?
As this went on, we sometimes wondered if we might be lousy parents—so scared of messing up, and so averse to changing our routine, that we’d deprived our baby girl of steak. Then, one night, I fell into a reverie. We’d failed to give our daughter solids yet again that day, and I’d started on my standard stretch of self-recrimination: Would we ever wean our daughter? If we put it off until October, I thought, we’d miss the chance to give her cake for her first birthday. Then I tried to picture what would happen if we waited even longer. I imagined her in kindergarten, drinking from a bottle while the other kids had string cheese; then in middle school, as the Girl Who Never Learned to Chew; then as a businesswoman on the go, toting Nalgenes full of breast milk in her purse. The sillier these scenarios became, the more comforting I found them—and the more it seemed to me that nothing that we did as parents would really make a difference in the end. Of course our girl would try some mashed-up peas eventually. Of course she’d eat a piece of steak at some point between her six-month checkup and her Sweet 16. And that milestone would be attained even if we dragged our feet today, tomorrow, and all of next week, too.
My worries vanished: We weren’t lousy parents—just a bit hands-off, but that’s OK.
Soon I found myself applying the same exculpatory logic to many other tasks of early parenting.
“Dan, should we get started on the potty training?”
“Eh, why bother? It’s not like she’ll be shitting in her pants at high-school graduation.”
Now, I sometimes fret that this idea has too much sway inside my head. Whenever we’re confronted with some new conundrum—what to do for preschool, for example, or how to handle toddler tantrums—I’m inclined to fall back on my blanket rule, my anti-principle of parenting: It’s not like she’ll be doing this forever, I’ll say. Everything will work out fine. Or else, I guess, everything won’t work out fine. But even then, would it really be our fault?
Not unless we’d acted like a pair of ogres: like if we really had stopped our girl from eating solid food for years or made her wear a diaper to her high-school graduation. But short of that, I can’t shake the intuition that any choices that we make as parents—or any choices that we fail to make—won’t matter in the long run. I’m glad to say my daughter has been eating lots of mush these days and isn’t drinking so much milk. This was bound to happen at some point just as she’s bound to poop into a toilet, regardless of the method we decide to use for teaching her, whether it’s the Brazelton approach, the three-day plan, or some other potty-training scheme I haven’t heard of yet. Other, more fundamental outcomes in her life—I mean aspects of our daughter’s character, her passions, and her long-term health—may be far less certain at this point. But if I’m honest, these feel just as unresponsive to our parenting.
I find that sort of comforting, but also sort of sad.
* * *
Let’s talk about the weird-shit rule of parenting. It’s a principle that I just made up. Here’s the gist: Provided that you have the means to satisfy your child’s basic needs, and assuming that you aren’t acting in a way that’s flagrantly abusive, the only way to really change her life—to alter her nature, for better or worse—is to do some weird, outrageous shit. I don’t know exactly what that shit would be; I guess it could be pretending that your baby’s French, or depriving her of toys, or suspending her inside a window cage. (To be honest, even that shit might not be weird enough to make a difference in the long run.) But otherwise, in the absence of weird shit, the weird-shit rule stipulates that as long as you love your kids in more or less the way that normal parents do, and try your best to be benign, you’ll be pretty much irrelevant.
Parents tend to understand the weird-shit rule, yet parents also tend to think that they’re exceptions. They might be scared their shit is weird by accident, and that it’s messing up their kids in lots of little ways. Or else they might be proud of how their shit is so exceptional and weird the better way that makes a child more amazing. I’m here to say that both of these are fantasies. You’re almost certainly not a weirdo parent. Maybe you’ve pursued the most extreme attachment parenting, and your baby never leaves your side. That’s not weird enough to count as weirdo parenting. Perhaps you sleep-trained your kid before she could even lift her head? That also isn’t weird. What about cloth diapers? Sorry, pretty normal. Gave up on breast-feeding earlier than your perfect next-door neighbor? Doesn’t really matter. A total ban on screen time till the age of 5? A little odd, I guess, but also: not that weird!
No, when I say “weird shit,” I’m referring to the stuff you’d never dream of doing. It might be well-intentioned, at least according to some weirdo logic, but it’s also very, very far outside the norm. Weird shit would be insisting that your child only poops at certain times, or that she never hears a word beginning with the letter P. Weird shit would be depriving her of song, or telling her you’re ghosts. So I’m confident in saying that, chances are, your parenting is pretty normal—and your pretty normal parenting won’t, in the end, change all that much about your child’s future.
I’m proud to say my weird-shit rule is supported by the science of parentology. When behavioral geneticists study pairs of fraternal and identical twins, including those who grew up together or separately, and measure how they differ as adults, they tend to find very little impact from what they call the siblings’ “shared environment”—the set of factors that includes whatever aspects of their lives those kids might have in common if they lived together: things like their neighborhood or school, or their parents’ personalities, social class, and strategies for raising children.
If these factors are irrelevant, then what does affect a child’s future? Twin studies say a large proportion of the differences between children’s cognitive abilities, personalities, and chances of ending up with mental illness (among other long-term outcomes) can be explained solely by their DNA. And most of the rest appears to come from random chance, quirks in their biology, and specific non-parent-related life experiences: the teachers they had, or the friends they made along the way.
This has always been a strong result and was supported in the last few years by an omnibus analysis of almost 3,000 twin studies conducted between 1958 and 2012. It has, at times, been used to make some bold, bleak claims about what it means to raise a family. Twenty years ago, a panic over parenting swept across the media when developmental psychologist Judith Rich Harris put out a book, The Nurture Assumption, that claimed the links between parents’ actions and the outcomes of their kids were based on flimsy science. A raft of essays followed, addressing what appeared to be her central provocation: “Do Parents Matter?” A “modern-day cult of parenting” had taken hold, as Malcolm Gladwell put it at the time, but now it seemed as though it wasn’t doing any good. If it was, then wouldn’t major changes in parental methods—participation trophies and all that—have had transformative effects? Yet for Harris, the evidence seemed pretty clear: Parents changed; their kids did not.
This line of thinking thrives in certain academic circles, even as it so egregiously contradicts our sense of parenting as the most important job we’ll ever do (and undercuts a massive industry in parenting self-help). In a pair of recentessays for the online site Quillette, Saint Louis University behavioral geneticist Brian Boutwell said that Harris had it right. Quoting from her book, and referring to that big analysis of several thousand twin studies, he affirmed there’s little reason to believe that we can help determine our kids’ intelligence, personality, or mental health. We aren’t really “puppet masters” of our kids’ development, he argued, but rather something more important—their guardians and friends.
Boutwell does concede—as do all adherents to this theory—that parents can be cruel or kind, and that there are obviously many ways to screw up a little person’s life. If a child ends up inside a Romanian orphanage, for example, studies say that will change her for the worse. So might any approach to “parenting” that could be classified as physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. My weird-shit rule assumes a childhood that clears these very modest thresholds; it takes it as a given that a parent won’t behave in vicious, hateful ways.
In another sense, the rule applies only to those parents who possess some degree of privilege. A vast and terrible gap exists, of course, between the richest and the poorest families in the U.S., with obvious effects on children’s lives. It matters quite a bit to kids’ development when they have lead in their drinking water, or face a bloom of Legionella microbes, rampant air pollution, super-busted schools, and racism. These broad effects of bad environments may be minimized in twin studies, which sometimes draw from groups that lack diversity. Research done inside a welfare state like Norway, for example, or among middle-class families in Minnesota, capture just a narrow band of variation on these measures. It tends to overlook the kids who don’t have some minimal degree of health and safety.
Nor will these studies tend to show what happens when a parent acts in weird-shit ways—whether that environment is extra-bad or extra-good. When it comes to how, exactly, people choose to raise their kids—which toys they buy, which rules they set, how they nurture and communicate—the research only tests for ordinary differences across a given set of families, rather than the total range of possible decisions and behaviors. So when those studies tell us that a person’s style as a parent doesn’t really matter, they’re referring to gradations in the mostly-normal shit that parents do. They’re saying that parents aren’t so important, assuming their behavior falls within the standard bounds of their community. But if they were doing something very different—I mean, if they were off the reservation, parent-wise? Then it’s really hard to say.
The more I think about this science, the more it makes me think that parents ought to shake things up. Maybe if my wife and I were weird enough, we could move the needle for our daughter, even just a bit, and make her a happier, healthier woman. That’s just in the long view: How we act around the house would also have effects on her right now while she’s still a kid. If studies tell us that genetics wins out in the end for lots of traits and outcomes, they also say its influence is weakest—and ours is strongest—when our child is still young and less able to control her own environment. (That’s especially true for intelligence.)
But then I also know that any weird shit we dreamt up could also make things worse. We might follow the advice of Bringing UpBébé: One American Woman Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting and act as though we’re living in Bordeaux, on the theory that our daughter would grow up to be more patient, adventurous, and self-reliant. But what if the latest self-help fad turned out to be off the mark? What if it were weird but also really bad? What if we picked out the wrong book on Amazon and ended up with Bringing Up Bebeluş:One American Father Discovers the Wisdom of Romanian Orphanages?
That concern might be enough to put me back into my anti-parenting position: Let’s not try to rock the boat; we’ll do well enough just by virtue of our being normal people who adore their kid. But then again, that’s just for me; I know the stakes are higher for my wife. She’s the one who has to weigh the benefits of breast-feeding, then figure out when it’s time to stop. She’s the one who’s made to feel that moms must always maximize their nurturing potential, so they can love their kids in the best and most effective ways. I mean to say my laissez-faire approach to parenting isn’t just a function of my social class, but of my gender, too: It feels much easier for a dad to make pronouncements like, “Eh, it’s not like she’ll be pooping in her pants at high-school graduation.” Plus, one (not-yet-published) academic survey says that mothers tend to have a better intuition of how genetic factors influence a person’s personality, intelligence, mental health, and other traits.
So maybe this decision about the weirdness of our shit should be up to mom, instead of dad. But either way, it’s based on the belief that the weirdness of our shit is up to us. It takes it as a given that, by reading books and articles and Facebook-group advice, we might really learn to change the underlying structure of our interactions—that we’d have the strength to budge the shared environment we call our home. I’ve come to think this can’t be true. Maybe it’s a corollary to the weird-shit rule of parenting: Even if you want to be a more extreme and efficacious parent, you probably can’t.
That’s in part because genetics works on parents, too. If it’s true my daughter’s personality will largely be driven by her DNA, then the same is true for me and my partner. Our inclinations as her caregivers—the degree to which we’ll behave with warmth, or try to do the weird-shit things we read about online—will be a function of our heredity. In fact, a recent study of 22,000 Icelanders finds strong evidence for what researchers call “genetic nurture” effects. A person’s educational attainment can be explained, in part, by her parents’ genetic makeup—even when she did not inherit the parental genes in question.
My approach to raising children will also be a product of the culture I grew up in and an outgrowth of behaviors I observed (and experienced) when I was very young. Some of these behaviors can be changed: I was spanked, for example, when I misbehaved; our perfect daughter, were she ever to misbehave, would receive a time-out. Ours may be the nicer, better way to raise a kid—certainly it’s now standard in our community—but I don’t really think the spankings I received in the early 1980s, when that approach was commonplace, made me any more aggressive or unhappy as a grown-up. (They just hurt my little tushie!) So while this may be the sort of switch that one can choose to flip as modern parents, I can’t believe that it will transform very many children’s lives years down the line.
On top of that, I’m pretty sure that how I treat my daughter day-to-day has more to do with who she is than whom I’d like to be—it’s driven not only by my own innate qualities and sensibilities, but by hers. So far her disposition is, by all accounts, that of a lamb. This helps me to be an easygoing parent: No yelling, lots of tickling. But what if she were mischievous or mean? Then it’s likely that my wife and I would act in different ways—and not because we’d thought it through, read some books, and decided how to be.
I know that all the anxious time we’ve spent discussing solid food and punishment and potties will seem pointless in the long run (if not much sooner). But the immutability of parental shit suggests it won’t do much to change our family. It also makes it hard to figure how we could make our parenting any weirder—or any more straightforward—than it is already, than it would be if we chose to leave it unexamined. In that sense, I don’t think it really matters what we do, so long as we can stay within the normal bounds of loving, cruelty-free behavior. Like almost every other set of parents in the world, we’ll continue to make sure—as best we can—that our daughter is not malnourished, dosed with lead, victimized by violence, abandoned in her education, or otherwise subjected to gross abuse or deprivation. If we succeed in that, then she’s likely to be her, and we’re likely to be us, and there’s nothing else to say.
I know that makes it sound like I don’t believe in free will—that I don’t believe that parents can be good or bad by choice. I also worry that it lets me off the hook for smaller things that I should really try to do, like always putting down my phone when I’m playing with my daughter. This fatalism needn’t be deflating, though. After all, the point of putting down my phone is to make our time together now as rich and enjoyable as it can be, not to make my daughter better later on. Indeed, once I gave up on the notion that I could sculpt her personality, or even do that much to shape my own, it helped me see my loved ones in a different way. I could put aside the awful instrumentalism that runs through the literature of child-rearing. I could broaden out my focus to a different set of goals. “A good relationship is one in which each party cares about the other and derives happiness from making the other happy,” wrote Judith Rich Harris, the parenting skeptic, in 2006.
That sounds right to me.
Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate.
This article was originally published on March 16, 2018, by Slate, and is republished here with permission.
Researchers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research have discovered the largest explosion ever observed in the universe since the Big Bang.
The explosion emanated from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster some 390 million light-years from Earth.
“We’ve seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive,” Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, professor at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and co-author of the paper uploaded to preprint archive arXiv earlier this month, said in a statement. “And we don’t know why it’s so big.”
To make the discovery, the researchers used four telescopes across the globe, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory.
It was such a violent explosion that it literally cut a hole in the cluster plasma, the hot gas that surrounds black holes, as spotted through X-ray telescope observations of the cluster.
Simona Giacintucci, from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and lead author, compared the blast to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens — one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in US history.
“The difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas,” Giacintucci said in the statement.
The blast was not only gigantic, but also extremely slow.
“It happened very slowly — like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years,” Johnston-Hollitt explained.
Scientists at NASA were able to confirm the unprecedented blast. “The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove,” co-author Maxim Markevitch from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in the statement. “This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”
The discovery could open doors for further discoveries like it.
“It’s a bit like archaeology,” Johnston-Hollitt said. “We’ve been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now.”
The team is now looking to make further observations with twice the number of antennas, increasing sensitivity tenfold, according to Johnston-Hollitt.
GREENVILLE, OH—Reaching a more profound understanding of what martyrdom really meant, local 12-year-old Charlie Ward reportedly took a moment Friday while doing the stations of the cross to reflect on the boredom Jesus Christ must have felt during the crucifixion. “At first, I wasn’t really paying attention, but as I slowly worked my way through all 14 stations, I began to realize just how mind-numbingly dull it must have been for Jesus to be crucified,” said Ward, confirming that the multi-part devotion had helped him comprehend Jesus’s rote and tedious experience of falling multiple times and encountering various people as he carried the heavy wooden cross. “It’s really moving to think that our Lord loves us so much that he was willing to shoulder this amount of insipid monotony. I know I’m going to remember it every time I make it through another grueling church service or Sunday school lesson.” At press time, Ward noted that finishing the stations of the cross had strengthened his resolve to do whatever he could to avoid the eternal torpor of Hell.
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