Home   Contents    Next Chapter

CHAPTER XV

THE PSEUDO-LIVING ORGANISMS

         We have seen that organic structure is likely to be found in either section of the universe in the minority tendency. In the case of the negative section of the universe, where most objects are alive, this minority tendency will be the positive tendency. Thus the organic structures in the negative part of the universe are not living but lifeless beings, though having certain appearances of life. These we have called pseudo-living organisms, which, though in certain respects they appear like living beings, yet their motions are of a passive rather than an active character.      

        Inasmuch as, on reversal with respect to time, a negative universe becomes a positive one, and the inorganic life that is found in the negative section of the universe corresponds to the ordinary lifeless inorganic bodies that we observe, so we may notice that these pseudo-living organisms are the exact reverse of the living organisms that can be observed in the positive section of the universe.

        We have seen that, at ordinary temperatures, these pseudo-living organisms, in order to keep existing, must have a constant metabolic process always going on; this being the exact reverse of the metabolic process going on in living organisms in the positive section. In fact, take any process going on in living organisms, and its exact reverse with respect to time will give us the corresponding process going on in pseudo-living organisms.      

        Take, for example, the sensitiveness that is characteristic of nearly all life. This will, indeed, be found also in the inorganic life in the negative section of the universe. But the pseudo-living organisms have nothing of the sort. They are not sensitive to causes, but to effects; for a small effect may, in these organisms, be the result of a large cause, as we should expect from the second law of thermodynamics. Thus, while all living substance is sensitive to the past, all lifeless substance is similarly sensitive to the future. This is indicated in ordinary physical objects by the fact that it is easier, where both are unknown, to trace the future than the past. The same will be true of the pseudo-living organisms, which are but complicated physical bodies surrounded by living substance. Such organisms will be organized to be able to feel, but not what has already happened. As to the past, anything in those organisms that may possibly be called feeling would be absolutely blank.

        In the case of living organisms, this feeling, it its most elementary form, consists merely of that irritability which we have already identified with the reversal of the second law of thermodynamics. That is, feeling consists, in its most elementary form, of a stimulus releasing reserve energy and making it available energy or else actually using it. On the contrary, the pseudo-living feeling would be exactly the reverse, turning available energy into a store of reserve energy as effectually as may be. In the more complex living organisms, special organs of feeling are developed, which are of special irritability, organs which are specially efficient in extracting available energy out of reserve energy. In fact, in those special organs of feeling (the nervous system) is concentrated most of the mechanical efficiency with respect to extracting available energy to be used as molar motion. Finally, we have the development of a brain, a central organ in which the reserve energy is stored as a result of special stimuli, and which can use that energy to produce molar motion. In the pseudo-living organism, which is the exact reverse of the living organism, this nervous system and brain would constitute a system of extremely low mechanical efficiency, that is, a system for doing as nearly nothing as possible. It would indeed store up immense amounts of reserve energy, or rather, of partly available energy, which would be almost as good as unavailable.

        Thus the nervous system and the brain, which in living organisms is the most active part of the organism, would also be found in the pseudo-living organism, with the same size, shape, position, substance, etc., but would, instead of being extremely active, be the deadest part of an apparently dead organism. And the reason for this obvious, if we will but consider. The physical body, and especially the pseudo-living organism, is sensitive only to the future. If something strikes it, or if any other stimulus is applied to it, this immediately becomes a past phenomenon and the organism can no longer take cognisance of it. But should it ever happen that the body itself produces a visible effect in the manner of motion, sound, heat, etc, the body shows it by its internal condition before the effect is produced, though, as soon as the effect appears, this abnormal condition of the body disappears. The body can feel what is going to happen, not indeed what is going to happen to it, but what is going to happen as a result of it; and the moment the event happens, all is forgotten, as it were, that is, no resulting internal condition is noticeable. In pseudo-living organisms, special lifeless organisms built up by living surroundings to resemble in certain respects the living beings that we see, these phenomena will, in the more complex cases, be specialized into a nervous system. Thus the phenomena under the positive tendency, and in particular in the pseudo-living organisms, that are analogous to feeling, refer not to past causes, nor indeed to future causes (this not being the true reverse of past causes), but to the direct reverse of past causes, namely, to future effects.

        Where, in a living organism, we have enough complexity to find such an organ as a brain, we immediately have the brain reactions which are known as mental phenomena. These are the centralized stores of available energy which the nervous system has extracted from the outside reserve energy, and which can be used under a stimulus to produce molar motion. The mind is thus part of the brain-machinery, a highly complex and specialized machinery for the extraction of reserve energy and its final conversion into molar energy. The extraction of reserve energy in the original process is sensation; the energy stored up in the brain at a higher level is the mental process; and this mind can only feel sensations, and retain traces of processes, that have already happened, and refer them to the past. On the contrary, in the pseudo-living organism, the similarly complex and specialized process will merely produce reserve energy for the outside world to use, and any mental process in such organism could only refer not to the past causes but, like all feeling under the positive tendency, to future effects, which, however, would be felt as stimuli and not as effects; for the object itself would under a strain as if stimulated. In other words, this pseudo-living mind, this machine for doing nothing as effectually as possible, could only perceive and remember the future, and would conceive of that future as the reverse of what it really is, namely, as stimulus instead of effect.     

        Since the ordinary organic bodies are the simplest forms out of which the pseudo-living organism develops as a high degree of complexity, just as the inorganic life of the negative section of the universe is the simple form of which living organisms are a higher development, we may easily suppose that ordinary inorganic bodies such as we constantly observe have this reversed feeling; but, as mental processes are a result of a highly complicated and specialized organism, we cannot attribute to ordinary physical objects anything like a mind.

        It has been a favorite theory of the late Prof. Josiah Royce that physical objects are alive and even endowed with a mind, but that we cannot communicate with them or observe that mind on account of the difference in reaction-time. According to his theory, while we react to a stimulus in, let us say, a tenth of a second, let us suppose that there is being that reacts in a thousand years. The motions of that being will be so slow that to us he will appear practically motionless and dead, while, on the other hand, our motions will be so rapid that he will be totally unable to perceive them, so that he will also think us dead. The theory indicates that a difference in reaction-time might be the cause of our not attributing life and feeling to physical objects. Under our theory of reversibility, the same will be true, only the reaction-time of a physical object will not merely be different from ours, but negative, so that all means of our observing the similarity would be cut off.

        This does not, of course, mean, that there are no observations or experiments possible from which we could indirectly infer such similarity, but merely that we could not possibly observe it directly, because it is superficially different almost in kind from living feeling. It is not, of course, quite true, that physical objects do not show the effects of stimuli; they do indeed, in some cases, but to a markedly less degree than they show the incubation of future effects. Thus, if this sensitivity could be at all called feeling, a physical object, once an event is past, would feel it vaguely if at all, and with a great uncertainty. To the pseudo-living organism, the past has the same vagueness and uncertainty as the future has for us, though some dim guesses as to the past might conceivably be made by the pseudo-living mind.

        But it still remains true, that if we were transported into a negative section of the universe, though the pseudo-living organism would appear in shape, substance, structure, etc., exactly like the living organisms we are accustomed to, yet we should not recognize the existence of sensitivity or mental phenomena in them at all, and they should appear to us as lifeless bodies, which indeed they are. They would appear to us merely as extremely well preserved corpses. And, because we cannot feel what the pseudo-living analogue of a mind would conceive as a stimulus, and would not react to it, those organisms would similarly think of us as dead.

Home   Contents    Next