Dorion Sagan and Joshua DiCaglio on the cosmic challenge of scale.

Episode Transcript
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Joshua DiCaglio (00:08):
Sometimes it's not just about the
representation, but about theway in which the representation
does something to you.

Dorion Sagan (00:15):
I think there's many, many kind of psychedelic
experiences that seem to beplaying, trick with scale.

Hi. I'm Josh DiCaglio. I'm an assistant
professor at Texas A and M, andI'm here to talk about my recent
book, Scale Theory, anondisciplinary inquiry, which
came out with the University ofMinnesota Press in 2021. And I'm
honored today to be joined byDorian Sagan, who has long been
an important intellectual figurefor mine.

Hello, and thank you for having me. I look
forward to our discussion.

Thank you. Thank you. To give an overview
of this book, attempts to try tolay out the basic theoretical
parameters for scale across agreat variety of disciplines. It
is focused by what I considerthis, like, central provocation.
How is it possible that I, yes,I or you, are made up

(01:07):
simultaneously of cells, atoms,pieces of ecological, web, parts
of a thermodynamic dispersal ofthe sun, elements in the
gravitational world of galaxies.
All of these thingssimultaneously right now are
descriptions of also what youare experiencing. This kind of
schema of scale in which wedescribe these different layers

(01:30):
of objects is incrediblybewildering and not so easy to
understand both in terms of howwe got to it and what its
implications are. Even thoughwe're describing and using,
scalar objects all the time,whether we're talking about DNA
or the cells in your body ortoxic molecules or environmental
effects, whether we're talkingabout viruses and pandemics,

(01:53):
These are all objects that existat scales that we don't usually
experience with the normal Homosapien human body. Alright,
Dorian. Well, first of all, Ijust wanna say thank you for
taking the time to to to readthe book.

No. Thank you. I I I I thought it was a a great of
mine. You did so much reading,and it's I I mean, I can't say
it was I understood everythingin it, but there was a lot of
stuff that you you tried to findyour site host, and, and it's
it's pretty cool. A lot oftopics I'm interested in, and
some of it was over I'm notreally good at, like, the
typological thing and, like,following directions as far as

(02:27):
the thought experiments go andstuff.
I tried, but, I thought Ithought there's some great
references in there.

I'm not entirely certain that I
understand everything I wroteeither.

No. And that yeah. And that's probably typical for
people who are writing aboutinteresting things too. Yeah.

Part of the method is to say, like, well,
like, here is this idea scalethat we don't quite fully
understand. And rather thanpretend that I'm going to
understand it, I'm gonna try towrite a book that's gonna help
us sort of see the contours ofit and the the confusion that it
throws us into so that we cantry to understand it a little
bit more.

Having to review a book it actually forces you to
read it, like, the whole thing,and that can be a good thing
too. And if especially sometimeswhat's a little bit outside your
comfort zone, you know, it makesyour brain grow a little bit.

You really did that for me from the time I was
an undergraduate, as I wasreading. It was actually Dazzle
Gradually was the first bookthat I got from yours. I was in
a literature and science course,and that came in. It was so
unusual. Right?
We were re we read it amongst abunch of novels about science.
It was at University of SouthCarolina. Yeah. Laura Walls,

(03:29):
who's now elsewhere, taught aliterature science course. And I
think it was shortly afterDazzle Gradually came out.
And I was just completelyexcited by your ability to take,
you know, basic ideas related toscience, but also philosophical
questions, bring them together,and then write it in a way that
actually does it to you. Andthis is kind of the thing that I

(03:50):
refused to give up for scaletheory was that I didn't wanna
just think about scale. I wantedto have scale do something to me
and then help the reader, like,do it also. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

The basic premise here, like, the switch
that I've been trying to use askind of an introduction to the
book is to say, we usually talkabout scale, and scalar objects
with too much assumed already.Right? We start talking about
cells. We talk talking about,you know, the the size of the
sun or the laws ofthermodynamics or quantum
objects or the big bang. Right?

(04:21):
These are all objects thatrequire scale. Right? These
require these shifts in size,and somehow we're, like,
relating those really bigobjects or those really small
objects. We were saying theyexist. Right?
We're not saying they don'texist. Right? And yet they bear
some kind of unclearrelationship to what we're
experiencing right now. And sothe basic maneuver that I keep
coming back to that I as I waswriting this Mhmm. Was how is

(04:45):
that actually a description ofwhat is happening right now?
Mhmm. When we're talking aboutcells, we're talking about your
body, about something that'sgoing on in your body in a way
of describing how your body isable to fit itself together and
do stuff, etcetera, etcetera.And that seems to me is
completely befuddling, right, orbewildering. And yet, in our

(05:06):
kinda everyday conversation oreven in our more rigorous
conversations, we just talkabout these objects as if
they're, like, really clear. Youknow, I mean, it's something
that we all were thinking aboutduring the COVID pandemic.
Right? That somehow, we've got arelationship to viruses, which
are these really tiny particlesthat are able to invade our
body. We only actually knowthey're there whenever we get

(05:26):
something like a symptom. Butthen for it to be a pandemic, it
has to exist even on a differentscale, which is the scale of the
planet, in order for it totraffic around. And then it
requires different kind ofbehavior on my part.
And so we're all sitting in ourhouses wondering what are we
doing in relation to these verytiny particles that are
spreading on the the scale ofthe globe.

It's, like, caught between the microcosm and the
macrocosm. I'll just say, youknow, I have, like, some scalar
subject. I won't say objects inmy house, but I got a three year
old and a one year old. And thethree year olds, The boy went
to, school for the first time,you know, after, like, day care
down across the campus. And,apparently, when he was dropped

(06:09):
off today by an on bicycle byhis mother, they told her that
he had because I had seen thatthey sent a a photo.
Not necessarily want kids on,you know, without permission on
the Internet, but we got a photoof him painting with two hands.
So we have a artistic householdand stuff, and it will
apparently, one was Edward Monkbecause he's obsessed with The
Scream, which I read, like, froman art book to him because it's

(06:31):
kind of, like, a little kid thengets scared. You know? And you
scream, you can't. You know?
Everybody's had that dream, Ithink. And so it's very it's
very relevant for him. And theother thing was because the day
before, on the advice of yourbook, we checked out that, inner
life of a cell video. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right? And, of course, his grandmother is, the
biologist Lynn Margolis, whodied in 02/2011, who he's never
met. But, he knows about herthrough hearing her talk about.
And so I had thought, like,because, you know, he's been
watching Frozen. I'm this littleI know this is a, but he's been
watching Frozen and pretendingto be Elsa and all this.
And and so but, I said, maybeyou should watch, like, Modern

(07:15):
Times by Charlie Chaplin. I wasjust trying to throw something
else out there. And I showedthat, and he said, no. Charlie
Chaplin is boring. And then hewant and then I showed him a
micro video.
You know, I try I like the livevideos. He showed one of the of
his grandmother, and he said,no. I don't wanna see anymore
with grandma Lenny and, orgrandma Lynn or whatever. She
said, I don't wanna see anymorewith her. I wanna see the other

(07:36):
kind.
And he wanted to see, like, thecomputer generated DNA thing,
which I don't like, but he lovesthem. And so I just wanted to
tell you that story. And as faras, Charlie Chaplin being
boring, because, mom was outwith, like, a neck thing, and I
always had both of them on thecouch, and we all fell asleep to
computer generated micro videos.It was a really good sleep.

I mean, it's astonishing, though. Right?
Because what we've done is we'vestarted to actually give images
to these things that we didn'thave images for. You know? And
and I don't talk that much aboutyou know, there are other people
who have who have done sort ofmore thorough work on how we
image and actually render themolecular.
But the thing I'm trying tofocus on is that kind of crazy

(08:22):
transformation whereby we getfrom here to there. Mhmm. The
story I'll counter with is whenmy kids were, three and five, I
showed them the powers of 10video.

Right.

Almost like a bit of an experiment because one
of the inspirations for some ofwhat I've written in this book
was that as I was thinking aboutscale, I kept having
conversations with people andthey would point to the powers
of 10. They were very criticalof it.

Right. I was surprised to see that in your
book because I always thought ofit as being innocuous. I mean,
it we should probably tell your,podcast d's or whatever they're
called, what the powers of 10is, but isn't it's a it's a
classic scalar short, like,documentary video that goes from
somebody's hand, a couple, like,sleeping in a park in a picnic.
Right? All the way to the endsof, you know, cosmic space and

(09:08):
all the way down into whateveris beneath the cells and the
atoms.

And and people have been very critical of this
for for what I think are goodreasons. Right? Because of the
way that it frames out theviewer, it can kinda lead you to
forget where you're at. Mhmm.But there's also things in it
that, like, don't let you forgetthat.
Right? And that's one of thearguments I'm making about scale
is that if we think about whatscale is doing there so
listeners who are unfamiliarwith it could go look it up, but

(09:32):
you'll see that there's a boxaround it with the reference to
the scale.

To the next level or the

next Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think the
narrator is not actually veryinteresting in there. Right? But
I find that in scaler videos,they like, the narrators often
don't know what to make of it.
And so the the narration isoften not actually that
interesting. But the the shiftin size is the thing that's
crazy. And it's not just thatthere's a change in size. Right?
Like, this book is not justabout size.

(09:59):
Okay? In fact, I I try to avoidusing the word size. We just
check if I actually succeeded. Idon't think I did.

No. You did. You wrote size matters at one point,
but

I'm just

kind of tongue in cheek. Okay. Look it. I'll read
this because this is one of mynotes, okay, on this question.
Okay?
And this is it might be thismight be a little bit risque,
but I'll just read it anyways.As a gadfly, I was going to ask
you, and then I saw in yourbook, good anticipation even if
a quasi pun that size, quote,matters, end quote. And I agree

(10:31):
it does, but it seems to me thatthe perspective and qualia
rather than quantity, this wouldbe like a, you know, a sort of a
criticism or, another angle ontowhat I feel is missing in, like,
the focus on just scale, ofwhich scale as an example may
matter more.

One of the things that's troubling about
the way that scale manifests.Right? The way we talk about
like, you have scale and and tosome extent, it's just a number.
Right? It just says, you know,10 to the negative, you know,
right, whatever.

Right.

Or, like, or it's just one nanometer. Right?
There's just the line there. Andso it seems to be about numbers.
It seems to be about this kindof, like, numerical rigid notion
of reality that is whollyobjective and has nothing to do
with the perspectives that andthe practices, especially the
social practices that wererequired to get there.

(11:20):
Right? Which is why a lot ofscience studies scholars
following Latour and otherthinkers have critiqued scale as
part of this, like, attempt tohide, to some extent, the
epistemic practices of science,how we come to know about
science. And, of course, wewanna know about how science
comes to find these objectscalled cells or galaxies. But

(11:41):
that number is not, I would say,as scary as it appears for those
reasons. The the number is justabout consistency.
It's a quantity that just letsus keep track of where our
perspective is. And where is noteven the right word because
that's one of the things thatthat people know about the
powers of 10 video is that itseems to, like, move us. Right?
Which is why we call it as ascalar's doom. But we're not

(12:04):
actually moving.
We're changing our perspective.

Right.

And so that number is actually essential for
saying, look. The perspectivethat you're having right now is
this large. And now I'm now I'm,speaking more in terms of size.
But the important thing there isthat that changing quantity is a
change in quality. Mhmm.
One of the kind of interestingthings about the metric system
is it lets us keep track ofscale in a way that ties our

(12:31):
normal experience of the world,right, which is the meter scale
is within our normal scale. Itlets us keep tabs on that while
also pointing to somethingthat's outside of our our usual
way of experiencing the world.You don't usually experience the
world in a way that lets you seecells or atoms or the planet or
galaxies. And so that measure isthere to keep track of that

(12:56):
consistency. And the thing thatI think the powers of 10 does,
I'm actually kind of flummoxedto think of any better way to do
this.
I've been trying to, like, findpeople who who have other ways
of trying to piece together whatthe the kind of transformation
that scale produces.

A potential problem might be something I
talked about under the rubric ofProtagoras. That Mhmm. Yeah. The
famous statement in in cosmicapprentice that man is the
measure of all things, which Ithink usually has an inflection,
at least in English, thatsuggests that everything is
about us kind of like a biblicalself centeredness and
anthropocentrism. But anotherway that is interesting with

(13:37):
regard to scalarity, if youlike, is to think of that as us
being the actual measure, whichI think is what you actually you
do that, and you call it, like,the one meter scale is this
scale of our ordinary existence.
And the potential problem withthat is that we still are
projecting ourselves intovarious other things. And we

(13:58):
look at their size, thedistance, other, like, things we
can measure. It was sort of,like, emptying out the quality.
For example, what are thesethings? You know?
Do they have Internet? So wehave Internet, and we experience
it. Otherwise, we wouldn't evenbe able to have this
conversation, but do otherthings. And I think but, you

(14:18):
know, I sent you that JamesMcAllister quote about us being
a way of looking at theuniverse, you know, that my
father liked to talk aboutversus us being sort of a a meta
society, a weird totalitariancommunist, like, clone of
eukaryotic cells of the body,and these things are a lie.

(14:40):
Absolutely.
Said, you know, other animalsare poor in world, but his most
quoted philosopher was Jacob vonAksko, the Estonian ethologist
who went and came up with theidea of the omelet, which sort
of morphed in its protagron, ifyou like, human form, protagron
in the first sense into Dasein,he said they're a poor world,
but a lot of people woulddisagree with it. They're dogs

(15:00):
with that poor world. It's justa different world. Even Uxco
himself might. Although Uxco,like, gave different worlds for
people, and then each animalspecies there or that he
identified had its own world.
But for Samuel Butler, themicroscope so these qualities
bubble up in the galaxy of, inthat keyhole galaxy, like, that

(15:21):
Hubble took. There's, like, thisthing that's light years across
a lung, and it looks like theback of a middle finger. And
that's just the type of humanself centered thinking, you
know, that leads to the Bible,which is still embedded in,
like, you know, the the thehidden philosophy of science,
etcetera. We have to be carefulwhen we think we're kinda being
antiseptically going from thebig to the small, that we're not

(15:43):
carrying all sorts of, like,prejudices with us and that we
have a sort of artificialobjectivity. And then it it it
might take away from more fromother questions, questions of
perspectives in general.
Like, I after reading your book,I was like, you know, it just
really hit me, like, how whenyou look off down a road, the
perspective like, the the thethe train tracks go into a dot.

(16:05):
I mean, that's crazy. It'samazing. It's like, I don't you
can't if you think more youthink about it, the more
perplexing it is, but it allowsyou to, like, take that
obviously wrong datum that'sused in perspective in paintings
and then move in the real world.So we're doing all sorts of
tricks with that all the time.

Right. Science essentially takes that change in
perspective, which usually wewould just notice kind of if,
you know, even if we spent timenoticing it. It just looks like
things just kind of mergetogether. It's amazing to me
that science then takes thatpoint of merger Uh-huh. And
changes the resolution.

Right.

Right? So the the kind of switch

that

I think produces the question about
scale that is the heart of thisbook

Mhmm.

You know, one of the the examples I'd like to
point to is the fact that celltheory, which is, you know, the
this is this is the scale atwhich much of your work is
working, right, with LynnMargulis.

And the planetary with Gaia too. Yeah.

And the planetary. Right? The one that
that completely blows my mind isthat it took us until about the
eighteen thirties or fortiesbefore we put together

Right.

Cell theory. Right? It's just a kind of
interesting fact about thehistory of science that even
though, you know, Hooke had had,you know, seen cells

Right.

A a long time before, it took a long time for
it to click that these were notjust very small animals. Right?
They were called animals beforethen. Right?

Right. By low and low.

But but, like, actually, what your body was
made of and that they're semiautonomous creatures that have
their own Yeah. Organelles.Right? Like, it's not just very
small things Mhmm. That are partof the same phenomenal realm.
They're just look too small foryou to see. Right? But you full
on revise your entire field ofobjects. And it's and it's when

(17:47):
you go to to Gaia and and Ireally love that phrase from,
Lynn's, what what it's it's Gaiais just symbiogenesis seen from
space. The the it's just it'scellular evolution at the scale
of the planet.
Because what those are doing isthey're showing that at that
horizon of human perception. AndI and I think that's that's

(18:08):
really what you're talking aboutwhen you talk about the kind of
limit where the railroad kindamerges into one. Right? That's
the limit at which our eyes areable to parse reality. They're
not able to see anything of moredetail or really of of larger
scope.
Mhmm. And so what's astonishingabout what science has done is
that it then says, okay. No.We're gonna develop methods for

(18:30):
tracing what kind of differencesare discernible at the limits or
beyond the limits at which thethe normal human apparatus is
able to produce it. And on theother side of that, they define
objects.
It doesn't mean that they're notactually describing things.
Right? I'm definitely not one ofthose scholars who would say,
like, scientists have createdcells by any means. Right? But

(18:51):
they're discerning objects at ascale at which humans don't
usually experience.
There's a kind of thresholdthere. And so the the idea of
threshold is absolutelyessential to what I'm talking
about here because thatthreshold is the thing that both
puts us in contact with it andcuts us off from these scalar
objects. You don't experienceDNA directly. But then at the

(19:12):
same time, that is what you'reexperiencing when you're sick or
when you're living.

Except that okay. I would just say that there is a
there is sort of, like, a a jumpto, like, hyper realism with the
idea of scale. Because, I mean,the in the middle ages, weren't
people experiencing the miasmasthat they thought were causing
the diseases or seeing the micearise in the rags and and
experiencing the spontaneousgeneration. So I would say, in

(19:39):
some sense, what you're callingscale that has this kind of
discreet and it and, you know,you've you've made, like, a a
sort of separation betweenvarious scales, which I would
say arguably are prettyinfluenced by the history of
science.

Yeah. So we can talk a little bit more about,
like, why I would distinguishthose those different scales.
But let's back up because Iwanna respond to some of what
you said before. This questionof anthropocentrism is really
important. And I should say,during that, you like, your work
was really my first introductionto what is often among academics
now called posthumanism.
Like, if I had to glossposthumanism, I would say it's

(20:14):
the the set of philosophies thatare pushing at our notion of the
human and the central centralityof the human, including these
binaries that we place betweenourselves and the rest of
reality, human, animal, self,and other, these kind of
binaries. I was thinking a lotabout how the descriptions of
science have revised the way inwhich we're able to

(20:36):
conceptualize what we are.Right? And the cellular example
was really the first one that Ihad. And then the second one I
had was was nanotechnology.
So in relation to this questionof anthropocentrism, our
definition of cells, our ourunderstanding of cells is not
disconnected from our inquiryinto them. Right? So we've all
been trying to experiment withhow to say something about

(20:57):
something like sales while notcentering ourselves, like, may
not making it about us, but alsoaccounting for the fact that our
understanding of cells is alsopartially about us. Right? And
so this conversation aboutanthropocentrism, which I think,
you know, you've been engagingwith for decades.
I mean, I I'm Assange is goingback to Read Microcosmos, how
central that was to the taskthat you and Lynn were taking

(21:17):
up. That it's really abouttaking the stuff that, you know,
Carl Sagan was doing withCosmos, putting it in the
microbial, and really trying todis like, show us how that
displaces our ideas ofourselves. I would like to think
that what I'm doing here inscale theory is more of that
same task while stillunderstanding then how have we

(21:38):
thrown ourselves into thistransformation where, in a
certain sense, I like to thinkof it as science has
deconstructed us. But, ofcourse, we're also doing the
science. I always have foundyour statements about the
microbe to be incrediblemystical statements that are
clarifying for some of what CarlSagan is sometimes more or less
explicitly doing.

(21:59):
Maybe you would know better thanI about, like, all of these
rhetorical techniques he's usingto kind of think about the
broadness of reality. But it'sso much more directly about,
like, wait a second. I am notwhat I thought I was. It's
really important then for us tounderstand what transformation
in our perspectives that hashas, occurred for us to start to

(22:22):
see something like climatechange. Right?
Which is a beautiful scalaridea. Right? Because it's
connecting one scalar object,carbon, with another scalar
object, climate change, andwe're somehow caught in the
middle. But by we're somehowcaught in the middle, I just
mean our normal experience.Right?
Like, the way you experience,there is some relationship
between those objects at thesedifferent scales and your usual

(22:44):
experience, which, by the way,your body is designed to
experience the world at thisscale. I cite Simon Levin's
somewhat famous speech on, youknow, among ecologists on scale
and kinda mess with it a littlebit because because he notes
that every organism has aparticular scale at which it
experiences the world. Thisbrings us back to your micro
umwelt question. The human bodyhas produced an umwelt that

(23:08):
among many other things, andthere's many other things that
the human body does to filterreality. Right?
Like, when we can talk aboutwhat the eyes do to see things
and, you know, you can only hearcertain frequencies, etcetera,
etcetera. Right? So, like, I'mnot saying scale is the only
one, but it is a reallyimportant metric for
understanding how your body haspieced together experience at a

(23:28):
particular level that makescertain differences matter. If
you got feedback from everysingle one of your cells, that
would be insane.

It

would just literally be too ex too much
experience.

Mhmm. It'd be like they're going on the Internet as
for us.

Yeah. Oh, exactly. Right? I mean, this is
what this this is part of whatwe're all experiencing as little
humans.

Yeah. It's a scaler morass right now as far
as the the global globality oftechnology.

Like, there's too much information. A vast
majority of that information isactually irrelevant to us, and
yet everybody's trying to makeit feel like it's relevant to
us.

Yeah. And that makes me think of Samuel Butler,
who I find fascinating. The guywho wrote, Erewhon in a way
about flesh, but also four bookson evolution at his own expense
and who Gregory Bateson called,Darwin's most able critic. And
he was really excited when hegot the, Origin of Species when
he was in New Zealand. But thenhe he he kinda diverged because

(24:24):
he looked back at the sourcesthat were mentioned in early
editions of the origins ofspecies on Darwin's illustrious
predecessors.
And he saw that he had sort of,like, sanitized and mechanized
the theories of the, olderevolutionists by making it all
about natural selection whenbefore they had this room, like
Lamarck and Buffon and even hisown, grandfather, Erasmus

(24:47):
Darwin, had this feeling of thatthese organisms can do things on
their own. You know? That theycan they can make their little
decisions. Just like even themost megalomaniac and powerful,
rich politicians, etcetera,they're not controlling. They're
not controlling anything.
They might think they are too,you know, by adding, like, you
know, coal fly ash, say, in intoto airplanes, and they'd be

(25:10):
trying to either, you know, coolthe planet by darkening it or
warm it up and get some more oilout of the poles, but they're
insignificantly microscopicwithin terms of the actions of
Earth as a whole, as are most ofour ideas about what's happening
and how and why they'rehappening. And so Butler, at one
point, when I was sitting in inthe library at Smith College

(25:30):
reading this, everything I couldby him because they had a
complete Shrewsbury edition ofhis works. And he's got a lot of
notebooks and this, I think, wasin one of those where or maybe
it was one of his evolutionbooks where he says, we don't
remember when first we grew aneye. So if you put yourself
scarily in colonial microposition and, like, imagine that

(25:52):
they have their own littledesires, their own little
purposes, and as he says, theirown little tool kits, which
amount to kind ofnanotechnology, that those
things through not necessarilythrough anything eerily
mystical, but maybe justthermodynamic flow patterns,
little choices made becomeembedded over vast amounts of

(26:12):
times into the structures thateventually become something like
a body.
We don't remember when we firstgrow an eye. We could say we are
growing eyes and technology. Butwhen I look at science and
technology rather than lookingat it as, like, a kind of
asymptotic approach to absolutetruth, I see it more as
developing organs in the in, youknow, in a human superorganism.
It has all sorts of problems andideas. And it's out of those.

(26:35):
Some, you know, will benaturally selected. And
eventually, they'll be secondnature instead of, you know, in
the forefront of yourconsciousness. And I think there
is something deep in that thatidea that was dismissed by
Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwinand others as being, you know,
mystical. But the opposite iseven more objectionable to think

(26:56):
that only humans have, like, atrue innerness and that only we
are capable of, like, doingthings that last. I mean, Gaia,
I think I calculated it.
If you divide the time and say2,500,000,000 or 3.5, billion,
the time that civilization atabout ten thousand years has
been on this planet, humancivilization, urban side,

(27:19):
whatever, all of science, youknow, middle ages, everything.
Ten thousand years goes into3,500,000, like, 350,000 times.
So we're just like a fraction ofa percent. My mom said, Lynn
Margolis, to go back to her. Oneof her friends told me this
after she died.
What will be left, you know, ofhumans in the fossil record, a
thin layer of iron from thecars. So that doesn't get a

(27:42):
little bit more ant deanthroposcience than that, and
that may well be the case. Andwe can't even accept the
possibility of it because it'sso demeaning. We would rather
name an entire geological epicafter ourselves. The
Anthropocene, when, as I arguedin that arts of living on a
damaged planet by Singh et al inmy intro to the I think it was a

(28:06):
monster section.
You know, they if we're gonnaget ourselves so we have to get,
name an h after thecyanobacteria because they're
the ones who created the oxygenatmosphere that we're breathing,
which whose scattering of whichlight turns the atmosphere blue,
which created the ozone layerand which energizes the entire
surface of the planet. Andbecause of the the maintenance
of chemicals that react withoxygen, could continuously put

(28:29):
back into Earth's atmospherewould make us visible to
extraterrestrials who hadspectroscopic, equipment and
science at our level. So, youknow, that's it would tell the
Earth was a lie, not so much byhumans. And also just a a note,
and this is like a little happyhorse of mine, you know. I think
that the the the monolithicmantra and total acceptance as

(28:54):
absolute consensus of carbondioxide can be distracting from
the fact that, you know, there'sexperiments that show that
particulate pollution becausethe which whose residence time
in the atmosphere is much lower,and they're bigger particles in
terms of scale because, althoughthey cool the Earth in the
daytime, they also reradiatesolar and, the earth's radiation

(29:16):
at night.
For example, over at Mount SaintHelens, the fumes that, came
out, they made it cooler in thedaytime, but it was more than
hotter than it usually was, andthen they cooled at night. So
the effect of the gasolineadditives, the coal fly ash, and
other forms of particularpollution from, bombs, war,

(29:37):
industry in general, may be, amore direct cause of global
warming. Unfortunately, becauseof the same problem, we're
talking about the gigantism ofthe structures that are being
made by the tiny individualsthat are humans are more
crowded, more scientized, moreautomated automated science,
which does sort of takes thescience out of science planet,

(29:57):
those are things that is arebeginning to escape our
attention. It are importantbecause just like, at the
individual level, things thatescape public consciousness can
come back to haunt you if youdon't realize them. Although
they might work in the shortterm.
For example, we should beworried about climate change.
Now it might be a good thing,but what if we're looking at the
wrong thing? I read this littlebook about Philip k. Dick, and

(30:18):
he gives us an example by HenriBergson, a woman who's walking
towards an old fashionedelevator, and, there's no
elevator in the shaft. Shedoesn't realize that.
She's about to step to her deathinto the elevator, but somebody
throws her to the ground just intime, and she and she opens her
eyes wide. There's nobody there.It was a hallucination. That, I

(30:40):
think, is a good metaphor for alot of times what happens with
our ideations, both academicallyand in everyday life and at the
perceptual level. We have theselittle little things that work.
It doesn't mean that they'retrue. You know? It's kind of a
Nietzschean view.

So many of the arguments that you were just
making and the points you werejust making rely on scalar
objects and changes in scale. Iwould define a scalar object as
an object that we only becomeaware of when we change scale
significantly. And so Carlsontalks about this a little bit,
when he talks about scalarnumbers in the it's in the
billions and billions book,right, which is one of the last
things that

Yeah. It was postmortem, actually. I didn't I
haven't read it. Well, I read Iread the part where he so
supposedly called his childrento his bedside one by one, which
might have been true, but Ididn't I no one of the other
kids were there. When I wasvisiting him, I think that Annie
Dream sort of took someliberties.
Yeah.

The cyanobacteria one is very
interesting for the that you'realready doing two different
scales. Right? You're invokingthat scalar object because
cyanobacteria are only reallyable to be defined at the
micrometer. But then you'reobserving their effects at a
geological scale, Okay? In orderto make a point about both the
significances of evolution Mhmm.
The, true impacts on the the wayin which we tell the story about

(31:56):
the

planet. Mhmm.

Right? Mhmm. And then you did the same you I
I mean, you used the phraseinterestingly microscopic. You
talked about, like, the extentof time. Right?
You start talking about tenthousand years, and we just
don't live at that scale. Wedon't live at

that scale. I do. I like that scale.

Well, for sure. Okay. Because we have we have
started to teach ourselves to dothat. Ultimately, for most of
us, for the most part, itdoesn't actually matter if I
understand the Krebs cycle,right, which is the cycle that
mitochondria use to cycle ADPthrough and make energy. Right?
Even though it's, like, one ofthe most important processes to
sustain my body. Scale theory isless about that kind of science

(32:35):
literacy and more interested in,like, taking the basic facts. As
you're saying, cyanobacteriahave this effect. Right? One of
the things that Lynn Marguliswas infamous for and then kind
of indicated, if I'm narratingit correctly, is the idea that
mitochondria were essentiallyinvasive species.
Right?

Well, no. It's alpha proteobacteria, as their
closest genetically, but theycould have been, you know,
eaten. I mean, the thing is oncethe cyanobacteria oxidized,
ruining the planet worse than wewill ever do, but also making
the fresh air we breathe, thatall of the previous life forms
that were were anaerobic and notable to survive to free oxygen,

(33:16):
which is so reactive, had toeither go into the muds or in
some cases become symbiotic. Andso the the bigger cells that the
ancestors to the mitochondriacame into were probably archaea,
and they were probably poisonedby oxygen. But with the with the
mitochondria that were respiringbacteria, they could survive the
oxygen by that partnership.

(33:38):
So that would be a thumbnail ofthe origin of, mitochondria from
respiring bacteria, you know,like, two and a half,
2,000,000,000 years ago.

The interesting thing to me is that then how you
rally that to then try to do tokinda hack at, decenter,
confuse, rewrite, whatever arenarratives.

You're a rhetorician, and I was like,
happy to be science. I I startedoff in comp lit. I went to one
year in art school. I was like,there's nothing more boring than
science writing. I said,sometimes I jokingly explain
myself as, an artist stuck inthe body of a science writer,
you know, because I think thatand I also have a very deep
interest in philosophy.
And, also, you know, I have topersonally grow up with people

(34:23):
scientizing me in in variousways and minimum and now you see
that at the global scale, youknow, which is how about self
parody? It's the science. Youknow, you gotta believe it. No.
That's exactly what you don'thave to do with science.
And that's what one thing thatdespite it being subjected to
the superiority of science on akind of hierarchical
epistemological scale socially,but at least that kind of doubt,

(34:47):
leaving aside Anglo Americanphilosophy, analytical
philosophy, is still alive inphilosophy where, you know, you
you have the right to to putthings under a ratio and not to
make and not to have to maketruth claims, let alone publish
papers on what you perceive thetruth. So I think there's a kind
of an immunization to thecockiness of science in a

(35:08):
technocratic society such as theone that we're living in by the
survival of certain forms ofphilosophy and inquiry that are
not immediately put in through afilter of right and wrong.

So you had to survive that is what you're
saying?

I had to survive my my father not wanting to be
interrupted and deliver, youknow, beta tests of Cosmos,
which was fascinating. I mean, Iwas I was, when I was 11 or 12,
he he a lot of things he wouldlater say on TV, he would say,
to me personally, and, andmeanwhile, my mother and her
second husband, Tian Margolis,she would speak so fast, and you
could don't forget a word inedgewise. In either case, that I

(35:46):
once joked, using a line from aTheodore Sturgeon, story that I
would copy and say thehyperkinetic symbiotic
extractions with themicrotubuleistic variations, you
know, to try to get

the

get the tenor of the speed of, like, the
scientific verbiage that wasgoing on. So but I think yeah.
But that doesn't mean that theperspectival shifts you're
talking about, didn't come frommy mother. In a certain sense,
they did. But I think the wholethe the microcosmos was an
effort to see evolution fromwhich it seem it seems logical,

(36:18):
a a microbial perspective.
And I think that in a lot ofspace science and a lot of, you
know, astrobiology, whatformerly known as exobiology,
and in a lot of scientificdiscourses and technocratic
scientific discourses withregard to health and everything,
there is still, like, this deepshadow of this, like,
anthropomorphic God and as Godyou know, God we got rid of God,

(36:41):
and then Rand took his place. Tome, it's artistically and
philosophically fulfilling tolook at it from these ways that
take us down a few notches,which really, I think, is where
we're going. I don't even thinkit's like a scaler illusion. I
think, like, the opposite is ascaler illusion. The idea that
we must be superior.
I mean, it's it seems like anormal, thing for thermodynamic

(37:03):
systems that are trying to findenergy and feed themselves and
deal with the threats aroundthem. You want you're gonna have
a tendency towards selfishness,and humans have it in spades.
And it may be contributing totheir premature demise.

It might be useful then to go back to
something you said earlier aboutwhat humans do then. Because we
experience the world at acertain scale, we have what I
and some other people as wellhave called a scalism, a kind of
preference for our scale, andeverything has to be rewritten
back at our scale. I distinguishbetween three different
definitions of scale in thebook. The first I call golfer

(37:38):
scaling. You take an object thatyou presuppose, and you make it
really big or you make it reallysmall.
But But the interesting thingabout that, like, Honey, I
Shrunk the Kids or any of thesekind of narratives, you know,
the kind of fantastic voyageinto the body, is that the
object remains the same despitegoing to a scale, which this
literally doesn't exist. And infact, biology has discovered

(37:58):
this many times over that, youknow, there are limits at which
biology, life seems to have to,in order to get bigger or
smaller, has to compound itselfto do that. So I distinguish
Gulliver's scale because there'sthis way in which we already
assume that objects preexist andthat we when we're talking about
scale, we're just talking aboutthings getting bigger or
smaller. And that's completelyignoring these kind of

(38:19):
thresholds. And so I've set thatto the side as kind of
Gulliver's scaling as a kind ofimaginary that doesn't even fit
the things that we started todescribe as scale.
The other one though is iscartographic scaling. And part
of the reason that I distinguishthat is because it's primarily
about representations. The imageis actually the map. That is
actually one of the thepractical ways in which scale as
a kind of metric enters. Right?

(38:41):
Because you need to know therelationship between the map and
the territory that you'rewalking around, cruising towards
on your ship. But one of thethings that's that I think is
problematic about conflatingwhat I'm trying to talk about
here with cartographic scalingis that cartography is really
all about people and where theywanna go and how they wanna get
there.

Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.

And there's all sorts of things we add into maps
and sort of filter to make themwork for us, that it seems like
really important that weseparate out that process of
representation from the largerapparatus of scale whereby we're
talking not about therepresentation, but the
observation. So I'm making adistinction here between scale

(39:24):
in representation and scale inobservation. Because the
representation makes it nicelynot about not about us even as
it is about us again. Right?Like, it's like, oh, you know,
we're talking about this, youknow, the inner life of the
seller or whatever as arepresentation.
That again lets me off the hookin a certain way Mhmm. As
opposed to if I sit here andsay, what I am observing is a

(39:45):
representation. We're notignoring the fact that it is.
Right? But but I'm noting thatit's a representation that's
representing to me a wholedifferent level of observation
of what I am, about what's aboutwhat cells are.
Sometimes it's not just aboutthe representation Mhmm. But
about the way in which therepresentation does something to

(40:05):
you. Part of what scale has doneis permit us to continue to
prefer certain things about ourscale, to insert them. Right?
Like, if you think about thethese these example of this is
Google Earth.
Right? Like, Google Earth isactually a really interesting
scalar perception that we canhave. It's like, here is the
object Earth, but I'm onlyinterested in it because I wanna

(40:29):
find places. If you comparethat, for instance, as I do some
in the book, with some of thethings that astronauts say as
they're circling the planet, youknow, there's the famous speech
by Rusty Schweickart that weoften just refer to as the no
frames, no borders speech. Oh,it turns out you can't see
nations up at the planet

oh, you know, at

the level of planet. What are the terms that
I want people to take out ofthis book is this idea of scalar
synecdoche.

I remember that word that from the book, but I
don't I still don't know whatit's meant by it. I can't even
pronounce synecdoche synecdoche.There was a movie named that.
Synecdoche. Right?
Yeah.

So synecdoche is the kind of metaphorical
structure in which you let apart fill in for the hole.

Right.

Right? So the quintessential example for this
is, like, the White House comesto fill in for our whole
structure of government. Yourealize that we already do this
in cynical thing with all of ourway of thinking about power. We
let the president fill in forthe entirety of all of the
people. And then you can go onemore step than that if you add a
kind of ecological question inthere and say, well, jeez.

(41:32):
Aren't we even letting humansfill in for all of the animals
within these artificialboundaries? One of the things
that scale does in relation toto this question of scalism is
it lets us put pressure oncertain things like what I'm
calling here the scalar synecdkey, in which we fill in certain
things for the entirety ofwhatever. I don't really think

(41:55):
about most of the conversationswe have that are kinda laced
with science, perhaps is a goodway to say it, as really being
science communication. Right?Like, a bulk of it happens when
you're like, wait a second.
Like, what is the ancestry of mydog? I'm gonna go get a DNA
test. Right? Like, you'vealready bought into a kind of
scalar apparatus and a mode ofunderstanding what a what a

(42:15):
dog's ancestry is. The scalarsynecdoche, again, it's just one
of what ultimately could be manyof these kind of assumptions
that we make about scale thatthen a more careful accounting
of scale helps us see how we'rerewriting and assuming certain
things about the world that doesbear relationship to science,
and science will help usunderstand it to some extent.

(42:36):
But we also need to translate itout of that. I think you you you
said it was like a sanitized.You're talking about Butler.
Talking about it as a kind ofsanitized version of
descriptions. And I'm trying toessentially desanitize those
scientific descriptions bypointing to the fact that they
actually do transform your wayof understanding reality.
And so we have to pay attentionto that.

Transforming your understanding of reality, I
think, is a good segue into, therelationship, which I think is
very interesting. And I know youstudied Aurobindo and know a lot
about mysticism that is notultimately necessarily mysticism
because it might be showing youthe way things really are to a
certain extent, to sort ofparaphrase Aldous Huxley. That

(43:18):
does interest me a lot, and I dothink that, you know, for the
band The Doors, you know, theytook it from Aldous Huxley's
book Doors of Perception inwhich he called consciousness a
kind of funnel that's blockingout a lot of things. That's a
guy who was injected by his wifeon his deathbed with with LSD,
and so he might have felt thathe merged with the infinite
rather than died, whateverthat's usually like. And and he

(43:42):
took the phrase for his bookfrom William Blake.
When the doors of perception areclans, things will be seen as
they really are infinite, whichthat's that's something that I
think we could we could talkabout too in terms of mysticism
and psychedelics. But I'll justgive two examples. One isn't
very psychedelic, but they bothfit into that category of my own

(44:02):
sort of numinous experiences. Sothat I think do show
interesting, and they aren't theonly ones, but scalar sort of
epiphanies, you know, where youyou feel under the influence of
some drug that your entire frameof reference has changed. And so
one, just very briefly, was inToronto.
I had never tried salvia, whichis something you smoke. It's a

(44:25):
very short acting psychoactivesubstance that's very strong,
and it gives people soft and,like, bodily changes. It's kind
of like a Alice in Wonderlanddrug, I think it's been called.
But, in one minute, I wassitting cross legged on the
floor with, like, some incensein somebody's house in Toronto,
and I had a shot of some hardliquor. And this is a guy with,

(44:47):
you know, he had there was somepretty sparse apartment.
He had he had a wife or agirlfriend and a daughter. They
weren't there. And this wasafter I gave I gave a talk, but
I inhaled that stuff. And thenfor the next what seemed like an
eternity, I was only aware ofgeometric shapes. I had no frame

(45:08):
of reference at all.
I didn't even know who I was. Ifelt as if I I I put I in quotes
because there there was no senseof self in the same way. See, an
I at EYE would be betterexperiencing these box like
shapes, different colors maybein an arrangement that seems

(45:28):
static and and like, some kindof platonic thing. And I think I
might have been, like, you know,on a, quote, unquote, real level
being, like, transforming someof the shapes of the pictures on
the walls and the furniture andthe rectilinearity of the room
into these eternal shapes inthis experience. And then it's a
very it's short acting.

(45:48):
And so then, all of a sudden, Ifelt as if, like, from the
deepest reaches of space, therewas, like, this swirling
activity that came back to me,and then it was a geometric
coming to. And I realized thatthere was somebody else in front
of me. And when I realized it,that's what it took for me to
realize that I was human again.And then I came back at the time

(46:12):
and space as we know it. Andthen the one that isn't
psychedelic, but I would put inthe same sort of numerous
experiences is, and it I it'sactually, written up by Evan
Thompson in his in his mind andlife book, which talks about,
like, the the connections ofneuroscience and eastern
philosophy, phenomenology, andstuff like that.

(46:33):
We had been in a Lindisfarneconference. I was actually with
Natasha Myers at the time, thethe rendering molecular person,
and, we were in New Mexico. Ihad been living in Toronto, and
I was jet lagged. So I had alsotaken that night porcine
melatonin, melatonin derivedfrom the pineal gland of the
pig, the cheapest stuff youcould get, like, over there to

(46:56):
try to, like, moderate my jetlag. And most importantly,
perhaps, I had seen the daybefore a lecture by the same
Evan Thompson talking about thehistory and the art and
techniques of lucid dreaming.
That morning, I I I had a luciddream, but it what started off
as a non lucid dream where mymother was in a bus. I was

(47:18):
waving goodbye to her. That waslike a I was getting my, gas,
filled at a tank. I put in mycard. I was trying to I was I
felt inside my pocket.
And inside the the corner of myjeans pocket, there was a little
bit of swag, you know, cheapmarijuana. But this was all in a
dream. Right? And then Irealized I was dreaming as the

(47:38):
bus, like, pulled out and stuff.And I looked up, like, where you
would look in your own Panella.
And I'd also been actually,doing kundalini, I I should
mention, was another factorwhere there were some exercises
with the pineal gland. But in mysleep state, realizing I'm
dreaming, I look up and insteadof flying as you know, you
probably had a few flying dreamsI think most people have, but

(48:00):
they're pretty incredible. Butinstead of flying, knowing that
I was dreaming, I saw the sky.And I what I saw was an eidetic
image of the blue sky with whiteclouds in the daytime and
completely overlapped andwithout any blocking of it,
night sky and glittering starsat the same time. And so it was

(48:20):
a it was quite an incredibleexperience, and I would like to
think that that was asuperposition, you know, some
quantum superposition or seeingboth sides of the earth at a
scale that we never have.
You know? So those are just twoof my own personal experiences,
but I think there's many, manykind of of psychedelic
experiences that seem to beplaying a trick with scale, not
necessarily in terms ofhallucination and in terms of of

(48:43):
William Blake when he says whenthe doors of perception are
cleansed, you might see thingsas they are. It's less finite
than our usual view of theEarth.

Thank you for sharing all those experiences.
For listeners who want the,like, careful yet experiential
accounting for this, I wouldrecommend reading rich Richard
Doyle's Darwin's pharmacy. Hewas, a huge influence on me, and
I know that you also write abouthim, in cosmic apprentice.
There's a very, very great andclear accounting in there of the

(49:14):
history of this term psychedelicand its relationship to the
problem of my manifestation asit emerges in kind of thinking
about evolution. So that's justthe first sort of note for
people listening to this.
The other sort of point of ofcontext that's not personal is
that the experience that I talkabout in scale theory is Stewart
Brand's description of when hefirst thought to do the whole

(49:37):
earth campaign. And he's he sayshe was sitting on his apartment.
I think it was, like, four fouror five stories up, tripping on
LSD, and then he says heglimpses the curvature of the
earth. He immediately thinks ofbuckminster Fuller talking about
the difficulty ofconceptualizing ourselves being
on a planet. And he says, oh, weneed an image of Earth from

(49:58):
space from that.
Right? No. In our current andsort of, you know, for the last
couple decades, rhetoricalcontext for thinking about
psychedelics, it's so easy. AndI've talked about this with
students all the time. Right?
You just they just kinda laughYou had an eye roll. Like, it
makes people uncomfortable.There's something really
important there about the themanifestation of a different
perspective. Right? So ifpsychedelic literally means my

(50:20):
manifestation, right, tomanifest mind in some way, it
makes sense that we would needsome kind of modification of our
perception, of our way ofexperiencing reality in order to
sort of glimpse thesedifferences in scale on the one
hand.
But then we can flip that andsay, in situations in which one
experiences these modificationsin perception and experience,

(50:42):
sometimes it suddenly makessense to describe things in
terms of scale. We can take thisback to the comment you made
earlier about sciencesanitizing. If we were to sit
down with the science scientificdescriptions, I think, you
you're doing in so much of yourwork, suddenly it can, if you
really just, like, actuallycontemplate, dwell with, right,

(51:03):
to use a nice Heidegger termperhaps, what is being
described. And you don't reallyknow what that is, but let's
just experiment with, like, oh,here are cells. Here are
ecological vectors.
I think that Carl Sagan findshimself in mystical territory in
ways that I don't know that hewas actually comfortable with.
When he says things like we arestar stuff and we long to

(51:24):
return, what is that doing toyour relationship to reality?
Well, it's manifesting adifferent experience of the
world that's taking you at thesedifferent scales and trying to
get you to experience yourselfaccording to those changes. Is
that psychedelic? In the processof thinking about scale very
carefully and doing this, when Iwrote scale theory initially,

(51:46):
before I I would write, I wouldsit for forty five minutes and
meditate.
And then I would sit down, andit would feel like a continuous
part of the meditation. It wouldput me in the state of mind in
which I wasn't just thinkingabout Mhmm. Cells. But I was
observing that this descriptionwas rewriting my experience.
Right?
And it just requires a kind ofslowing down and, really

(52:09):
attending to, like, wait asecond. You just described me in
terms of thermodynamicdispersal. It feels trippy. And
I would have moments where I'dbe walking through the kitchen,
and I would feel myself as thecosmos walking through itself.
This is, like, one piece of theuniverse walking around itself
going, oh, look over here is apan.

(52:29):
And over here, some food to putin this pan. And then I would
have these, like, scale switcheswhere it felt overlaid very
similar to what you were justtalking about there in terms of,
like, kind of cubist imagery.What if I think of this, and
here's here's Dorian Saganshowing up in my brain, you
know, circa 02/2013 as I'mcooking some dinner. The

(52:50):
aggregate of cells is producingsome nutrients because the cells
need some some nutrients. Andthen, you know, then Richard
Dawkins shows up and is like,it's the gene.
You know? And then you get theselfish gene discourse come in
overlaid on top of each other.And so I've articulated that now
in the more academic sense inthe book as scientists find

(53:10):
themselves entering thediscursive terrain of mysticism
when somebody like Carl Sagansays, the cosmos is all that
was, all that is, and all thatever will be. It's like, what
are you like, woah. All of it?
All of it? You mean all likelike right. Like, including the
ones we haven't discovered yetbecause they're, like, too big
or too small, and we haven'tquite figured out how to make
them appear to us as relevantdifferences. Like, I don't think

(53:32):
it's just scale that does this.I think there's a lot of
different ways that we couldtalk about science doing this
problem.
But scale certainly has broughtinto view for me specific ways
in which science has sanitizedits descriptions. Once I started
paying attention to this, Irealized from looking at the
scalar terminology, where did,for instance, the term hierarchy

(53:52):
come from? And it turns out thatin almost every case, there is
some relationship to a mysticalarticulation first. From what I
understand, Pseudo Dionysus, whois a crucial figure in the
history of Christian mysticism,was probably the person who
coined the term hierarchy, notto talk about political
structures, but to talk aboutthe layering of existence and

(54:15):
the attempt to get to the all. Ikept finding these kind of
mystical articulations.
So first of all, I then say,okay. Look. Let's just define
mysticism in a more rigorous wayas the attempt to induce and
make sense of experiences beyondthe human bounds, especially the
cosmic perspective. Because forsome reason, the cosmic

(54:36):
perspective seems to be usedmore readily than the microcosm.
What if mystics in observingthese certain people who start
to observe their perception, andthen they realize that beyond
themselves, what they think ofthemselves, is this vast reality
that's really just two scales.
And science has fleshed out allthese other scales in between

(54:57):
there and when smaller than thatand so on. Your human experience
is a parsing of this wholereality. The definition of the
cosmos there is really mystical.It's actually much clearer if
you read Alexander vonHumboldt's account of what he's
doing in cosmos, which is theprecedent to Carl Sagan's
cosmos. I talk about this inchapter 10.

(55:17):
That perspective of the vasttotality of existence suddenly
gives you a very differentperspective on reality. This is
territory that seems lesscomfortably scientific,
certainly. But nonetheless, Iwanna encourage readers to go
there because in these changesin scale, how they become
transformations of you and notjust descriptions that we have
of the world. I have thischapter on objects, a chapter on

(55:41):
subjects, and chapter onrelations. In each of those, the
primary difficulty in usunderstanding our scalar
configuration of objects is thatin some way, objects are
insubstantial.
And then it makes sense in someway to describe everything as
one, because on what basis doyou distinguish things out?
Where do you go when youunderstand yourself as cells or

(56:01):
atoms or parts of an ecology orparts of the sun? You can't
leave yourself intact there.That's what allows us to keep
that kind of objective ruse isthat you don't apply the scale
to what you think you are.You're not actually in control.
I don't know how the cell isdoing that. I don't know how the
oxygen got here. That isastonishing as, something to

(56:25):
attend to. When you try tounderstand the scientific
descriptions, like, you say Imade a puzzle. Sure.
I'll buy that. How does thatrevise my experience? You end up
in kind of mystical territory.And then you flip that and you
say, now I'm reading thesemystics to try to understand
this tradition. It seems likethey, all over the place,
articulate these scalar terms.

You mentioned my father's pale blue dot thing.
Preactli Zepsevic, who co wrotethis paper in Biosystems, where
they said you could also have apale blue dot of the Earth in
terms of organisms. Like, humansare a pale blue dot in terms of
where we are in the nexus oflife on Earth that has 10 to
30,000,000 species only toinclude sexually reproducing

(57:07):
organisms, the plants, thefungi, and the animals, which
are all basically sexuallyreproducing organisms.
Meanwhile, the the bacteria andarchaea are trading genes all
the time. They don't need tohave sex to reproduce, but they
trade genes even more than wedo.
In that frame of reference andyou look and you add in time,
people are minuscule. They theydisappear. So if you look at the

(57:30):
pale blue dot, I think it wastaken on Valentine's Day when
Voyager turned back and saw thewhole Earth as just being this
little dot. Nabokov describessomewhere Earth as a pinpoint
planet. More recently, the adeep solar system view was taken
from Saturn where, the glare ofthe sun was abated by Enceladus,

(57:52):
this, like, water world of amoon of Saturn, and you could,
see Earth, and there's a tinylittle arc in the montage that
NASA made, which is the moon.
You keep on going in thatdirection, and Earth disappears.
It disappears. So there's nomore Earth. From a scalar
perspective, astronomically,with our ability to see, we

(58:12):
don't see the whole place thatwe are. So that makes me think
about infinity and the strangemathematics of infinity and what
else we're missing.
It also makes me think ofNietzsche's idea of eternal
recurrence, that everything thatthat happens will happen
eternally. And I think I thinkhe had an experience and that it
was a kind of psychedelicexperience, so it might have
been broke by a seizure or, someof his he had a lot of a lot of

(58:37):
maladies. But I think it wasalso scientifically informed
because at the time, it's likethermodynamic speculations
included the idea that, youknow, sufficient energy, a
closed system, will go throughall possible states. And so if
space if you look at space asfinite, but time is infinite,
which he did partly because heargued that if time could have

(59:00):
stopped, it would have done soalready. So, therefore, time
must be infinite.
I think he plugged those sort ofVictorian scientific ideas into
what was for him an experience.Our friend, Rich Doyle, writes,
and you quote him in your book,that the persuasiveness of
scalar views seems, quote, tohinge on an experience of

(59:21):
interconnection as well as anunderstanding of it. And that's
kind of what we're talkingabout, whether you wanna call it
mystical or not, whether it'sprecipitated by psychedelics or
not. Those things can and dohappen, and they're very
interesting in terms of scale.Isn't this the attraction of
numinous experiences ofrevelation and religion,
psychedelic satori, theconviction that something real

(59:41):
has somehow, with apologies toUrsula Le Guin, because she
doesn't like that word somehowsince she's a weasel word,
somehow been revealed.
Nietzsche's eyes, when hewhispered to Lou Salome and her
as he reports in her biographyof him, the secret, I would say,
the experience of the eternalreturn standing in Switzerland
by Lake Silva Plana by a, quote,unquote, pyramidal block of

(01:00:03):
stone as Nietzsche describes it,6,000 feet above man and time.
That's a quote from hisdescription of his experience,
and he you can call it that. Butif you're above or outside time
or seeing time and on, assometimes mystics, describe it,
Can we even call that aninexperience? He tended to call
it his thought of thoughts andhis heaviest burden in part

(01:00:26):
because it suggested that youwould have to will everything
that happens knowing that itwould happen again no matter how
horrible it was in part of thestructure of, like, a causally
closed universe. I can't helpbut think that such an
experience of the sublime, Isay, the numinous is also a
matter of scale.
The one of the idios, you know,the same root of the word

(01:00:48):
idiosyncratic and idiot, but itmeans private. It was used by,
Heraclitus. He divided theidios. Cosmos is your private
world, like the one you enteredthe dream, the 40% of our lives
we spend dreaming. And then thecosmos coin, oh, it's like a
coin.
It circulates. That's what we'redoing right now. We we circulate
and we mix our ideas, andthey're different in the sense

(01:01:10):
that, you know, one is moreprivate. And in this this
numinous experience, there seemsto be, like, a a merger of the
two, and the person becomes intonothing and also and possibly at
the same time, everything. Youknow, when I thought about this
and came across these ideas ofinfinity and how people thought
about it, one of the things I Icame across is the amusing story

(01:01:34):
that the mafia boss whointerviewed Meyer Lansky, who
was a big accountant for themafia, thought one divided by
infinity is zero.
And he said, no. One divided byinfinity is infinity.
Apparently, the mafia like themath of what dollar signs in
their eyes, dollar signs thatmanifest it as cold hard cash.
Technically, in math, it'scalled undefined. Infinity is

(01:01:57):
not a number.
It just goes on and on, so youcan't do the math. One divided
by infinity might be nothing,but then what happened to the
one? The Italian mathematicianLuigi Fantiapi wrestled with
this problem, opting, I think,for the answer that one divided
by infinity is everything orperhaps everything and nothing.
This would seem to mirror theexperience of the lover before

(01:02:18):
his beloved, the scientistbefore nature, the artist lost
in her thought. If infinityexists, perhaps in time, as
Nietzsche thought, because itwould have already stopped if it
could have, although space couldstill be closed.
It might be another example, akind of philosophical
psychedelic experience withoutthe bite the history of humans

(01:02:41):
in two. But I I feel like I haveexperience, again, in quotes
because being outside time isnot exactly an experience. And
and I I do think that, you know,like, when you're talking about
the set of crypto mysticism ofCarl Sagan, my father, it is a
sense of at the one hand, it'svery egotistic and narcissistic.
He's a spokesman on TV with theaids going out into space that

(01:03:05):
might be some extraterrestrialairs or appropriate other
organs. At the other time, themessage is that I am being
swamped.
I'm swallowed into this giant,very old, if not timeless
entity, and that's who I am, andthat's who you, the viewers,
are.

Joshua DiCaglio (01:03:24):
The common thread there is that you already
become something else. Right?And in fact, it opens questions
about who you are to begin with.This is haunting all of our
discourse about scale, all ofthe objects that we talk about
at different scales. Like,that's always sort of lurking in
the background.
How do we get to these objectsto begin with? Who are you when
you get to these objects? Who'sleft to feel insignificant? Who

(01:03:46):
who's left to separate out youfrom the rest of the cosmos? And
that's where I find it actuallyreally useful to keep the whole
scalar spectrum in view, and toexperiment with it to see what
this layered redescription hasactually done for us.
You know, we wanna leap to,like, when are you saying that,
like, the cosmos is actuallylike a human body or something?
Let's just pause before that andjust notice that the same shift

(01:04:09):
in scale has happened in bothinstances. So the traditions of
contemplation become reallyimportant there for thinking
about how do we actually sitwith those changes in
perspective long enough so thatwe actually they actually do
something to us.

Dorion Sagan (01:04:24):
Well, hopefully, your book can act as a
Lafarmacon, one of those, like II called it in cosmic
apprentice, writing with being aa mind altering drive. Hope you
can get safely high.

Well, that's the hope here. That it's not
just an intellectual exercise.The root of theory is about a
mode of seeing. Yeah. That Idon't spend a lot of time
talking about specific examplesbecause I want any reader to
understand whatever they studyin relation to what these
transformations of scale hasalready done for.
Thanks, Dorian. Thank you somuch.

Thank you.

Alright. Yeah. I mean, so we should just have a
conversation then.

Yeah. Take out the word conversation. That word's
way over you, so everybody willhave a conversation.

Well, jeez. Okay.

Okay. We're off to a good start. It can only go up
it can only go uphill unless youhave a negative connotation for
uphill downhill from here.

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Dorion Sagan and Joshua DiCaglio on the cosmic challenge of scale.

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