The poet Robinson Jeffers developed a concept called inhumanism. The idea is to shift the metaphorical center of the universe away from what it is to be human to the larger non-human world — in other words, to be able to appreciate the startling beauty of existence human beings need to be able to recognize our limited role, and therefore, our actual place in the greater organization of all-that-is.

That’s all good as far as I am concerned. The problem is that in much of Jeffers’ work there is still that moral stain of “what should be.” Morality, a human invention to meet our evolutionary needs, is not inhuman.  Judging our place in all-that-is through the lens of what-should-be falls short of the idea of booting us out of the center of the universe.

Now I like Jeffers. There are several of his poems that have showed up in this blog because I really like them. Nevertheless, inhumanism became a mental game of mine.  I try to imagine, as a move in the game, a rubric which could be used in a way that would encapsulate the existence of human beings in the larger universe, but without being centered on some other specific instance. That would be too easy. As an example, using Jeffers’ hawk iconography, construct a hawk-rubric to judge the lives of human beings.  If you do that, we Homo sapiens fail. Finding something that isn’t centered on some specific (or set of) species, event or material object is difficult, perhaps impossible but is nevertheless fun to do.

Such lopsided systems (such as morality or the hawk rubric) for assessing value—or relative failure—are only really useful if you want an emotional justification for the damage you are about to inflict. Otherwise, they offer little knowledge about the other species, even if they covertly say a lot about us.

Another thinking game (one that is triggered by Jeffers’ poetry) is what I call the Permian game.  The PG allows me to distract myself from the misuse of rubrics in just such a way as morality does, and the way in which Jeffers’ seemed to use inhumanism in his poetry. There, in Jeffers’ words, it seems that human beings are just not good enough. There is implied a moral failure in the fact that we cannot escape our own imaginative and cognitive limitations. That, I think, is ridiculous. It’s tantamount to saying human behaviour is not an artifact of the world, which, ever the good materialist, I am quite sure it is.

The resultant PG starts with trilobites. (Here’s the cute little feller.) Imagine, the day he (?) died. Imagine that he is the last of his kind; the suffering and anguish he must have borne at the immoral nature of a sea-world that would permit an end to such a noble species. I let the game run, imagining the post-(trilobite)-apocalyptic earth (now devoid of importance and meaning) as time proceeds and all the evolving species of fish, reptiles, mammals, fruiting plants and other biological wonders begin to show up in the fossil record. This silliness seems to me on par with the silliness of chastising human beings for not being what our mythologies tell us we should be.

In Jeffers’ terms, this whinging, comes to be known as “Cassandra.”

Wisdom. Poor bitch, be wise.

No: you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men.

And gods disgusting. — You and I, Cassandra.

This kind of thing, this suffering, this moralizing, I find hard to stomach in Jeffers’ poetry and philosophy. Hence the game and its utility. It transforms my adverse reaction to a scintilla of joy.

I have lots of thinking games. Many of them center around something I ‘ve read about. There’s a book called What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, Original essays from a new generation of scientists. In it are 18 short essays on topics ranging across topics such as climate change and how that might effect human migration patterns in the near future, mirror neurons and their possible origin in the need for inbuilt quick motor learning enhancements and the capacity for empathy (i.e.  ethics), the problems associated with human biological enhancement, the oddities of dark matter and the notion of the relationship between entropy and the arrow of time, and that’s just the first few. It’s a delightful book, easy to read, meant for the general public, and provides a snap shot of what the big names of the future will probably be obsessing about.

One game (the entropy game or EG for short) came out of my relationship to one of the essays—Sean Carroll’s “Our Place in an Unnatural Universe.”  The ideas that triggered this particular game include:

Every feature we think of as characterizing life—metabolism, reproduction, evolution, memory—depends deeply on the arrow of time. Life, it is no exaggeration to say, is propelled through time by the growth of entropy.   and

The distinction between past and future is so deeply ingrained in the way we think about the universe that it doesn’t seem to need explaining. Like fish oblivious to the water, we are hardly aware of the deep puzzle of temporal asymmetry—the so-called arrow of time.

It’s difficult to tell you how delightful I find this. It’s a set of ideas (entropy, time, life) that spiral around each other in my head, shooting out sparks of quivering delight like the fire wheel’s of Malta. And like fireworks, I’m not sure my games accomplish much except a momentary joy.

But doesn’t my enjoyment matter?  I mean think about the relationship between entropy and time.  I mean is it an identity relationship? Is entropy time? If that’s the case then life, being an anti-entropy machine, is also a time-machine in that it reverses time because it reverses (temporarily) a pocket sized, entropic locality? But maybe not. Maybe the relationship is not an identity one, but one of constitution. So maybe entropy constitutes time? What would that mean? Time is a function of entropy?  So is the early low-entropic universal state existent without time? And if so what event triggers the constitution of time? Could there even be an event without the presence of time? Are there any other “things” that are constituted by entropy? That would make it time’s cousin.  Is that what space is? Or matter as we’ve come to know it? What if time constitutes entropy instead? What if it isn’t a one-way relationship? What if time and entropy co-constitutute? What if there is another option altogether?

See? Just like the multiple fire wheels spinning, burning in your head.

And if entropy isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other moments in the 18 essays that can become pieces in your mental sand box.

And take a think about Inhumanism. It’s a good concept. Maybe the momentary joy of thinking it is enough, just simply because it is actually part of all-that-is.