How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? Joshua DiCaglio’s SCALE THEORY provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale reconfigures objects, subjects, relationships—while teaching us to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. DiCaglio is joined here by author Dorion Sagan in a dazzling conversation about how a theory of scale might challenge perspectives on space and time, philosophy, innerness, psychedelics—with careful attention to scientific thinking as well as fascination and mysticism, much attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.
Joshua DiCaglio is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.
Dorion Sagan is an award-winning writer, editor, and theorist. He is the son of the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis.
References and citations: -Scale Theory (Joshua DiCaglio) -Cosmic Apprentice (Dorion Sagan) -Dazzle Gradually (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan) -Cosmos (Carl Sagan) -Powers of Ten video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0) -Inner Life of a Cell video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY) -Jakob von Uexküll -Microcosmos (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan) -Symbiotic Planet (Lynn Margulis) -Simon Levin -Samuel Butler -Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors); Sagan has a contribution in this volume. -The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (James Edward Burton) -Darwin’s Pharmacy (Richard Doyle) -Friedrich Nietzsche -Luigi Fantappiè -Molecular Capture (Adam Nocek)
Chapters
How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? Joshua DiCaglio’s SCALE THEORY provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale reconfigures objects, subjects, relationships—while teaching us to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. DiCaglio is joined here by author Dorion Sagan in a dazzling conversation about how a theory of scale might challenge perspectives on space and time, philosophy, innerness, psychedelics—with careful attention to scientific thinking as well as fascination and mysticism, much attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.
Joshua DiCaglio is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.
Dorion Sagan is an award-winning writer, editor, and theorist. He is the son of the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis.
References and citations: -Scale Theory (Joshua DiCaglio) -Cosmic Apprentice (Dorion Sagan) -Dazzle Gradually (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan) -Cosmos (Carl Sagan) -Powers of Ten video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0) -Inner Life of a Cell video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY) -Jakob von Uexküll -Microcosmos (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan) -Symbiotic Planet (Lynn Margulis) -Simon Levin -Samuel Butler -Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors); Sagan has a contribution in this volume. -The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (James Edward Burton) -Darwin’s Pharmacy (Richard Doyle) -Friedrich Nietzsche -Luigi Fantappiè -Molecular Capture (Adam Nocek)
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Sometimes it's not just about the representation, but about the way in which the representation does something to you.
Dorion Sagan:
I think there's many, many kind of psychedelic experiences that seem to be playing, trick with scale.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Hi. I'm Josh DiCaglio. I'm an assistant professor at Texas A and M, and I'm here to talk about my recent book, Scale Theory, a nondisciplinary inquiry, which came out with the University of Minnesota Press in 2021. And I'm honored today to be joined by Dorian Sagan, who has long been an important intellectual figure for mine.
Dorion Sagan:
Hello, and thank you for having me. I look forward to our discussion.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Thank you. Thank you. To give an overview of this book, attempts to try to lay out the basic theoretical parameters for scale across a great variety of disciplines. It is focused by what I consider this, like, central provocation. How is it possible that I, yes, I or you, are made up simultaneously of cells, atoms, pieces of ecological, web, parts of a thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, elements in the gravitational world of galaxies.
Joshua DiCaglio:
All of these things simultaneously right now are descriptions of also what you are experiencing. This kind of schema of scale in which we describe these different layers of objects is incredibly bewildering and not so easy to understand both in terms of how we got to it and what its implications are. Even though we're describing and using, scalar objects all the time, whether we're talking about DNA or the cells in your body or toxic molecules or environmental effects, whether we're talking about viruses and pandemics, These are all objects that exist at scales that we don't usually experience with the normal Homo sapien human body. Alright, Dorian. Well, first of all, I just wanna say thank you for taking the time to to to read the book.
Dorion Sagan:
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 everything in it, but there was a lot of stuff that you you tried to find your site host, and, and it's it's pretty cool. A lot of topics I'm interested in, and some of it was over I'm not really good at, like, the typological thing and, like, following directions as far as the thought experiments go and stuff.
Dorion Sagan:
I tried, but, I thought I thought there's some great references in there.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I'm not entirely certain that I understand everything I wrote either.
Dorion Sagan:
No. And that yeah. And that's probably typical for people who are writing about interesting things too. Yeah.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Part of the method is to say, like, well, like, here is this idea scale that we don't quite fully understand. And rather than pretend that I'm going to understand it, I'm gonna try to write a book that's gonna help us sort of see the contours of it and the the confusion that it throws us into so that we can try to understand it a little bit more.
Dorion Sagan:
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 sometimes what's a little bit outside your comfort zone, you know, it makes your brain grow a little bit.
Joshua DiCaglio:
You really did that for me from the time I was an undergraduate, as I was reading. It was actually Dazzle Gradually was the first book that I got from yours. I was in a literature and science course, and that came in. It was so unusual. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
We were re we read it amongst a bunch of novels about science. It was at University of South Carolina. Yeah. Laura Walls, who's now elsewhere, taught a literature science course. And I think it was shortly after Dazzle Gradually came out.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And I was just completely excited by your ability to take, you know, basic ideas related to science, but also philosophical questions, bring them together, and then write it in a way that actually does it to you. And this is kind of the thing that I refused to give up for scale theory was that I didn't wanna just think about scale. I wanted to have scale do something to me and then help the reader, like, do it also. Right?
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah. Yeah.
Joshua DiCaglio:
The basic premise here, like, the switch that I've been trying to use as kind of an introduction to the book is to say, we usually talk about 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 of thermodynamics or quantum objects or the big bang. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
These are all objects that require scale. Right? These require these shifts in size, and somehow we're, like, relating those really big objects or those really small objects. We were saying they exist. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
We're not saying they don't exist. Right? And yet they bear some kind of unclear relationship to what we're experiencing right now. And so the basic maneuver that I keep coming back to that I as I was writing this Mhmm. Was how is that actually a description of what is happening right now?
Joshua DiCaglio:
Mhmm. When we're talking about cells, we're talking about your body, about something that's going on in your body in a way of describing how your body is able to fit itself together and do stuff, etcetera, etcetera. And that seems to me is completely befuddling, right, or bewildering. And yet, in our kinda everyday conversation or even in our more rigorous conversations, we just talk about these objects as if they're, like, really clear. You know, I mean, it's something that we all were thinking about during the COVID pandemic.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? That somehow, we've got a relationship to viruses, which are these really tiny particles that are able to invade our body. We only actually know they're there whenever we get something like a symptom. But then for it to be a pandemic, it has to exist even on a different scale, which is the scale of the planet, in order for it to traffic around. And then it requires different kind of behavior on my part.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And so we're all sitting in our houses wondering what are we doing in relation to these very tiny particles that are spreading on the the scale of the globe.
Dorion Sagan:
It's, like, caught between the microcosm and the macrocosm. I'll just say, you know, I have, like, some scalar subject. I won't say objects in my house, but I got a three year old and a one year old. And the three 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 off today by an on bicycle by his mother, they told her that he had because I had seen that they sent a a photo.
Dorion Sagan:
Not necessarily want kids on, you know, without permission on the Internet, but we got a photo of him painting with two hands. So we have a artistic household and stuff, and it will apparently, one was Edward Monk because he's obsessed with The Scream, which I read, like, from an art book to him because it's kind of, like, a little kid then gets scared. You know? And you scream, you can't. You know?
Dorion Sagan:
Everybody's had that dream, I think. And so it's very it's very relevant for him. And the other thing was because the day before, on the advice of your book, we checked out that, inner life of a cell video. Yes.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dorion Sagan:
Right? And, of course, his grandmother is, the biologist Lynn Margolis, who died in 02/2011, who he's never met. But, he knows about her through hearing her talk about. And so I had thought, like, because, you know, he's been watching Frozen. I'm this little I know this is a, but he's been watching Frozen and pretending to be Elsa and all this.
Dorion Sagan:
And and so but, I said, maybe you should watch, like, Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin. I was just trying to throw something else out there. And I showed that, and he said, no. Charlie Chaplin is boring. And then he want and then I showed him a micro video.
Dorion Sagan:
You know, I try I like the live videos. He showed one of the of his grandmother, and he said, no. I don't wanna see anymore with grandma Lenny and, or grandma Lynn or whatever. She said, I don't wanna see anymore with her. I wanna see the other kind.
Dorion Sagan:
And he wanted to see, like, the computer generated DNA thing, which I don't like, but he loves them. And so I just wanted to tell you that story. And as far as, Charlie Chaplin being boring, because, mom was out with, like, a neck thing, and I always had both of them on the couch, and we all fell asleep to computer generated micro videos. It was a really good sleep.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I mean, it's astonishing, though. Right? Because what we've done is we've started to actually give images to these things that we didn't have images for. You know? And and I don't talk that much about you know, there are other people who have who have done sort of more thorough work on how we image and actually render the molecular.
Joshua DiCaglio:
But the thing I'm trying to focus on is that kind of crazy transformation whereby we get from here to there. Mhmm. The story I'll counter with is when my kids were, three and five, I showed them the powers of 10 video.
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Almost like a bit of an experiment because one of the inspirations for some of what I've written in this book was that as I was thinking about scale, I kept having conversations with people and they would point to the powers of 10. They were very critical of it.
Dorion Sagan:
Right. I was surprised to see that in your book because I always thought of it as being innocuous. I mean, it we should probably tell your, podcast d's or whatever they're called, what the powers of 10 is, 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 ends of, you know, cosmic space and all the way down into whatever is beneath the cells and the atoms.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And and people have been very critical of this for for what I think are good reasons. Right? Because of the way that it frames out the viewer, 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 forget that.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? And that's one of the arguments I'm making about scale is that if we think about what scale is doing there so listeners who are unfamiliar with it could go look it up, but you'll see that there's a box around it with the reference to the scale.
Dorion Sagan:
To the next level or the
Joshua DiCaglio:
next Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think the narrator is not actually very interesting in there. Right? But I find that in scaler videos, they like, the narrators often don't know what to make of it.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And so the the narration is often not actually that interesting. But the the shift in size is the thing that's crazy. And it's not just that there's a change in size. Right? Like, this book is not just about size.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Okay? In fact, I I try to avoid using the word size. We just check if I actually succeeded. I don't think I did.
Dorion Sagan:
No. You did. You wrote size matters at one point, but
Joshua DiCaglio:
I'm just
Dorion Sagan:
kind of tongue in cheek. Okay. Look it. I'll read this because this is one of my notes, okay, on this question. Okay?
Dorion Sagan:
And this is it might be this might 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 your book, good anticipation even if a quasi pun that size, quote, matters, end quote. And I agree it does, but it seems to me that the perspective and qualia rather than quantity, this would be like a, you know, a sort of a criticism or, another angle onto what I feel is missing in, like, the focus on just scale, of which scale as an example may matter more.
Joshua DiCaglio:
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 to some extent, it's just a number. Right? It just says, you know, 10 to the negative, you know, right, whatever.
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Or, like, or it's just one nanometer. Right? There's just the line there. And so it seems to be about numbers. It seems to be about this kind of, like, numerical rigid notion of reality that is wholly objective and has nothing to do with the perspectives that and the practices, especially the social practices that were required to get there.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? Which is why a lot of science studies scholars following Latour and other thinkers have critiqued scale as part of this, like, attempt to hide, to some extent, the epistemic practices of science, how we come to know about science. And, of course, we wanna know about how science comes to find these objects called cells or galaxies. But that number is not, I would say, as scary as it appears for those reasons. The the number is just about consistency.
Joshua DiCaglio:
It's a quantity that just lets us keep track of where our perspective is. And where is not even the right word because that's one of the things that that people know about the powers of 10 video is that it seems to, like, move us. Right? Which is why we call it as a scalar's doom. But we're not actually moving.
Joshua DiCaglio:
We're changing our perspective.
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And so that number is actually essential for saying, look. The perspective that 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 is that that changing quantity is a change in quality. Mhmm.
Joshua DiCaglio:
One of the kind of interesting things about the metric system is it lets us keep track of scale in a way that ties our normal experience of the world, right, which is the meter scale is within our normal scale. It lets us keep tabs on that while also pointing to something that's outside of our our usual way of experiencing the world. You don't usually experience the world in a way that lets you see cells or atoms or the planet or galaxies. And so that measure is there to keep track of that consistency. And the thing that I think the powers of 10 does, I'm actually kind of flummoxed to think of any better way to do this.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I've been trying to, like, find people who who have other ways of trying to piece together what the the kind of transformation that scale produces.
Dorion Sagan:
A potential problem might be something I talked about under the rubric of Protagoras. That Mhmm. Yeah. The famous statement in in cosmic apprentice that man is the measure of all things, which I think usually has an inflection, at least in English, that suggests that everything is about us kind of like a biblical self centeredness and anthropocentrism. But another way that is interesting with regard to scalarity, if you like, is to think of that as us being the actual measure, which I think is what you actually you do that, and you call it, like, the one meter scale is this scale of our ordinary existence.
Dorion Sagan:
And the potential problem with that is that we still are projecting ourselves into various other things. And we look at their size, the distance, other, like, things we can measure. It was sort of, like, emptying out the quality. For example, what are these things? You know?
Dorion Sagan:
Do they have Internet? So we have Internet, and we experience it. Otherwise, we wouldn't even be able to have this conversation, but do other things. And I think but, you know, I sent you that James McAllister quote about us being a way of looking at the universe, you know, that my father liked to talk about versus us being sort of a a meta society, a weird totalitarian communist, like, clone of eukaryotic cells of the body, and these things are a lie. Absolutely.
Dorion Sagan:
Said, you know, other animals are poor in world, but his most quoted philosopher was Jacob von Aksko, the Estonian ethologist who went and came up with the idea of the omelet, which sort of morphed in its protagron, if you like, human form, protagron in the first sense into Dasein, he said they're a poor world, but a lot of people would disagree with it. They're dogs with that poor world. It's just a different world. Even Uxco himself might. Although Uxco, like, gave different worlds for people, and then each animal species there or that he identified had its own world.
Dorion Sagan:
But for Samuel Butler, the microscope so these qualities bubble up in the galaxy of, in that keyhole galaxy, like, that Hubble took. There's, like, this thing that's light years across a lung, and it looks like the back of a middle finger. And that's just the type of human self centered thinking, you know, that leads to the Bible, which is still embedded in, like, you know, the the the hidden philosophy of science, etcetera. We have to be careful when we think we're kinda being antiseptically going from the big to the small, that we're not carrying all sorts of, like, prejudices with us and that we have a sort of artificial objectivity. And then it it it might take away from more from other questions, questions of perspectives in general.
Dorion Sagan:
Like, I after reading your book, I was like, you know, it just really hit me, like, how when you look off down a road, the perspective like, the the the the train tracks go into a dot. I mean, that's crazy. It's amazing. It's like, I don't you can't if you think more you think about it, the more perplexing it is, but it allows you to, like, take that obviously wrong datum that's used in perspective in paintings and then move in the real world. So we're doing all sorts of tricks with that all the time.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right. Science essentially takes that change in perspective, which usually we would just notice kind of if, you know, even if we spent time noticing it. It just looks like things just kind of merge together. It's amazing to me that science then takes that point of merger Uh-huh. And changes the resolution.
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? So the the kind of switch
Dorion Sagan:
that
Joshua DiCaglio:
I think produces the question about scale that is the heart of this book
Dorion Sagan:
Mhmm.
Joshua DiCaglio:
You know, one of the the examples I'd like to point to is the fact that cell theory, which is, you know, the this is this is the scale at which much of your work is working, right, with Lynn Margulis.
Dorion Sagan:
And the planetary with Gaia too. Yeah.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And the planetary. Right? The one that that completely blows my mind is that it took us until about the eighteen thirties or forties before we put together
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Cell theory. Right? It's just a kind of interesting fact about the history of science that even though, you know, Hooke had had, you know, seen cells
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
A a long time before, it took a long time for it to click that these were not just very small animals. Right? They were called animals before then. Right?
Dorion Sagan:
Right. By low and low.
Joshua DiCaglio:
But but, like, actually, what your body was made of and that they're semi autonomous creatures that have their own Yeah. Organelles. Right? Like, it's not just very small things Mhmm. That are part of the same phenomenal realm.
Joshua DiCaglio:
They're just look too small for you to see. Right? But you full on revise your entire field of objects. And it's and it's when you go to to Gaia and and I really love that phrase from, Lynn's, what what it's it's Gaia is just symbiogenesis seen from space. The the it's just it's cellular evolution at the scale of the planet.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Because what those are doing is they're showing that at that horizon of human perception. And I and I think that's that's really what you're talking about when you talk about the kind of limit where the railroad kinda merges into one. Right? That's the limit at which our eyes are able to parse reality. They're not able to see anything of more detail or really of of larger scope.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Mhmm. And so what's astonishing about what science has done is that it then says, okay. No. We're gonna develop methods for tracing what kind of differences are discernible at the limits or beyond the limits at which the the normal human apparatus is able to produce it. And on the other side of that, they define objects.
Joshua DiCaglio:
It doesn't mean that they're not actually describing things. Right? I'm definitely not one of those scholars who would say, like, scientists have created cells by any means. Right? But they're discerning objects at a scale at which humans don't usually experience.
Joshua DiCaglio:
There's a kind of threshold there. And so the the idea of threshold is absolutely essential to what I'm talking about here because that threshold is the thing that both puts us in contact with it and cuts us off from these scalar objects. You don't experience DNA directly. But then at the same time, that is what you're experiencing when you're sick or when you're living.
Dorion Sagan:
Except that okay. I would just say that there is a there is sort of, like, a a jump to, like, hyper realism with the idea of scale. Because, I mean, the in the middle ages, weren't people experiencing the miasmas that they thought were causing the diseases or seeing the mice arise in the rags and and experiencing the spontaneous generation. So I would say, in some sense, what you're calling scale that has this kind of discreet and it and, you know, you've you've made, like, a a sort of separation between various scales, which I would say arguably are pretty influenced by the history of science.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Yeah. So we can talk a little bit more about, like, why I would distinguish those those different scales. But let's back up because I wanna respond to some of what you said before. This question of anthropocentrism is really important. And I should say, during that, you like, your work was really my first introduction to what is often among academics now called posthumanism.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Like, if I had to gloss posthumanism, I would say it's the the set of philosophies that are pushing at our notion of the human and the central centrality of the human, including these binaries that we place between ourselves and the rest of reality, human, animal, self, and other, these kind of binaries. I was thinking a lot about how the descriptions of science have revised the way in which we're able to conceptualize what we are. Right? And the cellular example was really the first one that I had. And then the second one I had was was nanotechnology.
Joshua DiCaglio:
So in relation to this question of anthropocentrism, our definition of cells, our our understanding of cells is not disconnected from our inquiry into them. Right? So we've all been trying to experiment with how to say something about something like sales while not centering ourselves, like, may not making it about us, but also accounting for the fact that our understanding of cells is also partially about us. Right? And so this conversation about anthropocentrism, which I think, you know, you've been engaging with for decades.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I mean, I I'm Assange is going back to Read Microcosmos, how central that was to the task that you and Lynn were taking up. That it's really about taking the stuff that, you know, Carl Sagan was doing with Cosmos, putting it in the microbial, and really trying to dis like, show us how that displaces our ideas of ourselves. I would like to think that what I'm doing here in scale theory is more of that same task while still understanding then how have we thrown ourselves into this transformation where, in a certain sense, I like to think of it as science has deconstructed us. But, of course, we're also doing the science. I always have found your statements about the microbe to be incredible mystical statements that are clarifying for some of what Carl Sagan is sometimes more or less explicitly doing.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Maybe you would know better than I about, like, all of these rhetorical techniques he's using to kind of think about the broadness of reality. But it's so much more directly about, like, wait a second. I am not what I thought I was. It's really important then for us to understand what transformation in our perspectives that has has, occurred for us to start to see something like climate change. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
Which is a beautiful scalar idea. Right? Because it's connecting one scalar object, carbon, with another scalar object, climate change, and we're somehow caught in the middle. But by we're somehow caught in the middle, I just mean our normal experience. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
Like, the way you experience, there is some relationship between those objects at these different scales and your usual experience, which, by the way, your body is designed to experience the world at this scale. I cite Simon Levin's somewhat famous speech on, you know, among ecologists on scale and kinda mess with it a little bit because because he notes that every organism has a particular scale at which it experiences the world. This brings us back to your micro umwelt question. The human body has produced an umwelt that among many other things, and there's many other things that the human body does to filter reality. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
Like, when we can talk about what the eyes do to see things and, you know, you can only hear certain frequencies, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So, like, I'm not saying scale is the only one, but it is a really important metric for understanding how your body has pieced together experience at a particular level that makes certain differences matter. If you got feedback from every single one of your cells, that would be insane.
Dorion Sagan:
It
Joshua DiCaglio:
would just literally be too ex too much experience.
Dorion Sagan:
Mhmm. It'd be like they're going on the Internet as for us.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Yeah. Oh, exactly. Right? I mean, this is what this this is part of what we're all experiencing as little humans.
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah. It's a scaler morass right now as far as the the global globality of technology.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Like, there's too much information. A vast majority of that information is actually irrelevant to us, and yet everybody's trying to make it feel like it's relevant to us.
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah. And that makes me think of Samuel Butler, who I find fascinating. The guy who wrote, Erewhon in a way about flesh, but also four books on evolution at his own expense and who Gregory Bateson called, Darwin's most able critic. And he was really excited when he got the, Origin of Species when he was in New Zealand. But then he he he kinda diverged because he looked back at the sources that were mentioned in early editions of the origins of species on Darwin's illustrious predecessors.
Dorion Sagan:
And he saw that he had sort of, like, sanitized and mechanized the theories of the, older evolutionists by making it all about natural selection when before they had this room, like Lamarck and Buffon and even his own, grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had this feeling of that these organisms can do things on their own. You know? That they can they can make their little decisions. Just like even the most megalomaniac and powerful, rich politicians, etcetera, they're not controlling. They're not controlling anything.
Dorion Sagan:
They might think they are too, you know, by adding, like, you know, coal fly ash, say, in into to airplanes, and they'd be trying to either, you know, cool the planet by darkening it or warm it up and get some more oil out of the poles, but they're insignificantly microscopic within terms of the actions of Earth as a whole, as are most of our ideas about what's happening and how and why they're happening. And so Butler, at one point, when I was sitting in in the library at Smith College reading this, everything I could by him because they had a complete Shrewsbury edition of his works. And he's got a lot of notebooks and this, I think, was in one of those where or maybe it was one of his evolution books where he says, we don't remember when first we grew an eye. So if you put yourself scarily in colonial micro position and, like, imagine that they have their own little desires, their own little purposes, and as he says, their own little tool kits, which amount to kind of nanotechnology, that those things through not necessarily through anything eerily mystical, but maybe just thermodynamic flow patterns, little choices made become embedded over vast amounts of times into the structures that eventually become something like a body.
Dorion Sagan:
We don't remember when we first grow an eye. We could say we are growing eyes and technology. But when I look at science and technology rather than looking at it as, like, a kind of asymptotic approach to absolute truth, I see it more as developing organs in the in, you know, in a human superorganism. It has all sorts of problems and ideas. And it's out of those.
Dorion Sagan:
Some, you know, will be naturally selected. And eventually, they'll be second nature instead of, you know, in the forefront of your consciousness. And I think there is something deep in that that idea that was dismissed by Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin and others as being, you know, mystical. But the opposite is even more objectionable to think that only humans have, like, a true innerness and that only we are capable of, like, doing things that last. I mean, Gaia, I think I calculated it.
Dorion Sagan:
If you divide the time and say 2,500,000,000 or 3.5, billion, the time that civilization at about ten thousand years has been on this planet, human civilization, urban side, whatever, all of science, you know, middle ages, everything. Ten thousand years goes into 3,500,000, like, 350,000 times. So we're just like a fraction of a percent. My mom said, Lynn Margolis, to go back to her. One of her friends told me this after she died.
Dorion Sagan:
What will be left, you know, of humans in the fossil record, a thin layer of iron from the cars. So that doesn't get a little bit more ant de anthroposcience than that, and that may well be the case. And we can't even accept the possibility of it because it's so demeaning. We would rather name an entire geological epic after ourselves. The Anthropocene, when, as I argued in that arts of living on a damaged planet by Singh et al in my intro to the I think it was a monster section.
Dorion Sagan:
You know, they if we're gonna get ourselves so we have to get, name an h after the cyanobacteria because they're the ones who created the oxygen atmosphere that we're breathing, which whose scattering of which light turns the atmosphere blue, which created the ozone layer and which energizes the entire surface of the planet. And because of the the maintenance of chemicals that react with oxygen, could continuously put back into Earth's atmosphere would make us visible to extraterrestrials who had spectroscopic, equipment and science at our level. So, you know, that's it would tell the Earth was a lie, not so much by humans. And also just a a note, and this is like a little happy horse of mine, you know. I think that the the the monolithic mantra and total acceptance as absolute consensus of carbon dioxide can be distracting from the fact that, you know, there's experiments that show that particulate pollution because the which whose residence time in the atmosphere is much lower, and they're bigger particles in terms of scale because, although they cool the Earth in the daytime, they also reradiate solar and, the earth's radiation at night.
Dorion Sagan:
For example, over at Mount Saint Helens, the fumes that, came out, they made it cooler in the daytime, but it was more than hotter than it usually was, and then they cooled at night. So the effect of the gasoline additives, the coal fly ash, and other forms of particular pollution from, bombs, war, industry in general, may be, a more direct cause of global warming. Unfortunately, because of the same problem, we're talking about the gigantism of the structures that are being made by the tiny individuals that are humans are more crowded, more scientized, more automated automated science, which does sort of takes the science out of science planet, those are things that is are beginning to escape our attention. It are important because just like, at the individual level, things that escape public consciousness can come back to haunt you if you don't realize them. Although they might work in the short term.
Dorion Sagan:
For example, we should be worried about climate change. Now it might be a good thing, but what if we're looking at the wrong thing? I read this little book about Philip k. Dick, and he gives us an example by Henri Bergson, a woman who's walking towards an old fashioned elevator, and, there's no elevator in the shaft. She doesn't realize that.
Dorion Sagan:
She's about to step to her death into the elevator, but somebody throws her to the ground just in time, and she and she opens her eyes wide. There's nobody there. It was a hallucination. That, I think, is a good metaphor for a lot of times what happens with our ideations, both academically and in everyday life and at the perceptual level. We have these little little things that work.
Dorion Sagan:
It doesn't mean that they're true. You know? It's kind of a Nietzschean view.
Joshua DiCaglio:
So many of the arguments that you were just making and the points you were just making rely on scalar objects and changes in scale. I would define a scalar object as an object that we only become aware of when we change scale significantly. And so Carlson talks about this a little bit, when he talks about scalar numbers in the it's in the billions and billions book, right, which is one of the last things that
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah. It was postmortem, actually. I didn't I haven't read it. Well, I read I read the part where he so supposedly called his children to his bedside one by one, which might have been true, but I didn't I no one of the other kids were there. When I was visiting him, I think that Annie Dream sort of took some liberties.
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah.
Joshua DiCaglio:
The cyanobacteria one is very interesting for the that you're already doing two different scales. Right? You're invoking that scalar object because cyanobacteria are only really able to be defined at the micrometer. But then you're observing their effects at a geological scale, Okay? In order to make a point about both the significances of evolution Mhmm.
Joshua DiCaglio:
The, true impacts on the the way in which we tell the story about the
Dorion Sagan:
planet. Mhmm.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? Mhmm. And then you did the same you I I mean, you used the phrase interestingly microscopic. You talked about, like, the extent of time. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
You start talking about ten thousand years, and we just don't live at that scale. We don't live at
Dorion Sagan:
that scale. I do. I like that scale.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Well, for sure. Okay. Because we have we have started to teach ourselves to do that. Ultimately, for most of us, for the most part, it doesn't actually matter if I understand the Krebs cycle, right, which is the cycle that mitochondria use to cycle ADP through and make energy. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
Even though it's, like, one of the most important processes to sustain my body. Scale theory is less about that kind of science literacy and more interested in, like, taking the basic facts. As you're saying, cyanobacteria have this effect. Right? One of the things that Lynn Margulis was infamous for and then kind of indicated, if I'm narrating it correctly, is the idea that mitochondria were essentially invasive species.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right?
Dorion Sagan:
Well, no. It's alpha proteobacteria, as their closest genetically, but they could have been, you know, eaten. I mean, the thing is once the cyanobacteria oxidized, ruining the planet worse than we will ever do, but also making the fresh air we breathe, that all of the previous life forms that were were anaerobic and not able to survive to free oxygen, which is so reactive, had to either go into the muds or in some cases become symbiotic. And so the the bigger cells that the ancestors to the mitochondria came into were probably archaea, and they were probably poisoned by oxygen. But with the with the mitochondria that were respiring bacteria, they could survive the oxygen by that partnership.
Dorion Sagan:
So that would be a thumbnail of the origin of, mitochondria from respiring bacteria, you know, like, two and a half, 2,000,000,000 years ago.
Joshua DiCaglio:
The interesting thing to me is that then how you rally that to then try to do to kinda hack at, decenter, confuse, rewrite, whatever are narratives.
Dorion Sagan:
You're a rhetorician, and I was like, happy to be science. I I started off 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 in the body of a science writer, you know, because I think that and I also have a very deep interest in philosophy.
Dorion Sagan:
And, also, you know, I have to personally grow up with people scientizing me in in various ways and minimum and now you see that at the global scale, you know, which is how about self parody? It's the science. You know, you gotta believe it. No. That's exactly what you don't have to do with science.
Dorion Sagan:
And that's what one thing that despite it being subjected to the superiority of science on a kind of hierarchical epistemological scale socially, but at least that kind of doubt, leaving aside Anglo American philosophy, analytical philosophy, is still alive in philosophy where, you know, you you have the right to to put things under a ratio and not to make and not to have to make truth claims, let alone publish papers on what you perceive the truth. So I think there's a kind of an immunization to the cockiness of science in a technocratic society such as the one that we're living in by the survival of certain forms of philosophy and inquiry that are not immediately put in through a filter of right and wrong.
Joshua DiCaglio:
So you had to survive that is what you're saying?
Dorion Sagan:
I had to survive my my father not wanting to be interrupted and deliver, you know, beta tests of Cosmos, which was fascinating. I mean, I was I was, when I was 11 or 12, he he a lot of things he would later say on TV, he would say, to me personally, and, and meanwhile, my mother and her second husband, Tian Margolis, she would speak so fast, and you could don't forget a word in edgewise. In either case, that I once joked, using a line from a Theodore Sturgeon, story that I would copy and say the hyperkinetic symbiotic extractions with the microtubuleistic variations, you know, to try to get
Joshua DiCaglio:
the
Dorion Sagan:
get the tenor of the speed of, like, the scientific verbiage that was going on. So but I think yeah. But that doesn't mean that the perspectival shifts you're talking about, didn't come from my mother. In a certain sense, they did. But I think the whole the the microcosmos was an effort to see evolution from which it seem it seems logical, a a microbial perspective.
Dorion Sagan:
And I think that in a lot of space science and a lot of, you know, astrobiology, what formerly known as exobiology, and in a lot of scientific discourses and technocratic scientific discourses with regard to health and everything, there is still, like, this deep shadow of this, like, anthropomorphic God and as God you know, God we got rid of God, and then Rand took his place. To me, it's artistically and philosophically fulfilling to look 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 think it's like a scaler illusion. I think, like, the opposite is a scaler illusion. The idea that we must be superior.
Dorion Sagan:
I mean, it's it seems like a normal, thing for thermodynamic systems that are trying to find energy and feed themselves and deal with the threats around them. You want you're gonna have a tendency towards selfishness, and humans have it in spades. And it may be contributing to their premature demise.
Joshua DiCaglio:
It might be useful then to go back to something you said earlier about what humans do then. Because we experience the world at a certain scale, we have what I and some other people as well have called a scalism, a kind of preference for our scale, and everything has to be rewritten back at our scale. I distinguish between three different definitions of scale in the book. The first I call golfer scaling. You take an object that you presuppose, and you make it really big or you make it really small.
Joshua DiCaglio:
But But the interesting thing about that, like, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or any of these kind of narratives, you know, the kind of fantastic voyage into the body, is that the object remains the same despite going to a scale, which this literally doesn't exist. And in fact, biology has discovered this many times over that, you know, there are limits at which biology, life seems to have to, in order to get bigger or smaller, has to compound itself to do that. So I distinguish Gulliver's scale because there's this way in which we already assume that objects preexist and that we when we're talking about scale, we're just talking about things getting bigger or smaller. And that's completely ignoring these kind of thresholds. And so I've set that to the side as kind of Gulliver's scaling as a kind of imaginary that doesn't even fit the things that we started to describe as scale.
Joshua DiCaglio:
The other one though is is cartographic scaling. And part of the reason that I distinguish that is because it's primarily about representations. The image is actually the map. That is actually one of the the practical ways in which scale as a kind of metric enters. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
Because you need to know the relationship between the map and the territory that you're walking around, cruising towards on your ship. But one of the things that's that I think is problematic about conflating what I'm trying to talk about here with cartographic scaling is that cartography is really all about people and where they wanna go and how they wanna get there.
Dorion Sagan:
Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And there's all sorts of things we add into maps and sort of filter to make them work for us, that it seems like really important that we separate out that process of representation from the larger apparatus of scale whereby we're talking not about the representation, but the observation. So I'm making a distinction here between scale in representation and scale in observation. Because the representation makes it nicely not about not about us even as it is about us again. Right? Like, it's like, oh, you know, we're talking about this, you know, the inner life of the seller or whatever as a representation.
Joshua DiCaglio:
That again lets me off the hook in a certain way Mhmm. As opposed to if I sit here and say, what I am observing is a representation. We're not ignoring the fact that it is. Right? But but I'm noting that it's a representation that's representing to me a whole different level of observation of what I am, about what's about what cells are.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Sometimes it's not just about the representation Mhmm. But about the way in which the representation does something to you. Part of what scale has done is permit us to continue to prefer certain things about our scale, to insert them. Right? Like, if you think about the these these example of this is Google Earth.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? Like, Google Earth is actually a really interesting scalar perception that we can have. It's like, here is the object Earth, but I'm only interested in it because I wanna find places. If you compare that, for instance, as I do some in the book, with some of the things that astronauts say as they're circling the planet, you know, there's the famous speech by Rusty Schweickart that we often just refer to as the no frames, no borders speech. Oh, it turns out you can't see nations up at the planet
Dorion Sagan:
oh, you know, at
Joshua DiCaglio:
the level of planet. What are the terms that I want people to take out of this book is this idea of scalar synecdoche.
Dorion Sagan:
I remember that word that from the book, but I don't I still don't know what it's meant by it. I can't even pronounce synecdoche synecdoche. There was a movie named that. Synecdoche. Right?
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah.
Joshua DiCaglio:
So synecdoche is the kind of metaphorical structure in which you let a part fill in for the hole.
Dorion Sagan:
Right.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? So the quintessential example for this is, like, the White House comes to fill in for our whole structure of government. You realize that we already do this in cynical thing with all of our way of thinking about power. We let the president fill in for the entirety of all of the people. And then you can go one more step than that if you add a kind of ecological question in there and say, well, jeez.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Aren't we even letting humans fill in for all of the animals within these artificial boundaries? One of the things that scale does in relation to to this question of scalism is it lets us put pressure on certain things like what I'm calling here the scalar synecd key, in which we fill in certain things for the entirety of whatever. I don't really think about most of the conversations we have that are kinda laced with science, perhaps is a good way to say it, as really being science communication. Right? Like, a bulk of it happens when you're like, wait a second.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Like, what is the ancestry of my dog? I'm gonna go get a DNA test. Right? Like, you've already bought into a kind of scalar apparatus and a mode of understanding what a what a dog's ancestry is. The scalar synecdoche, again, it's just one of what ultimately could be many of these kind of assumptions that we make about scale that then a more careful accounting of scale helps us see how we're rewriting and assuming certain things about the world that does bear relationship to science, and science will help us understand it to some extent.
Joshua DiCaglio:
But we also need to translate it out of that. I think you you you said it was like a sanitized. You're talking about Butler. Talking about it as a kind of sanitized version of descriptions. And I'm trying to essentially desanitize those scientific descriptions by pointing to the fact that they actually do transform your way of understanding reality.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And so we have to pay attention to that.
Dorion Sagan:
Transforming your understanding of reality, I think, is a good segue into, the relationship, which I think is very interesting. And I know you studied Aurobindo and know a lot about mysticism that is not ultimately necessarily mysticism because it might be showing you the way things really are to a certain extent, to sort of paraphrase Aldous Huxley. That does interest me a lot, and I do think that, you know, for the band The Doors, you know, they took it from Aldous Huxley's book Doors of Perception in which he called consciousness a kind of funnel that's blocking out a lot of things. That's a guy who was injected by his wife on his deathbed with with LSD, and so he might have felt that he merged with the infinite rather than died, whatever that's usually like. And and he took the phrase for his book from William Blake.
Dorion Sagan:
When the doors of perception are clans, things will be seen as they really are infinite, which that's that's something that I think we could we could talk about too in terms of mysticism and psychedelics. But I'll just give two examples. One isn't very psychedelic, but they both fit into that category of my own sort of numinous experiences. So that I think do show interesting, and they aren't the only ones, but scalar sort of epiphanies, you know, where you you feel under the influence of some drug that your entire frame of reference has changed. And so one, just very briefly, was in Toronto.
Dorion Sagan:
I had never tried salvia, which is something you smoke. It's a very short acting psychoactive substance that's very strong, and it gives people soft and, like, bodily changes. It's kind of like a Alice in Wonderland drug, I think it's been called. But, in one minute, I was sitting cross legged on the floor with, like, some incense in somebody's house in Toronto, and I had a shot of some hard liquor. And this is a guy with, you know, he had there was some pretty sparse apartment.
Dorion Sagan:
He had he had a wife or a girlfriend and a daughter. They weren't there. And this was after I gave I gave a talk, but I inhaled that stuff. And then for the next what seemed like an eternity, I was only aware of geometric shapes. I had no frame of reference at all.
Dorion Sagan:
I didn't even know who I was. I felt as if I I I put I in quotes because there there was no sense of self in the same way. See, an I at EYE would be better experiencing these box like shapes, different colors maybe in an arrangement that seems static and and like, some kind of platonic thing. And I think I might have been, like, you know, on a, quote, unquote, real level being, like, transforming some of the shapes of the pictures on the walls and the furniture and the rectilinearity of the room into these eternal shapes in this experience. And then it's a very it's short acting.
Dorion Sagan:
And so then, all of a sudden, I felt as if, like, from the deepest reaches of space, there was, like, this swirling activity that came back to me, and then it was a geometric coming to. And I realized that there 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 and space as we know it. And then the one that isn't psychedelic, but I would put in the same sort of numerous experiences is, and it I it's actually, written up by Evan Thompson in his in his mind and life book, which talks about, like, the the connections of neuroscience and eastern philosophy, phenomenology, and stuff like that.
Dorion Sagan:
We had been in a Lindisfarne conference. I was actually with Natasha Myers at the time, the the rendering molecular person, and, we were in New Mexico. I had been living in Toronto, and I was jet lagged. So I had also taken that night porcine melatonin, melatonin derived from the pineal gland of the pig, the cheapest stuff you could get, like, over there to try to, like, moderate my jet lag. And most importantly, perhaps, I had seen the day before a lecture by the same Evan Thompson talking about the history and the art and techniques of lucid dreaming.
Dorion Sagan:
That morning, I I I had a lucid dream, but it what started off as a non lucid dream where my mother was in a bus. I was waving goodbye to her. That was like a I was getting my, gas, filled at a tank. I put in my card. I was trying to I was I felt inside my pocket.
Dorion Sagan:
And inside the the corner of my jeans pocket, there was a little bit of swag, you know, cheap marijuana. But this was all in a dream. Right? And then I realized I was dreaming as the bus, like, pulled out and stuff. And I looked up, like, where you would look in your own Panella.
Dorion Sagan:
And I'd also been actually, doing kundalini, I I should mention, was another factor where there were some exercises with the pineal gland. But in my sleep state, realizing I'm dreaming, I look up and instead of flying as you know, you probably had a few flying dreams I think most people have, but they're pretty incredible. But instead 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 white clouds in the daytime and completely overlapped and without any blocking of it, night sky and glittering stars at the same time. And so it was a it was quite an incredible experience, and I would like to think that that was a superposition, you know, some quantum superposition or seeing both sides of the earth at a scale that we never have.
Dorion Sagan:
You know? So those are just two of my own personal experiences, but I think there's many, many kind of of psychedelic experiences that seem to be playing a trick with scale, not necessarily in terms of hallucination and in terms of of William Blake when he says when the doors of perception are cleansed, you might see things as they are. It's less finite than our usual view of the Earth.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Thank you for sharing all those experiences. For listeners who want the, like, careful yet experiential accounting for this, I would recommend reading rich Richard Doyle's Darwin's pharmacy. He was, a huge influence on me, and I know that you also write about him, in cosmic apprentice. There's a very, very great and clear accounting in there of the history of this term psychedelic and its relationship to the problem of my manifestation as it emerges in kind of thinking about evolution. So that's just the first sort of note for people listening to this.
Joshua DiCaglio:
The other sort of point of of context that's not personal is that the experience that I talk about in scale theory is Stewart Brand's description of when he first thought to do the whole earth campaign. And he's he says he was sitting on his apartment. I think it was, like, four four or five stories up, tripping on LSD, and then he says he glimpses the curvature of the earth. He immediately thinks of buckminster Fuller talking about the difficulty of conceptualizing ourselves being on a planet. And he says, oh, we need an image of Earth from space from that.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Right? No. In our current and sort of, you know, for the last couple decades, rhetorical context for thinking about psychedelics, it's so easy. And I've talked about this with students all the time. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
You just they just kinda laugh You had an eye roll. Like, it makes people uncomfortable. There's something really important there about the the manifestation of a different perspective. Right? So if psychedelic literally means my manifestation, right, to manifest mind in some way, it makes sense that we would need some kind of modification of our perception, of our way of experiencing reality in order to sort of glimpse these differences in scale on the one hand.
Joshua DiCaglio:
But then we can flip that and say, in situations in which one experiences these modifications in perception and experience, sometimes it suddenly makes sense to describe things in terms of scale. We can take this back to the comment you made earlier about science sanitizing. If we were to sit down with the science scientific descriptions, I think, you you're doing in so much of your work, suddenly it can, if you really just, like, actually contemplate, dwell with, right, to use a nice Heidegger term perhaps, what is being described. And you don't really know what that is, but let's just experiment with, like, oh, here are cells. Here are ecological vectors.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I think that Carl Sagan finds himself in mystical territory in ways that I don't know that he was actually comfortable with. When he says things like we are star stuff and we long to return, what is that doing to your relationship to reality? Well, it's manifesting a different experience of the world that's taking you at these different scales and trying to get you to experience yourself according to those changes. Is that psychedelic? In the process of thinking about scale very carefully and doing this, when I wrote scale theory initially, before I I would write, I would sit for forty five minutes and meditate.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And then I would sit down, and it would feel like a continuous part of the meditation. It would put me in the state of mind in which I wasn't just thinking about Mhmm. Cells. But I was observing that this description was rewriting my experience. Right?
Joshua DiCaglio:
And it just requires a kind of slowing down and, really attending to, like, wait a second. You just described me in terms of thermodynamic dispersal. It feels trippy. And I would have moments where I'd be walking through the kitchen, and I would feel myself as the cosmos walking through itself. This is, like, one piece of the universe walking around itself going, oh, look over here is a pan.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And over here, some food to put in this pan. And then I would have these, like, scale switches where it felt overlaid very similar to what you were just talking about there in terms of, like, kind of cubist imagery. What if I think of this, and here's here's Dorian Sagan showing up in my brain, you know, circa 02/2013 as I'm cooking some dinner. The aggregate of cells is producing some nutrients because the cells need some some nutrients. And then, you know, then Richard Dawkins shows up and is like, it's the gene.
Joshua DiCaglio:
You know? And then you get the selfish gene discourse come in overlaid on top of each other. And so I've articulated that now in the more academic sense in the book as scientists find themselves entering the discursive terrain of mysticism when somebody like Carl Sagan says, the cosmos is all that was, all that is, and all that ever will be. It's like, what are you like, woah. All of it?
Joshua DiCaglio:
All of it? You mean all like like right. Like, including the ones we haven't discovered yet because they're, like, too big or too small, and we haven't quite figured out how to make them appear to us as relevant differences. Like, I don't think it's just scale that does this. I think there's a lot of different ways that we could talk about science doing this problem.
Joshua DiCaglio:
But scale certainly has brought into view for me specific ways in which science has sanitized its descriptions. Once I started paying attention to this, I realized from looking at the scalar terminology, where did, for instance, the term hierarchy come from? And it turns out that in almost every case, there is some relationship to a mystical articulation first. From what I understand, Pseudo Dionysus, who is a crucial figure in the history of Christian mysticism, was probably the person who coined the term hierarchy, not to talk about political structures, but to talk about the layering of existence and the attempt to get to the all. I kept finding these kind of mystical articulations.
Joshua DiCaglio:
So first of all, I then say, okay. Look. Let's just define mysticism in a more rigorous way as the attempt to induce and make sense of experiences beyond the human bounds, especially the cosmic perspective. Because for some reason, the cosmic perspective seems to be used more readily than the microcosm. What if mystics in observing these certain people who start to observe their perception, and then they realize that beyond themselves, what they think of themselves, is this vast reality that's really just two scales.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And science has fleshed out all these other scales in between there and when smaller than that and so on. Your human experience is a parsing of this whole reality. The definition of the cosmos there is really mystical. It's actually much clearer if you read Alexander von Humboldt's account of what he's doing in cosmos, which is the precedent to Carl Sagan's cosmos. I talk about this in chapter 10.
Joshua DiCaglio:
That perspective of the vast totality of existence suddenly gives you a very different perspective on reality. This is territory that seems less comfortably scientific, certainly. But nonetheless, I wanna encourage readers to go there because in these changes in scale, how they become transformations of you and not just descriptions that we have of the world. I have this chapter on objects, a chapter on subjects, and chapter on relations. In each of those, the primary difficulty in us understanding our scalar configuration of objects is that in some way, objects are insubstantial.
Joshua DiCaglio:
And then it makes sense in some way to describe everything as one, because on what basis do you distinguish things out? Where do you go when you understand yourself as cells or atoms or parts of an ecology or parts of the sun? You can't leave yourself intact there. That's what allows us to keep that kind of objective ruse is that you don't apply the scale to what you think you are. You're not actually in control.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I don't know how the cell is doing that. I don't know how the oxygen got here. That is astonishing as, something to attend to. When you try to understand the scientific descriptions, like, you say I made a puzzle. Sure.
Joshua DiCaglio:
I'll buy that. How does that revise my experience? You end up in kind of mystical territory. And then you flip that and you say, now I'm reading these mystics to try to understand this tradition. It seems like they, all over the place, articulate these scalar terms.
Dorion Sagan:
You mentioned my father's pale blue dot thing. Preactli Zepsevic, who co wrote this paper in Biosystems, where they said you could also have a pale blue dot of the Earth in terms of organisms. Like, humans are a pale blue dot in terms of where we are in the nexus of life on Earth that has 10 to 30,000,000 species only to include sexually reproducing organisms, the plants, the fungi, and the animals, which are all basically sexually reproducing organisms. Meanwhile, the the bacteria and archaea are trading genes all the time. They don't need to have sex to reproduce, but they trade genes even more than we do.
Dorion Sagan:
In that frame of reference and you look and you add in time, people are minuscule. They they disappear. So if you look at the pale blue dot, I think it was taken on Valentine's Day when Voyager turned back and saw the whole Earth as just being this little dot. Nabokov describes somewhere Earth as a pinpoint planet. More recently, the a deep solar system view was taken from Saturn where, the glare of the sun was abated by Enceladus, this, like, water world of a moon of Saturn, and you could, see Earth, and there's a tiny little arc in the montage that NASA made, which is the moon.
Dorion Sagan:
You keep on going in that direction, and Earth disappears. It disappears. So there's no more Earth. From a scalar perspective, astronomically, with our ability to see, we don't see the whole place that we are. So that makes me think about infinity and the strange mathematics of infinity and what else we're missing.
Dorion Sagan:
It also makes me think of Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, that everything that that happens will happen eternally. And I think I think he had an experience and that it was a kind of psychedelic experience, so it might have been broke by a seizure or, some of his he had a lot of a lot of maladies. But I think it was also scientifically informed because at the time, it's like thermodynamic speculations included the idea that, you know, sufficient energy, a closed system, will go through all possible states. And so if space if you look at space as finite, but time is infinite, which he did partly because he argued that if time could have stopped, it would have done so already. So, therefore, time must be infinite.
Dorion Sagan:
I think he plugged those sort of Victorian 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, to hinge on an experience of interconnection as well as an understanding of it. And that's kind of what we're talking about, whether you wanna call it mystical or not, whether it's precipitated by psychedelics or not. Those things can and do happen, and they're very interesting in terms of scale. Isn't this the attraction of numinous experiences of revelation and religion, psychedelic satori, the conviction that something real has somehow, with apologies to Ursula Le Guin, because she doesn't like that word somehow since she's a weasel word, somehow been revealed.
Dorion Sagan:
Nietzsche's eyes, when he whispered to Lou Salome and her as he reports in her biography of him, the secret, I would say, the experience of the eternal return standing in Switzerland by Lake Silva Plana by a, quote, unquote, pyramidal block of stone as Nietzsche describes it, 6,000 feet above man and time. That's a quote from his description of his experience, and he you can call it that. But if you're above or outside time or seeing time and on, as sometimes mystics, describe it, Can we even call that an inexperience? He tended to call it his thought of thoughts and his heaviest burden in part because it suggested that you would have to will everything that happens knowing that it would happen again no matter how horrible it was in part of the structure of, like, a causally closed universe. I can't help but think that such an experience of the sublime, I say, the numinous is also a matter of scale.
Dorion Sagan:
The one of the idios, you know, the same root of the word idiosyncratic and idiot, but it means private. It was used by, Heraclitus. He divided the idios. Cosmos is your private world, like the one you entered the dream, the 40% of our lives we spend dreaming. And then the cosmos coin, oh, it's like a coin.
Dorion Sagan:
It circulates. That's what we're doing right now. We we circulate and we mix our ideas, and they're different in the sense that, you know, one is more private. And in this this numinous experience, there seems to be, like, a a merger of the two, and the person becomes into nothing and also and possibly at the same time, everything. You know, when I thought about this and came across these ideas of infinity and how people thought about it, one of the things I I came across is the amusing story that the mafia boss who interviewed Meyer Lansky, who was a big accountant for the mafia, thought one divided by infinity is zero.
Dorion Sagan:
And he said, no. One divided by infinity is infinity. Apparently, the mafia like the math of what dollar signs in their eyes, dollar signs that manifest it as cold hard cash. Technically, in math, it's called undefined. Infinity is not a number.
Dorion Sagan:
It just goes on and on, so you can't do the math. One divided by infinity might be nothing, but then what happened to the one? The Italian mathematician Luigi Fantiapi wrestled with this problem, opting, I think, for the answer that one divided by infinity is everything or perhaps everything and nothing. This would seem to mirror the experience of the lover before his beloved, the scientist before nature, the artist lost in her thought. If infinity exists, perhaps in time, as Nietzsche thought, because it would have already stopped if it could have, although space could still be closed.
Dorion Sagan:
It might be another example, a kind of philosophical psychedelic experience without the bite the history of humans in two. But I I feel like I have experience, again, in quotes because being outside time is not exactly an experience. And and I I do think that, you know, like, when you're talking about the set of crypto mysticism of Carl Sagan, my father, it is a sense of at the one hand, it's very egotistic and narcissistic. He's a spokesman on TV with the aids going out into space that might be some extraterrestrial airs or appropriate other organs. At the other time, the message is that I am being swamped.
Dorion Sagan:
I'm swallowed into this giant, very old, if not timeless entity, and that's who I am, and that's who you, the viewers, are.
Joshua DiCaglio:
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 of the objects that we talk about at different scales. Like, that's always sort of lurking in the background.
Joshua DiCaglio:
How do we get to these objects to begin with? Who are you when you get to these objects? Who's left to feel insignificant? Who who's left to separate out you from the rest of the cosmos? And that's where I find it actually really useful to keep the whole scalar spectrum in view, and to experiment with it to see what this layered redescription has actually done for us.
Joshua DiCaglio:
You know, we wanna leap to, like, when are you saying that, like, the cosmos is actually like a human body or something? Let's just pause before that and just notice that the same shift in scale has happened in both instances. So the traditions of contemplation become really important there for thinking about how do we actually sit with those changes in perspective long enough so that we actually they actually do something to us.
Dorion Sagan:
Well, hopefully, your book can act as a Lafarmacon, one of those, like I I called it in cosmic apprentice, writing with being a a mind altering drive. Hope you can get safely high.
Joshua DiCaglio:
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 I don't spend a lot of time talking about specific examples because I want any reader to understand whatever they study in relation to what these transformations of scale has already done for.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Thanks, Dorian. Thank you so much.
Dorion Sagan:
Thank you.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Alright. Yeah. I mean, so we should just have a conversation then.
Dorion Sagan:
Yeah. Take out the word conversation. That word's way over you, so everybody will have a conversation.
Joshua DiCaglio:
Well, jeez. Okay.
Dorion Sagan:
Okay. We're off to a good start. It can only go up it can only go uphill unless you have a negative connotation for uphill downhill from here.