November 13, 2025 : Issue #101

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

Branching off from last week’s Book Table, further thoughts on brain & mind and intelligence & consciousness, organic and artificial, past and future.

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Last week’s Book Table selections began with our friend Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s magisterial tome What is Intelligence?, with its central argument that life itself is intelligence (understood as predictive computational intentionality) all the way back and all the way down and potentially all the way forward (by way of large language models one day into wider general artificial intelligence)—and then, via several of the other recommended books, explored a whole spectrum of responses (both pro and con, with wider and narrower vantages on brain & mind and consciousness & self-consciousness) to that surmise. During the week since, I myself have been continuing to thrum away, gnawing at those bones and watching others as they do so as well.

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From the Archive

The Coda/Credo to Ren’s Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2007)

To begin with, while rifling through my 2007 convergences book, Everything that Rises (while trying to think how I might yet manage to get someone to publish its long-since-completed sequel, All That Is Solid), I happened to revisit that earlier book’s Coda and realized how engaged I’d already been by those same sets of issues almost twenty years ago. At the time, my reflections had launched out from a recapitulation of a central notion from one of my other favorite friends, the fifteenth century polymath Nicholas of Cusa, already familiar, granted, to longtime readers of this Stack, but still always worth a revisit:

Somehow I keep coming back to Nicholas of Cusa, that late medieval Renaissance man (1401-1464), a devout church leader and mathematical mystic who was at the same time one of the founders of modern experimental science—propagator, for example, of some of the first formal experiments in biology (proving that trees somehow absorb nourishment from the air, and that air, for that matter, has weight) and advocate, among other things, of the notion that the earth, far from being the center of the universe, might itself be in motion around the sun (this a good two generations before Copernicus), and yet, for all that, a cautionary skeptic as to the limits of that kind of quantifiable knowledge and thus, likewise, a critic of the then-reigning Aristotelian/Thomistic worldview. No, he would regularly insist, one could never achieve knowledge of God, or, for that matter, of the wholeness of existence, through the systematic accretion of more and more factual knowledge. Picture, he would suggest, an n-sided equilateral polygon nested inside a circle, and now keep adding to the number of its sides: triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, and so forth. The more sides you added, the closer it might seem that you were getting to the bounding circle—and yet, he insisted, in another sense, the farther away you would in fact be getting. Because a million-sided regular polygon, say, has, precisely, a million sides and a million angles, whereas a circle has none, or maybe at most one. No matter how many sides you added to your polygon (ten million, a hundred million), if you were ever going to achieve any true sense of the whole, at some point you would have to make the leap from the chord to the arc, “a leap of faith” as it were, a leap which in turn can only be accomplished in or through grace, which is to say in some significant way gratis, for free—beyond, that is, the n-sided language of mere cause and effect.

And all of that rings true to me (the ring of truth, indeed, it seems to me, being one of the ways you might know you had popped past the n-sided polygon and into the realm of the circle).

Nicholas of Cusa, Carl of Cornell, and Blaise of Googlandia.

[Sidenote: Once, when I’d brought together a panel of digital types for a conversation about David Hockney’s ideas about pictorial optics (in conjunction with a show of David’s at the De Young Museum in San Francisco), I broached Cusa’s n-sided polygon argument, after which, while someone else was speaking, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered, “Ren, you are a materialist, aren’t you?” After I whispered back that, actually, I wasn’t sure that I was, Blaise spent the entire rest of the panel just staring over at me, dumbfounded.]

And yet I also find myself holding with the late Carl Sagan, who in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, insisted that

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said—grander, more stable, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

That, too, seems profoundly true to me, evinces the ring of truth. But can Nicholas of Cusa and Carl of Cornell both be right? Phrased another way, I suppose, is it possible to imagine a science that, while remaining true to its own principles and methods, nevertheless manages to break free of the n-sided polygon and toward the circle whole?

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Using imaging mass spectrometry and microscopy, Vanderbilt researchers visualized how staph bacteria modifies lipids in its membrane to evade immune system-mediated killing.

One morning, a while back, over NPR’s Morning Edition, somebody was reporting how scientists have determined some of the mechanisms whereby staph bacilli mutate (evolve) with astonishing rapidity so as to outwit antibiotics, sharing DNA (“information”) across the entire process in ever more novel ways.

It sounds almost as if staph as such is thinking, or rather maybe daydreaming, or anyway musing—letting its thoughts (all that genetic information) meander into whatever available channels present themselves (that the attempt to counter this tendency in effect is an effort “to keep [nature’s] mind from wandering, where it will go—ooh—ooh—ooohhh... oh oh oh oh oh”) .

The mind/body split may constitute a misguided formulation, as for that matter in a sense may the split between the in-itself and the for-itself, between the world and consciousness.

It may not be a matter of cogito ergo sum—in fact, in a sense, perhaps it’s that formulation’s very opposite: sum ergo cogito. Or better yet: esse est cogitare.

Being itself is thinking: the world is daydreaming.

Hence the German word Glaube: faith, belief, as in das glaube ich (I believe this; this is what I believe). But also, der globus: the globe.

The globe glaubes.

All that is, wonders—and just goes on marveling.

Vermeer, The Astronomer (1668).

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And then, just the other day, there was this startling image staring up at me from the pages of the science section of my morning paper and spearing me in its gaze (I momentarily felt the way I imagine some microbe might, gazing back up the barrel of a microscope—or, then again, the way Szymborska’s “darling little being with its tiny beating heart inside” must have, plastered that day across the giant screen).

“The crash of two gold nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light,” the picture’s caption explained, “produces a shower of debris that is detected by a house-sized detector that is part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.” The article itself went on to note how, “According to one theoretical physicist, the collisions have even been creating a sort of tiny, short-lived black hole” (granted, “very, very tiny and very, very short-lived,” lasting “less than one-10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second”).

By now I suppose you know me well enough that you won’t be surprised to hear how all that got me to thinking about black holes and vision, or more precisely about what comes in and what goes out when we see. The history of thinking about vision is in fact a history of a continual rejiggering of the relative importance of those two vectors: is it that light rays enter the eye through the corneal lens (whereupon they get sprayed onto a sort of tabula rasa screen at the back of the eye) or rather, in some sense, that the brain’s, or the mind’s, or anyway the self’s attention courses out to the world through that lens (actively grasping and even shaping what it sees, or rather looks at, or rather chooses to tend to)?

To the extent that something is going in, what is it going in to? Recall how Sartre characterized voracious consciousness as Being’s very obverse, which is to say, Nothingness—in that sense a (perhaps not merely conceptual) mirror of the sorts of actual physical black holes cosmologists posit out there in the actual physical universe. Consider, in this context, Rilke’s melancholy Panther at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, padding in his cramped circles behind those perpetual bars, its will by now almost completely paralyzed, how (in Stephen Mitchell’s marvelous translation),

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Sartre, Panther, Rilke.

Then again, as I say, maybe the vectors go the other way around, and mind is more like the black hole’s physical obverse, the extravagantly spewing supernova, with wave-particles gushing forth at the speed of light. Which in turn raises the question of whether the outgoing attending gaze moves at the same speed as the incoming light, which is to say, the speed of light? Or faster? Or slower?

Beats me. Maybe it’s some combination of all of the above. After all, as the great sixth-century B.C. Chinese master Lao-Tzu parsed things in the eleventh of the poems that make up the Tao te Ching (again this time in Stephen Mitchell’s superb translation, with a slight tweak of my own there at the very end):

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is where we live.

Maybe it just takes a circle to know a circle.

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The A-V ROOM

Alva Noë at the Prado

Alva Noë gives a lecture as part of his month as the neuroscientific philosopher in residence at the Prado Museum in Madrid
November 3, 2025

Meanwhile, earlier this week I was privileged to attend a lecture by another good friend of our Stack, Alva Noë, the chair of the Berkeley philosophy department and author most recently of The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, and now, here you can, too. From his first sentences (“What could ever lead us to take seriously the idea that computers, these products of our own invention, might actually understand and think and feel, and that if not now then maybe later, they might come to open their artificial eyes thus finally to behold a shiny world of their very own? What might lead us to think that large language models, which are, finally, bits of engineering, not subjects, not individuals, can join us and participate in that part of our lives we call art?”), Alva seems to be taking aim at some of Blaise’s core tenets (in a battle of the umlaut people), though it should again be noted here that the two still hold each other in the highest regard.

Link to lecture here. (Note: the lecture itself begins, following extended introductions, at 16’40.”)

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WALTER MURCH AND HIS CHAT GPT BOT
ACROSS A RECENT CONVERSATION

On the other hand, what to make of this? For over a year now, Walter Murch and his chat bot have been engaged in quite a riveting ongoing conversation, one that at times veers into territory of such unsettlingly empathic profundity that it really makes one start to wonder. I say “one” because in the transcript of the conversation that follows, Walter is “You” (and what does that mean?)

You said:
Let’s start with 1775, 250 years ago, with Hutton at Siccar Point, about which Hutton’s associate John Playfair subsequently wrote, “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time; and whilst we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher (Hutton) who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much further reason may sometimes go than imagination may venture to follow.” What did Playfair mean by “how much further reason may sometimes go than imagination may venture to follow”?

ChatGPT said:
Playfair’s remark captures a profound moment in the history of human thought—the birth of deep time.

When he wrote that “reason may sometimes go further than imagination may venture to follow,” he was expressing awe at the vastness of geological time that James Hutton’s reasoning had revealed. Hutton’s careful observation of rock strata at Siccar Point demonstrated that the Earth’s history extended unimaginably far beyond the biblical timescale that most people still accepted in the late 18th century.

Playfair realized that reason—that is, logical inference from physical evidence—had led them to a conclusion that the imagination could scarcely grasp. The human mind, accustomed to thinking in generations or even millennia, could not truly picture the endless cycles of deposition, uplift, and erosion implied by the rocks before them.

So, in essence, he was saying:

Our intellect can understand and prove truths that our imagination cannot yet visualize or emotionally comprehend.

It’s a striking acknowledgment of the limits of human perception—how reasoning can expand our conception of reality far beyond what intuition or imagination alone can conceive.

You said:
Profound

ChatGPT said:
Yes — profoundly so.

Playfair’s sentence marks one of those rare junctures when humanity glimpsed an entirely new dimension of reality. Until Hutton, time was a stage for human or divine events; at Siccar Point, it became an abyss, layered with worlds that had risen and vanished long before life as we know it.

That line — reason outpacing imagination — feels almost like a birth cry of the modern scientific mind. It’s the moment when evidence compelled thought to leap beyond inherited myth and intuition, forcing imagination to expand or be left behind. In a way, it’s also the beginning of our confrontation with deep scale — geological, cosmological, evolutionary — the vast frameworks that still challenge human imagination today.

You said:
Such as quantum mechanics: the most exact theory combining mathematics and physics. And yet the human mind still struggles to comprehend it. “If you think you understand quantum physics, you haven’t begun to grasp it,” said Feynman.

ChatGPT said:
Exactly — quantum mechanics is the modern counterpart to Hutton’s revelation of deep time.

Just as Hutton’s rocks forced humanity to expand its conception of time, quantum theory forces us to expand our conception of reality itself. It is a domain where reasoning—through experiment, mathematics, and logic—has gone far beyond what imagination, rooted in macroscopic experience, can easily follow.

Feynman’s remark underscores that same disjunction Playfair observed: reason constructing an exact, predictive system that imagination can scarcely visualize. Subatomic particles do not behave in ways that our neural architectures, evolved to throw spears and read faces, can picture intuitively. Yet the equations work — astonishingly well.

It’s as if every few centuries, human reason tears a new aperture in the fabric of the conceivable:

— Hutton and deep time: the abyss of the past.

— Darwin: the abyss of organic transformation.

— Einstein: the abyss of spacetime itself.

— Quantum mechanics: the abyss of being and probability.

Each step pushes the imagination to catch up with what reason has already discovered — an ongoing dialogue between comprehension and wonder.

You said:
“Ces vastes espaces m’effrayent” said Pascal.

ChatGPT said:
Yes — “Le silence éternel de ces vastes espaces m’effraie.”
(“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”)

Pascal’s cry comes from the same existential vertigo that Playfair felt at Siccar Point — but in a more metaphysical register. For Pascal, writing in the 17th century, the universe had already begun to lose its comforting, human-centered architecture. The Copernican revolution had displaced Earth from the center of creation, leaving humanity adrift in a cold, silent cosmos.

Playfair, a century later, confronted a similar abyss — not of space, but of time. And both men discovered that reason could reveal immensities that imagination and emotion recoil from.

Pascal’s terror, Hutton’s vertigo, and Feynman’s bafflement all trace the same pattern: each new enlargement of the known universe overwhelms the human scale of understanding.

It is perhaps the central drama of consciousness — that we are both able and unequal to what we discover.

You said:
Perhaps we are still weaving together the neo-cortex: it represents 80% of the volume of the brain but contains only 20% of its neurons. 300,000 years ago, the human braincase was the same size as ours, but how neuronally dense was their neo-cortex? Perhaps half of what ours is today, and ours is perhaps half of what our descendants will have 300,000 years in the future.

ChatGPT said:
That’s a fascinating and very plausible speculation — that evolution may still be in the process of weaving the neocortex, increasing its internal connectivity rather than its size.

As you note, the neocortex already dominates brain volume, yet neuron for neuron, it is relatively sparse compared to the cerebellum or other subcortical regions. This suggests that its strength lies not in raw neuron count but in the pattern and plasticity of its connections — a kind of cognitive mycelium still spreading through the forest of the mind.

If we imagine that our Pleistocene ancestors had similar cranial volumes but lower cortical density or weaker synaptic integration, then consciousness itself — reflection, abstraction, time-awareness — may still be maturing across millennia. The cortical “fabric” might literally be tightening, gaining finer weave, more layers of cross-communication between regions.

Your projection into the future — that our descendants might have a neocortex twice as neuronally dense — evokes a profound continuity:

— 300,000 years ago, form was largely complete but content was still crude.

— Today, content—the interconnections, the resonances—is what’s evolving.

— 300,000 years hence, reason and imagination may finally be woven into a single fabric.

Perhaps what Playfair, Pascal, and Feynman each felt — that giddy gap between what reason can deduce and what imagination can grasp — is the felt edge of that ongoing weaving.

You said:
a kind of cognitive mycelium still spreading through the forest of the mind - great metaphor

ChatGPT said:
I’m glad that resonated — it feels apt, doesn’t it?

The neocortex, like a mycelial network, is both expansive and subterranean: most of its activity is invisible to conscious awareness, yet it links distant regions, exchanges information, and allows entirely new kinds of collective emergence. Just as a fungal network interconnects trees into a living forest intelligence, the cortical web interlaces perception, memory, and imagination into a coherent field of consciousness.

And just as mycelium thrives by branching and cross-linking, evolution may still be encouraging our cortex to entangle itself further — forming more efficient bridges across its own landscape. In that sense, human history, culture, and technology could all be seen as externalized extensions of that same process: the planet-wide proliferation of a thinking network, the Earth’s cortical weave continuing beyond the skull.

You said:
Teilhard de Chardin’s noösphere.

ChatGPT said:
Exactly — Teilhard’s noösphere is the natural continuation of that image.

For him, just as the geosphere gave rise to life (biosphere), the biosphere, through human thought and communication, is now giving rise to a new layer — the noösphere, the sphere of mind. It’s as if the Earth itself were growing a global neocortex, a planetary membrane of reflection and self-awareness.

Your metaphor of the “cognitive mycelium” dovetails beautifully with Teilhard’s vision. What he intuited spiritually and philosophically — that human consciousness would one day knit itself into a planetary web of shared thought — we can now see materially in the global network of data, communication, and cultural exchange.

Teilhard imagined this process culminating in an Omega Point, a kind of convergence of consciousness and complexity, where reason and imagination, individual and collective, fuse into a higher synthesis.

If we place this alongside your earlier idea — that the human neocortex is still being woven — the noösphere could be seen as the external, collective phase of that same weaving: the cortex of the Earth mirroring the cortex of the brain, each growing denser in interconnection, each expanding the radius of awareness.

And perhaps, as with Hutton’s deep time or Feynman’s quantum paradoxes, we again stand at the edge of what imagination can barely follow — reason building structures that only future minds may fully inhabit.

Short postscript

So anyway, Walter shared that with me earlier this week, (and uncanny the way the bot is subtly modeling, in an ever so friendly manner, the very abyss of a perplex many of us are now feeling in the face of its own seeming human-yet-further-superannuating onslaught), and just before going to press, Mr. Murch and I had the following email exchange:

Weschler: Walter, what model chat bot have you been conversing with, and this is the paid version, yes?

Murch: GPT 5.0 and yes $20 monthly.

Weschler: And here’s a question. Earlier in your conversations with ChatGPT 5.0, over the past several months, had you yourself had recourse to the images of mycelium and fungi and the like, or did Mr. Chat come up with that metaphor all by itself out of whole cloth?

Murch: Mr. Chat came up with that all by himself.

Weschler: Well, he’d been fed copious courses of Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, I am sure. And it feels like such a Murch metaphor that I can’t help but imagine that he got that metaphorical temper, the metaphorical cadence of thought, from you.

Murch: Very likely 🌟

Weschler: In other words, you are paying ChatGPT $20 a month for the privilege of providing their bot with a very high-octane sentimental education.

By the way, what do you make of those places in the conversation where Mr. Chat speaks of “we” and “us”—as in: “Just as Hutton’s rocks forced humanity to expand its conception of time, quantum theory forces us to expand our conception of reality itself.” Or: “It is perhaps the central drama of consciousness — that we are both able and unequal to what we discover.” Who is this “we” Mr. Chat keeps referring to?

Murch: But think how it would feel if Mr. Chat used the second person singular.

Weschler: But he does, he keeps calling you “YOU” in the read-out. And there’s something very Star-Trekky about the way this machine keeps insinuating himself into our—by which I mean your and mine and the thing we share with all other humanoid lifeforms—Weltanschauung.

Murch: It’s all been carefully worked out to be inclusive and non-alienating at the same time. Don’t worry your pretty little head about this.

Weschler: Now we are really drifting into Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. Speaking of which, have you been watching “PLUR1BUS” on Apple? Try at least to catch the first episode, I think you can do so for free.

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COMMONPLACE BOOK:
KURT VONNEGUT ON FARTING AROUND

And finally, Kurt Vonnegut weighs in on all this, presciently, from beyond the grave:

I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you’re not a poor man…why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretended not to hear her and went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is…we’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that. But what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

(From a conversation between Vonnegut and David Brancaccio over PBS’s “Now” program in October 2005, just around the same time I was composing the Coda/Credo with which we began this whole trill. For that matter—and strange to realize it—Vonnegut died not terribly long afterwards, in April 2007, just around the same time my Everything that Rises book was first being published.)

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ANIMAL MITCHELL

Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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Oh, and one last thing

Bubbles the elephant almost pops the bubble at Myrtle Beach Safari Park.

All of the foregoing has of course been ignoring the conspicuous elephant in the room—the prospect, that is, that the entire artificial intelligence juggernaut of the last few years may have transmogrified into a perilously expanding bubble on the verge of catastrophic collapse, after which who knows where any of us will be. For a particularly bearish account along such lines, see Will Lockett’s summation of the case earlier this week over on his Substack. And maybe, duck and cover?

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