At this time there still existed a union of literary and scientific cultures; there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come. There was indeed, between Coleridge and Davy, a close friendship and a sense of almost mystical affinity and rapport. The analogy of chemical transformation leading to the emergence of wholly new compounds was central to Coleridge’s thinking, and at one point he planned to set up a chemical laboratory with Davy. The poet and the chemist were fellow warriors, analyzers and explorers of a principle of connectedness of mind and nature.
Coleridge and Davy seemed to see themselves as twins: Coleridge the chemist of language, Davy the poet of chemistry.
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George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad lexical relationships between most words in the English language.
But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left something important out of his definition of life. In order for living organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted, they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.
Davy’s inaugural lecture enthralled many, including Mary Shelley. Years later, in Frankenstein, she was to model Professor Waldman’s lecture on chemistry rather closely on some of Davy’s words. (Specifically, when, speaking of galvanic electricity, Davy had said, “A new influence has been discovered, which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only by animal organs.”) And Coleridge, the greatest talker of his age, always came to Davy’s lectures, not only to fill his chemical notebooks but, as he said, “to renew my stock of metaphors.
I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.
Most important is that feelings are so interwoven with thinking that to allow one and not the other is to diminish both. We can listen to words and we can listen to tears. It is all the same thing. I know that at the moment the world of brain talk is full of the separation of these two systems. But that will pass soon enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is everything all at once. Even space is stuff that hugs us. Life is one lavish act of touching. Thinking and feeling are no exceptions. So we can rejoice.
And when someone is thinking along and starts to cry, let’s just be glad they felt psychologically safe enough with us to do that. And then watch the fresh thinking that follows. And the bright eyes that say so.
A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are
intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.