Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [10]
The combination of the hallucinogenic plant brew and the waves of sound, smell, and smoke orchestrated by Flores unleashed a flood of thoughts and images in my mind. In the realm of visions I saw a long, tall figure like a cross between Picassoâs Don Quixote and the Egyptian god Horus stalking around a carnival scene. I knew I was hallucinating. Floresâs singing resonated in my bones like old music reaching back to the roots of our species. I eventually remembered to focus on intelligence in nature. I saw myself as a biological organism, my heart pumping blood without my thinking about it, lungs breathing when I sleep, neurons firing when I think, body repairing itself when wounded. I felt like a wet robot becoming self-aware, careening toward a dreadful question: Who programmed me? What if an intelligence acted not only in the intricate workings of present-day cells, but also as a creative force at the origin of life forms?
The question was dreadful because I am an agnosticâmeaning I know that I donât know, in particular regarding final causes. The word comes from the Greek a gnôstos, not known. Floresâs ayahuasca session led me to ponder my presuppositions. A scene from my adolescence came to mind: I was sitting in a religion class in a Swiss high school listening to the teacher, a Benedictine monk in white robes, who had a round, bald head; he was talking with enthusiasm about âGod of the universe.â At one point, his shiny head caught my attention and prompted me to ask a question: âAs our heads are no bigger than soccer balls, and as the universe is so immense, how can we know with certitude about God of the universe?â To my surprise, the monk told me to leave the room because of the âimpertinenceâ of my question. As I stood in the lonely corridor outside the classroom door, I became certain the question had validity. Surely the size of our brains limits our capacity to grasp things. So how does a reliable understanding of the universe hold in three pounds of gray, fleshy matter? From that moment on, I found it difficult to subscribe wholeheartedly to concepts I canât understand, such as âGod of the universe.â
I sat through Floresâ ayahuasca session on a mattress, scribbling in my notebook in the dark. Ayahuasca visions can contain information and insights, and writing them down helps me to remember them.
I knew that the concept of a creative force at the origin of life is a matter of faith. Some Christian scientists and philosophers contend that the biological world is rife with evidence of âintelligent design.â They say that cells contain protein machinery that is too complex and precisely engineered to have evolved through a series of random mutations. And they say that the DNA in our cells contains huge amounts of complex information that cannot have originated in chance and necessity. They argue that this âirreducible complexityâ points with near certainty to the existence of an âintelligent designer,â often a thinly disguised version of God. By associating âintelligenceâ and âdesignâ when discussing nature, proponents of this view move away from the verifiable to the theological. The existence of God, or a designer, is a matter of belief and cannot be demonstrated, no matter how much evidence one piles up regarding cellular complexity.
I wanted no truck with the intelligent-design movement. By considering intelligence in nature, I was not seeking to explore