“In a society
increasingly constructed on the power of the computer, one would be well
advised to hold fast the thought that the idea
of God is the master algorithm.” ~ A.
Burnbridge, Particle and Wave: A
Navigational Guide to the Practical Transit of Light.
******
I
have, over the course of many years, spent considerable hours reflecting on the
multitude of things conveyed to me by my revered mentor, an exercise of some
difficulty given his writing style and teaching methodology. As a writer,
Burnbridge is most often characterized --- many would say justifiably so --- as
irrational, illogical, turgid, inchoate, fragmentary, fundamentally formless. In
his retrospective overview of Burnbridge’s magnum opus, (re)Evolutionary Biotics, Philip Anthony Macklinmore, writing in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, says: “On
the whole, the four volumes of this admittedly massive undertaking must be
considered as a sort of tautological conundrum, a mash-up of thoughts each
wrenched from its context in its home world of theology, philosophy,
psychology, mathematics, literature, and science and arrayed across the four
volumes as though on some infinitely multi-dimensional chessboard, free from
the tyrannies of both time and space, a mental universe essentially and
entirely self-referential resonant nonetheless beyond the boundaries of its
tight closure, a bass line to a fugal music of the spheres. Largely unreadable
in any ordinary sense of the word, it can only be experienced and allowed to
gestate.”
His
pedagogic style was no less idiosyncratic. He took on few students, perhaps no
more than three dozen over the entire course of his career, and chose these by
criteria incomprehensible to any but himself. One did not apply to be
Burnbridge’s pupil, one was invited out of the blue. Nor did there appear to be
any prerequisite for his tutelage. One was simply beckoned out of his own world
and plunged, consciousness first, into Burnbridge’s. In his teaching as in his writing,
he labored (if indeed for him it was a labor) not so much to impart knowledge
as to produce an effect. He held no formal classes, conversed but did not
lecture, suggested readings but did not guide them, and stressed above all else
silently patient and reflective observation of the reality in which one found
oneself submerged. “I am not a teacher,” he once said. “I am simply a
vocabulary, a means whereby one day to speak.”
I
note these few disjunct facts in hopes of giving some context, however vaporous,
to what follows. I have been rereading Particle
and Wave for several years now, rereading it in the only way possible to
read Burnbridge, without hope of comprehension and driven simply by the recurrent
desire to be intimately in his presence, rather as one stands before a fine
painting or an ancient tree or an oceanside sunset. The quote at the head of
this musing is one of many that has stuck with me throughout that endeavor. As
with much of Burnbridge’s thought, it has seemed to me at one and the same time
unintelligible and fecund with import. In particular, it has been what at first
seems merely a minor detail of emphasis, that grace note of italization ---
“the idea of God” --- that has
confounded my understanding and troubled my imagination.
In
reading him, I never lose sight of the fact that Burnbridge was a Jesuit, a
profoundly religious person though never ostentatiously so, a thinker not an
evangelizer, and it is that primal fact about him that oscillates through the
whole of my reflection on this thought of his, a sine wave of vexing
perplexity. Would it not have been more theologically conventional, more
crisply metaphorical if a bit more mundane, to assert simply that “God is the
master algorithm?” And what to make of the faintly threatening admonition “one
would be well advised?”
Silently patient
and reflective observation of the reality in which one finds oneself submerged.
As
I do often these days, I have been napping sunk in the plush brown recliner in
the converted upstairs bedroom that serves as my study, drifting through the
gauzy dreams induced by the dappled sunlight on my shuttered eyelids, the
luminous rhythm of a crisply fall day’s brilliance conducted through the window
by the gentle swaying of the maple on the treelawn beyond, until the sound of
my wife’s vacuuming the hallway carpet nudges me back to the world. Returning
from such a midday sleep --- itself a minor violation of the normal order of
the day, a privilege of the very young and of the aging --- has always seemed
to me a sort of fleeting rebirth, an instantaneous transit part improbable
memory, part fragile fantasy across a dim and shifting boundary separating a
distant unthought elsewhere from an insistent here and now. Were it not for the
fragments of a personal past (or pasts) dragged along in the wake of the
transition like scattered bits of flotsam pulled behind a speedboat, there
would be no more to the change of state than the simple flipping of a switch,
sudden and certain.
Today
these images are of a distant youth, glimpses of my earliest education floating
leaf like through my awakening consciousness as though gently fallen from the
height of some great tree grown tall beyond the limits of my seeing, the
catechism of my childhood rife with wonder and with terror, the germinal ideas
of God planted in the furrows of my fertile reason and imagination, the notion
of a reality omnipresent, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful. The thoughts
that sprouted from these primal revelations --- all very early education is
accepted by the nascent mind as revelation --- were not as wholly comforting as
I am certain they were intended. Indeed, to my infant soul there was something
about them vaguely unsettling, disquieting, an insistent drone of something
faintly sinister, faintly threatening, just beneath the possibility of
perception. Omnipresent, as in inescapably everywhere; all knowing, as in the
repository of all possible knowledge; all seeing, as in ever and immediately
conscious of every constituent datum of individual existence, mine and all
others; all powerful, as in mediating all that makes human existence possible,
and thus by reason or caprice the font both of reward and of catastrophe.
As I
grew, the conclusions my imagination spun successively from such considerations,
a complex web of consequentiality and obligation ever more extensive, ever
weightier, seemed to me too immovable an impediment to the burgeoning liberty I
so thirsted after, the unfettered freedom that was the promise of the world
into which I was born. Offering no opposition to the swelling currents of that
world --- increasingly rationalist, increasingly atheist --- I settled into a
placid agnosticism and called it maturity.
Agnosticism
is a species of skepticism, and the most certain fruit of skepticism is irony:
this is the intuition that brings my reflection back to Burnbridge. Staring at
the screen on which I type these words, I am suddenly, oppressively, conscious
of the computer that makes it possible, of its wonder and its ubiquity. The
highest achievement and chief instrument of our technological genius, it has
quietly assumed the central role as prime architect of the reality in which we
find ourselves. Increasingly inescapably everywhere, it is if not yet actually
then certainly potentially the repository of all human knowledge, needing only
the inexorable expansion of its capacity and the continuing transference of all
of humankind’s memories. Deployed in the service of our security, extended by
the smartphones in our hands even to the most trivial affairs of daily life,
its eyes seem everywhere. It catalogues our thoughts, our desires, our votes,
our preferences, the simplest facts of our birth and our aging and our dying,
and of this catalogue constructs for each of us a collation of data points it
then interprets as our selves. It controls the energies that make our lives
comfortably livable and the weaponry that makes our destruction conceivable.
“…the
idea of God is the master algorithm.”
Omnipresent, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful. No, the irony is not lost
on me. It is as though, having dismissed the fact of God, we have constructed, out of some deep unconscious
imperative essential to our nature, a working model of the mind of God and in doing so have confirmed Voltaire’s observation
that “if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” I only wonder
if we have somehow managed to include among those attributes we have
unconsciously modeled the comprehensive beneficence of the divine love…and therein, I think, lies the
import of Burnbridge’s disquieting “one
would be well advised.”