For the last couple of months I’ve been obsessively busy with finishing my novel Return to the Hollow Earth—which I’ll discuss in a different post next week. Re. blogging, what with the rampaging ubiquity of social media, long-form blog posts are slippping in their popularity as a communication format. But there’s no replacement for a meaty post when I’ve got a lot of things to say and a lot of photos to show.

Today’s topic is Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Searth for Invisible Dimensions, by Christopher G. White (Harvard University Press 2018), available in hardback or Kindle for about $35. I met Chris a couple of times while he was working on the book—it took him a number of years. He’s a professor of religion at Vassar, and a nice guy. I like his book exceedingly, and I wrote an official blurb for it.

Other Worlds is a magisterial and deeply satisfying work on the history of a peculiarly modern idea: the fourth dimension. This esoteric concept points beyond the quotidian world, and Christopher White’s volume shows how readily the notion of hyperspace blends with human spiritual aspirations. The fun is that White makes his history into a juicy narrative, rife with geniuses, scientists, charlatans, impresarios, and artists of every stripe. The depth of research and wealth of information is stunning. One almost feels the author has surveyed our times with an all-seeing, higher-dimensional eye. A book to treasure, a feast.

In my post today, I’ll present some excerpts from the book, along with a more or less random bunch of my recent photos.

The core 4D book that most people know about is Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland of 1888. It’s what we might now call a first-person science-fiction or fantasy novel, narrated by A Square, who lives on a plane called Flatland. A 3D sphere shows herself to our Square by passing through his plane, and then she lifts him out into “higher space” (that is, into three-dimensional space) and he looks down upon his world and sees…the insides of things. I kind of took off on this in my novel Spaceland.

Perhaps the fact that Abbott was a clergyman helped promote a movement to start thinking of the supernatural in terms of the fourth dimension—and this is one of the key notions in White’s book. The following quote, and all the others, are from his Other Worlds.

It was not that Abbott thought spirits existed in a higher, fourth dimension, though other Christians would make such arguments, as we will see. It was more that the overall aim of the Flatland narrative was to expand the imagination, to show that extra-empirical realms might exist. “I hope,” Abbott once commented about Flatland, that it “may prove suggestive . . . to those Spacelanders of moderate and modest minds who—speaking of that which is of the highest importance but lies beyond experience—decline to say on the one hand that ‘This can never be,’ and on the other hand, ‘It must needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it.’ ” Elsewhere he arrived at a similar formulation, saying that he hoped to help others “conceive that there may be a Thoughtland, as much more real than Factland as the land of three dimensions seems to us more real than the land of two.”

There’s a countervailing notion of the fourth dimension, which even now we still see in Lovecraft—the fourth dimension as a crazy, almost evil concept. I myself have taken some flak about this over the years. “Won’t the fourth dimension drive you crazy?” White:

Contemporary fiction also dealt at length with the idea that the fourth dimension could be an unhealthy obsession, though the topic was sometimes dealt with humorously. (One notice in Life Magazine from 1912, for example, warned readers about professors who taught esoteric higher-dimensional notions that entangled one’s mental faculties.) Though Howard Hinton denied that developing fourth-dimensional vision caused mental problems, he often encountered these criticisms. It did not help that there were widely publicized cases linking fourth-dimensional enthusiasms and mental illness, including one notice, picked up by a number of British newspapers, that an Oxford undergraduate and son of a local priest committed suicide after studying the fourth dimension. Newspapers reported his brother saying that the evening before the suicide the troubled undergraduate “wished to discuss the ‘fourth dimension,’ and higher mathematics. He was very excited. The next morning, he was very white, and his eyes were staring. He said he had been out of his mind, but was then sane, and that he knew it at that time, but might forget it.” Did transcending normal perceptual abilities make one unfit for regular, three-dimensional life?

The fourth dimension is of course invoked in the Minkowski-Einstein notion of spacetime, as used in the theory of Relativity. But it’s not really time that true aficionados of the fourth dimension are after. We want to think of a different space direction. So, yes, time is like a higher dimension, but we want four dimensions of actual space. This notion had early currency among physicists as well. White:

While many mathematicians and scientists did not embrace the fourth dimension as a pathway to ecstatic religious visions the concept nevertheless did important imaginative work for them. Some, including the mathematical physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Tait and the Canadian-American mathematician and astronomer Simon Newcomb, seemed to think that the fourth-dimension concept made the existence of heaven or a spirit world more plausible. In The Unseen Universe, for example, Tait and his coauthor speculated that the soul was like a knotted vortex ring that came from an invisible dimension.

One of my favorite writers on the fourth dimension is Charles Howard Hinton, indeed I once edited a book of his essays and somewhat science-fictional stories. Hinton also appears as a character in my novel Jim and the Flims. Here’s White’s very dramatic account of Hinton’s death.

On April 30, 1907, C. Howard Hinton and his wife Mary attended the annual dinner of the Society of Philanthropic Inquiry in Washington, D.C. Hinton did not know it, but it would be not just his last time socializing with friends but also his final exit from three-dimensional existence. The evening began auspiciously, with printed programs that featured Hinton’s talk at the end of the night. When his turn came, Hinton stood up and gave what his wife remembered, writing in a sad letter to William James, as a “wonderful speech.” By the end of it, however, something was wrong. Hinton finished his remarks, walked out of the banquet, and fell to the ground dead. Hinton generally promised a lot, but that evening’s remarks were particularly ambitious—a brief talk, the program announced, on “Psychic Entrance into Life in the Fourth Dimension or Heaven or any Other Place.” On this occasion at least, Hinton succeeded in ways no one could have imagined.

In the early 1900s, numerous ministers began drawing on notion of the fourth dimension as a symbol or even an explanation of God, heaven, and the afterlife.

There was nothing specifically Christian about higher-dimensional notions. In fact, most people who used higher dimensions did so not to buttress Christian doctrines but to argue for more general spiritual notions such as the existence of a spirit world, life after death, or transcendent intuitions and visions. Certain that modern people needed religious ideas even if they could not accept them on dogmatic authority, W. F. Tyler argued in a thoughtful book on The Dimensional Idea as an Aid to Religion (1907) that the dimensional idea might “be grafted on to any existing religion,” lifting all religious believers out of the “quagmire” of superstition and irrationality.

The Russian mystic writer Pieter D. Ouspensky is another key figure in four-dimensional thought. I was a great student of his work when I was younger. White:

In 1909 the Russian mystic and fourth-dimensional philosopher Pieter D. Ouspensky moved to St. Petersburg, where he held court at a bar called the Stray Dog, a seedy, foul-smelling, and badly lit bar where metaphysical seekers talked all night long. The Stray Dog crowd called him “Ouspensky Fourth Dimension” and dancers, poets, painters, musicians, and radicals came to smoke, drink, and listen, day and night, as Ouspensky expounded with authority on the Tarot, yoga, “reality,” time, consciousness, God, and higher dimensions. Even Leo Tolstoy listened patiently over lunch one day as Ouspensky drew multidimensional diagrams on the tablecloth. This metaphysical bar chatter was collected in Ouspensky’s The Fourth Dimension (1909) and Tertium Organum (1911). As one who had experienced altered states of consciousness that were both frightening and revelatory, Ouspensky spoke with some authority. He studied James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and other books on consciousness, and he experimented with nitrous oxide and hashish. His experiences varied.

I well remember one of Ouspensky’s essays on “Experimental Mysticism.” He talks about how after one of his “experiments.” he awoke with the unpleasant sensation that everything was made of splintery, rough wood. Every pot-smoker knows this feeling all to well.

Claude Bragdon was another early favorite of mine. I studied his work while writing my very first book, Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension. , which is still in print from Dover Books, having sold an astounding 200,000 copies. (I got $1000 for the rights back in 1976.) White:

The Rochester architect Claude Bragdon believed that specific types of art and design could help people develop this kind of higher-dimensional sight. His pen and ink renderings, for instance, instead of using vanishing-point perspective, were isometric, employing a kind of perspective in which objects that are drawn seem to oscillate between different views. Isometric drawings oscillate in this way because parallel lines are drawn parallel on the page instead of receding in a triangle toward a vanishing point. There are a number of famous examples of isometric depth ambiguity, such as Escher’s drawings [and the Necker Cube], which have unstable corners and thus cause the eye to move between different views. Bragdon used the technique because it put the viewer in simultaneous multiple positions vis-a-vis the drawing, forcing a kind of higher vision upon the viewer: The viewer saw different sides of a thing at once.

And here’s more:

After 1919 … Bragdon turned to the theater as a way to develop spiritual spaces and narratives. A Broadway actor, manager, and (later) film actor, Hampden asked Bragdon to be the artistic director of his production of Hamlet.
This involved designing everything—all the costumes, sets, stage elements, and lighting. The close friendship between the two turned into a successful collaboration, and by 1923 Bragdon had closed his architectural practice in Rochester and moved to New York City, where he became a full-time stage designer. He moved into the Shelton Hotel, sharing the building and often his breakfast table with Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and other likeminded artists, writers, and spiritual seekers.

As I discuss in my book The Fourth Dimension, that magic cupboard in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books is a magic door to another world. As it happens, the physicists have designed such a construct, a kind of tunnel that leads from one sheet of reality to the next—it’s called an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Religion was another great interest of C. S. Lewis’s, and here White discusses that.

At some point Lewis annotated and underlined copies of Flatland and Hinton’s New Era of Thought. At different times he spoke of Flatland in particular as a modern classic—“the original manuscript of the Iliad,” he once proclaimed, “could not be more precious.” He used dimensional ideas to argue that nature was open and layered rather than closed and determined. In his book On Miracles, for instance, he used dimensional ideas to argue that nature was “perforated” and “pock-marked” rather than closed, as logical positivists and scientific materialists insisted. Like Abbott and other theists, Lewis knew that in order to persuade others about the existence of a higher, spiritual realm (not to mention miraculous incursions from that realm) he would have to advocate for a universe that was open-ended.

In Madeleine L’Engle’s books such as Wrinkle in Time, tesseracts become passageways between worlds—and now there’s a hugely popular movie about it. Her ideas were drawn from the earlier 4D philosphers such as Hinton. White:

The word “tesseract,” of course, was Hinton’s term for a hypercube, and in many ways L’Engle continued in the tradition of Hinton enthusiasts deploying this mystical object in order to glimpse higher realities. In Wrinkle, Mr. Murray and other government scientists had studied tesseracts and had had some success in creating them. Mr. Murray had “tessered” through the universe, in fact, landing, unfortunately, on an evil planet where he was now imprisoned. When the Mrs. Ws began their search for Mr. Murray with Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe, they explained tessering to them as a folding or wrinkling of spacetime. Mrs. Who lifted the hem of her skirt and stretched it into a straight line. She told the children to imagine an ant traveling along the hem. It would take a long time to travel straight across, but imagine if the path itself could be folded and its two ends brought together? If this were the case, the ant could very quickly travel from one end to the other. Tessering, she said was folding the fabric of spacetime to create new, shorter paths between destinations. When Meg complained that she did not understand, Mrs. Whatsit said that Meg was thinking of space “only in three dimensions,” and that tessering involved higher levels of spacetime. This led to a lengthy lesson on dimensionality that would have made Hinton proud.

White has a final chapter discussing various oddly hyperspatial ways to think about contemporary media.

A sense of mystery surrounded how moving images and information were transmitted invisibly and received by television antennae. In fact when televisual technologies emerged they were understood by many as a type of psychic seeing-at-a-distance. Stefan Andriopoulos has argued that the arrival of the television in Europe in the 1930s was facilitated not just by advances in engineering and physics but also by occult beliefs and practices related to telepathy, telesight, and clairvoyance. The imaginative insight and technical knowledge that made electrical television possible, he has shown, developed in part from “occultist studies on psychic ‘clairvoyance’ (Hellsehen) and ‘television’ (Fernsehen), carried out in the same period by spiritualists who emulated the rules and procedures of science.” When early electrical televisions brought wireless moving pictures into peoples’ homes many wondered if this was a new way of bringing the “supernatural or marvelous in one’s own living room.” Televisions were like crystal balls or the magic mirrors of fairy tales.

So, yeah, Other Worlds is a wonderful book. Here’s a photo me with a 72nd birhtday card from my daughter. I feel kind of nostalgic, recommending a young writer’s 4D book. Like I’m passing the baton. One of the first writers on the fourth dimension whom I encountered was the redoubtable Martin Gardner, who ran the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American all through my youth. He was a great hero of mine and, eventually, my mentor. When he retired from writing his column in 1981, I managed to get a freelance writing gig to interview him for a magazine called Science 81. And when I told Martin I was working on a book about the fourth dimension, he loaded me down with about a dozen rare old 4D books—on loan. And the next year he wrote a great intro for my book, The Fourth Dimension, which I mentioned above. And now it’s Chris White’s turn.

And so I bid a hail and farewell to all the great 4D thinkers up and down the timeline!

This will be a long blog post as I’m going to incorporate three things. Three takes on the same subject. The subject is panpsychism, which is the doctrine that everything is conscious, and that every individual thing has, if you will, a soul.

I myself have written about panpsychism, both in my nonfiction books, such as Infinity and the Mind, and in my novels, such as Hylozoic. (By the way, “hylozoism,” is a doctrine similar to panpsychism: it’s the belief that every object is in some sense alive.) While I was researching panpsychism for my novel, I came across David Skrbina’s wonderful philosophy book, Panpsychism in the West. And I realized I wasn’t alone. Up till then I’d almost thought, as Skrbina puts it, “the only panpsychic in history.” I was glad to learn I wasn’t!

I’m impelled to write about Skrbina’s book today, as a second edition has recently appeared. You can get an ebook or paperback for quite a reasonable price, either from MIT Press, or from Amazon.

What we have in my post today is, as I say, three takes. Take #1: Excerpts from Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West , Take #2 Rudy’s “Panpsychic Manifesto”, and Take #3 On Robot Consciousness from Rudy’s Infinity and the Mind. You’ll notice a bit of overlap among the takes, but never mind.

Take #1. Excerpts from Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West

Rather than summarizing what Skrbina says, I’ll quote excerpts from his book, and reprint some of the sources that he himself quotes. And, I hope, you’ll see for yourself what a terrific little tome this is. Introducing Panpsychism in the West, Skrbina says the following.

In reviewing the many cases for panpsychism, one notices over and over again a striking fact: that there is almost no recognition of panpsychist predecessors. In other words, most philosophers cited here seem to operate in a vacuum; they appear to have no knowledge of the long and lustrous history of panpsychism. They typically cite no one—or at most one or two individuals. … In essence, they almost act as if they were the only panpsychic in history.

Surveying ancient philosophy, Skrbina unearths a remark by Aristotle about Thales. “Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, and it is perhaps for that reason that Thales came to the opinion that all things are full of gods.” All things are full of gods. I love that.

The scientist-philosopher Gustav Fechner is of particular interest to Skrbina, who writes the following.

The most important aspect of Fechner’s panpsychism is his conception of the world as composed of a hierarchy of minds or souls. There are souls ‘below’ us in the plants, and there are souls ‘above’ us in the Earth, the stars, and the universe as a whole. Humans are surrounded, at all levels of being, by varying degrees of soul. This is Fechner’s ‘daylight view’— the human soul at home in an ensouled cosmos. He contrasted it with the materialist ‘night view’ of humans as alone, isolated points of light in a universe of utter blackness.

You can learn more about Gustav Fechner’s panpsychism in Chapter 4 of this online edition of a 1909 book by William James A Pluralistic Universe .

Skrbina mentions that the physicist Ernst Mach equates the processes of nature with human inclinations and feelings, and that his opposition to mechanistic ontology steers him toward a view of “nature as animate” rather than “human as mechanical.”

Skrbina writes about the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, known for his wonderful turn of the century book Art Forms in Nature, filled with gnarly images of jellyfish and the like.

Haeckel was explicitly panpsychist by 1892. “I regard all matter as ensouled, that is to say as endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain) and motion.” This affinity, Haeckel says, can be explained only “on the supposition that the molecules … mutually feel each other” He says that evolution shows “the essential unity of inorganic and organic nature” and “an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless material; the two are inseparably combined in every atom.”

We learn that in1880, Samuel Butler wrote, “I would recommend the reader to see every atom in the universe as living and able to feel and to remember, but in a humble way. … Thus he will see God everywhere.”

Skrbina tells us that, according to Herbert Spencer in 1884 the man of science must conclude that: “Every point in space thrills with an infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions; the conception to which [the scientist must] tend is much less that of a Universe of dead matter than that of a Universe everywhere alive: alive if not in the restricted sense, still in a general sense.”

Another great bit: In a brief essay titled “Intelligent Atoms,” Thomas Edison stated that “All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses intelligence. … The atom is conscious if man is conscious, … exercises will-power if man does, is, in its own little way, all that man is. … I cannot avoid the conclusion that all matter is composed of intelligent atoms and that life and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic intelligence.”

And another: Josiah Royce advances this line of thinking in Studies of Good and Evil (1898), displaying a deepening conviction that all things have inner lives with as much reality and intrinsic worth as those of humans: “We have no sort of right to speak in any way as if the inner experience behind any fact of nature were of a grade lower than ours, or less conscious, or less rational, or more atomic. … This reality is, like that of our own experience, conscious, organic, full of clear contrasts, rational, definite. We ought not to speak of dead nature.”

As Skrbina puts it: The “dead nature” of mechanism is fundamentally challenged by the panpsychic worldview. Skrbina ends with a compelling peroration.

Panpsychism is a distinctive metaphysical worldview. As such, it stands in an awkward relationship with conventional positivist, mechanistic thinking. It can seem inconsequential, or even incomprehensible. And yet these are the very hallmarks of new worldviews; anything less would imply a superficial or minor revision to the prevailing view. The problems of mind and consciousness are so difficult, so intractable, that “drastic actions”— perhaps even as drastic as panpsychism— are warranted. … We may be approaching one of those times in history when fundamental assumptions about the world change.

And in closing, Skribina proposes a call to action:

Natural resources, including plant and animal species, are generally seen as mindless and insentient objects, and thus as deserving no particular respect or moral consideration. With no deeper meaning or value, they exist solely to benefit us. … [But] our mechanistic worldview is in error: that, by treating nature as mindless, we engage in irrational and destructive behavior. Metaphysics has consequences.

[You can see a one-minute YouTube video of David Skribina making this last point at an “Emergence and Panpsychism” conference in Munich, 2011. More videos from this conference are online as well.]

Take #2. Rudy’s “Panpsychic Manifesto”

For some reason, I don’t quite remember why, a couple of weeks ago I started thinking about David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West, and about panpsychism in general, and I took a break from working on my novel-in-progress, Return to the Hollow Earth, and I wrote a kind of manifesto—which is a fanatical format I’ve always found congenial. And then I emailed Skrbina to thank him for his book, and he told me he’d published a new edition, and I engaged to get a copy of it and to write this blog post as a type of review. My thoughts scuttling around like a nest of ants.

“Ants and Gems” acrylic on canvas, February, 2018, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Every entity is in some sense conscious. Putting it differently, every individual thing has a soul—from atoms to plants to societies to planets to the universe itself. The principle of universal mind is panpsychism.

This doctrine is familiar from the earliest history of philosophy, although it’s not popular now. Panpsychism fell out of favor during the Industrial Revolution, and even more so during the Computer Age.

The current tendency is to regard a mind as a computation, and to suppose that the only non-human minds are computers or robots or devices with chips. But a talking smart phone doesn’t represent the living consciousness that I’m looking for.

Panpsychic is about soul—an inner glow, far richer than any sly imitation. Trees, flowers, rocks, chairs, sandwiches, and atoms all have the glow. All are conscious.

Zen Buddhists tell the story of a monk who asks the sage, “Does a stone have Buddha-nature?” The sage answers, “The universal rain moistens all creatures.”

The inner glow is not the exclusive birthright of humans, nor is it solely limited to biological organisms. Each object has a mind. Another list: Stars, hills, scraps of paper, molecules—each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences, each of them takes in sensations.

The underlying reason for this may be that natural processes embody what we can call gnarly natural computations. Think of swaying trees, a candle flame, drying mud, flowing water, even a rock. Physical chaos is everywhere. To the human eye, a rock appears not to be doing much. But at the atomic level, a rock is like a zillion balls connected by springs. A lot going on! Deep thinker.

Okay, but why bother to believe in panpsychism? Because there’s an emotional reward. It feels pleasant to suppose I’m surrounded by living minds. The nineteenth century philosopher-scientist Gustav Fechner was an eloquent advocate for this point of view. He drew a contrast between what he called the daylight view and the night view of the world.

The night view: We’re the only minds around. We’re like fireflies in a silent, utterly black warehouse of cluttered junk and grim clockwork machinery. We’re specks of light amid great gears and unforgiving barriers. Lost in a gloomy, dead, uncaring world.

The day view: We’re surrounded by other souls as bright as ourselves. We wing across sunny meadows of beautiful flowers, and into the dappled forest. The air throbs with music. On every side, large and small creatures greet us. A teeming, cheerful, living, friendly world.

Which world do you prefer? I think for most of us the answer is clear.

Fine, but is there any practical use for panpsychism? I feel there is already an application. If I have a good talk with someone, I can sense they have a mind. The back and forth play of empathy brings us into a shared state. And now—here’s a jump. If you think in a certain way, it’s possible to have empathy with objects , and to see objects as glowing with inner light. This is a pleasant sensation indeed. And it comes very naturally to a carpenter, a mechanic, a painter, or a jeweler—or even to a writer, if you go so far as to think of a manuscript as a conscious, living thing.

Not practical enough? Consider this. We don’t use clockwork gears in our watches anymore, and we don’t make radios out of vacuum tubes. The era of digital computer chips will fade. Biotech computation will come and go And in the end we’ll be working with the gnarly natural computations of ordinary objects—a flame, a stream of water, a plant. Panpsychic panpsychic empathy can provide the input/output and the programming tools for these natural devices. Stare at a candle flame, and it’ll tell you what to do. Seers already do this!

A final point. Panpsychism, like other forms of higher consciousness, is dangerous to the established order. If the soil and the plants have minds, I feel more respect for them in their natural state, and I’m prone to be more environmentally aware. If I feel myself among friends in the universe, I’m less likely to waste my life in serving Mammon. If even a corpse is alive, then I don’t care so much about dying. And it’s that much harder for political oppressors to cow me into submission.

Take #3: Rudy on Robot Consciousness in Infinity and the Mind

I wrote about panpsychism in the “Robot Consciousness” section of my book, Infinity and the Mind in 1982. (At that time, as Skrbina might put it, I didn’t truly understand I was dipping into the panpsychist tradition of philosophy.)

It seems evident that there could be robots whose general behavior was the same as the behavior of human beings. These robots would be thinking beings who had evolved on a substrate of metal and silicon chips, just as we are thinking beings who have evolved on a substrate of amino acids and other carbon-based compounds. Would one be justified in saying that these highly evolved robots possess consciousness in the same sense that humans do?

Upon lengthy introspection, most people will agree that the individual person consists of three distinct parts: (a) the hardware, the physical body and brain; (b) the software, the memories, skills, opinions, and behavior in general; (c) consciousness, the sense of self or personal identity, pure awareness, the spark of life, or even the soul.

I would like to argue that any component of parts (a) or (b) can be replaced or altered without really affecting (c). My purpose in arguing this way will be to show that there is nothing about part (c) that is specific to the individual. …

I contend that the sum total of the individual consciousness is the bare feeling of existence, expressed by the primal utterance, I am. Anything else is either hardware or software, and can be changed or dispensed with. Only the single thought I am ties me to the person I was twenty years ago.

The curious thing is that you must express your individual consciousness in the same words that I use: I am. I am me. I exist. The philosopher Hegel was very struck by this fact, and deemed it an instance of “the divine nature of language.”

What conclusion might one draw from the fact that your essential consciousness and my essential consciousness are expressed in the same words? Perhaps it is reasonable to suppose that there really is only one consciousness, that individual humans are simply disparate faces of what the classical mystic tradition calls the One.

The essence of consciousness is, really, nothing more than simple existence. I am. Why should the possession of this sort of consciousness be denied to anything that does exist? Aquinas has said that God is pure existence unmodified. Is it not evident that there is a certain single something–call it God, or the One, or pure existence–that pervades the world as it is?

Consider the Zen phrasing of this: The universal rain moistens all creatures. Or think of the world as a stained-glass window with light shining through every part.

To exist is to have consciousness. The other things one might feel are necessary for consciousness are more or less complicated sorts of hardware and software, patterns of mass and energy. But no pattern can be conscious until it exists, until it is brought into reality. Existence is, finally, the only thing required for consciousness.

A rock is conscious. This piece of paper is conscious. And so, of course, is a robot, both before and after his behavior evolves to our level. Traditionally, those who have asserted the equivalence of men and (possible) machines have been positivists, mechanists, materialists. They put their viewpoint this way: “People are no better than machines.” But if one only changes the emphasis, then this equivalence can become the expression of a deep [panpsychic] belief in the universality and reality of consciousness: “Machines can be as good as people!”

I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ve been pouring most of my energy into my novel Return to the Hollow Earth, which is a sequel to my 1990 The Hollow Earth. Really rockin’ on the book these days, and I think I see the ending now. Might finish this summer. At that time I might Kickstart/self-pub it, just for the joy of seeing it out there…or I’ll suffer through that tired old hat-in-hand begging-publishers thing, followed by, if someone goes for it, a two or three year wait for the book to come out.

I have ten books in the pipeline at Night Shade just now, nine reprints plus my most recent novel Million Mile Road Trip, which I finished writing in July, 2017—it’s likely to come out in late 2018 or early 2019.

Anyway, let’s get into the photos! As I mentioned, I’m doing a lot of my shooting with my Pixel 2 camera these days. Having less glass in the lens, it’s inevitably inferior to the Fujifilm X100T digital that I used for the last few years but, as they say, the “best” camera is the one you have with you.

We were down in Santa Barbara for a family gathering last week, and one of the guys, my nephew-in-law, I guess you’d call him, Scott Bates, urged us to stop in Bradley, California, just off Rt. 101 between Paso Robles and King City. The old two-lane 101 went through Bradley, and it had about seven gas stations, but now that the town has been by-passed for years, it’s kind of dead. Like a diorama of the 1940s.

But! We found this amazing enterprise called Rader Rods Garage, or Rustamongus, run by Jimmy Rader. He drifted out of the garage after Sylvia and I had been poking around for about ten minutes. One of his pet projects is a Studebaker…it’s actually assembled from three different Studebakers, and has the loveliest pink color on the front half.

You can see Jimmy’s transcendent vision for the Studebaker’s apotheosis on a T-shirt that he sells a his annual “Hot Rod Social” in late September. Note the propeller on the front of the Studie. He has the propeller all set. Along with the motorcycle that has wooden Model T wheels.

Jimmy is working on all kinds of projects, but I assured him that, as far as I was concerned, his work is already at a very high peak of perfection.

Great light out there in the flat red land, heavily yellow sun.

Dig the teeth on this old bus. I’ve always been crazy about flaking paint. Such fabu gnarl. All the things that Nature gives us, just for free, with no extra effort needed.

And this rod, too much. I bet Hoke is a driver. Perfect name. My big brother was into hot-rods, he subscribed to car magazines, and fixed up two Model As and a Model T while we were kids. I’d thought Jimmy Rader might know about Robert Williams and his hot rod art, but he hadn’t heard of him. A natural-born hot-rodder in the purest form.

Jimmy said he grew up in Alviso on the north side of San Jose, at the end of 1st Street, at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Even now Alviso is somewhat Bradley-like. Empty and quiet. A holy blank space in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Back in 1972, I flamed our Ford, and was reminded of it by the flames on this, Jimmy’s regular driving rig.

The train track runs by the edge of town, and for whatever reason a long freight train with National Guard gear was taking a break. Enlightenment at the ass-end of nowhere. (My theme today?)

We stopped in Paso Robles, too—they have a nice old town square on the west side of 101. “Pass of the Oaks.” A tiny historical museum is in an old building in the square, and one of the displays was memorabilia of Paso Robles High School, including cheerleading uniforms. I dig this, with the timeless duds and the oak in the window outside.

It’s always a little cheap to hook a photo onto some printed words, but what the heck. And imagine that the furry “shako” hat is this being’s head.

Santa Barbara is, like, really California. Compared to them, the SF Bay Area is in the northeast. Classic scene in Sylvia’s aunt’s house here, that saturated morning light, the pool outside, the Scandinavian furniture, the leafy plant. Like a David Hockney painting.

The Santa Barbara harbor is really packed. And you know I went for the ripple jitter in that dark green water.

I always wonder if I could find a way to live in a house boat. With bubble portholes in ascending sizes, yeah. The damp could be too much.

I took a great hike in the woods a couple of weeks ago, hiked up along the bed of a dry (well, damp) stream not far from our house. If I stay in for too many weeks, I worry I might never hike again. These days I like to use two hiking sticks, whether in the mountaineer or the geezer sense.

Sylvia and I went out for the San Francisco Women’s March with our daughter-in-law and granddaughter. The signs were great, as in the photo above, taken by Sylvia. It was nice to be with all the women…they seemed happy, confident, and energized by each other’s presence. It felt…safe.

Sylvia had knit an extra pussy hat, so I got to wear it. As a fashion accent, I kept one ear flipped down, in the style of the cartoon pigs I like to draw.

Such a wonderfully ugly/scary drawing of that man.

Stepping out the back door one evening, lovely mist against a ganzfeld pattern of twigs. Good to have that pocket phone camera, times like this.

I’ve used the same kind of keyboard for about 25 years, it’s the Microsoft Natural Elite Ergonomic. You used to get them free when you bought a computer, and I always had an extra. But this fall my last one started skipping certain key presses, so I took apart to clean it…and was really bewildered by what I found inside…a floppy mat of translucent plastic, like a flat alien jellyfish, and I didn’t put it back right, and then, for awhile I settled for a newer Microsoft keyboard, but the keys weren’t clicky enough for me and not in the right spots, and already I’m putting up with an unpleasantly modern keyboard on my Thinkpad, so I went online to eBay and found this beauty at some shop in New Hampshire that was primarily devoted to selling “Scandinavian Housewares.” Nearly $100, but it was in-the-box new. And I’m so glad to have it…with that straight no-mind channel from my brain through my millions-of-words-trained fingers to the screen.

Note cover page of Return to the Hollow Earth. Yeah, baby!

One day Sylvia and I went up to the Legion of Honor art museum in SF, saw some decent Klimts, not his very best, but even so…and walked across the street on a fairly deserted golf course with its awesome view down off the cliffs to the waters of the Golden Gate. Spring’s here.

Saw a deer out my bedroom window the other day. They eat our flowers, but it’s nice having animals around. Once our friend Leon Marvell was visiting from Australia, and he was very excited about seeing deer on the hoof, mirroring our excitement about seeing loose kangaroos down there. I never did see enough kangaroos, though. Need to go back.

“Ratfink Pollock” acrylic on canvas, January, 2018, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I started this painting by dripping paint that I had left over from Shrig and Krakens. Then I started thinking about Jackson Pollock and I wanted to see if I could start to emulate his effects. I watched some videos of him for help. It’s hard to get just the right thickness to the paint so that it dribbles off a brush or a stick or a rag in an interesting way. Eventually I had some white spaces left over among the thicket of drips, so I made those into eyes. And then I noticed two eyes together that had a space under them like a mouth. So I made that a mouth and went for the Big Daddy Roth cartoon hotrod-art Ratfink look. To tie it together, I added one more thick black drippy line. And to liven up the black line, I flipped yellow droplets all along it.

I went by the Luggage Store gallery in SF to pick up my painting A Skugger’s Point of View, where it had been in a show. As always you can find out more about my art on my Paintings page.

Was great to have one or two days of heavy rain in early January. I’m wild about the circles that rain drops make. So perfect, so quick. Nature’s analog computation, eternally doing it. People who imagine successfully “emulating” all of Nature inside some kind of manmade computer are so totally missing the point. It’s here, it’s done, it’s working—relax and enjoy. And abandon all hope of control.

We call this the “Donkey Hill,” it’s near where we live. For the last thirty or forty years, there were always two donkeys here, a new pair every few years, walking around cropping the vegetation, and then somebody complained about the donkeys, said they weren’t being properly cared for, just hee-hawing in rolling fields like that, and the landowners were cowed into sending the donkeys to a farm. No comment.

After we saw the movie I, Tonya, I got all interested in figure-skating, from watching news footage of the actual Tonya in the credits, and when I heard the US Figure Skating Championships would be right here at the Sharks arena in San Jose, I went online and got a couple of tickets, fairly pricey, but in the first few rows, and we watched, it was cool, especially the five top-seeded contenders. I was surprised that nearly every single one of the ten lower-seeded contenders fell down on at least one jump. And that’s all they ever do, is to practice those jumps. Just shows you how hard it is.

After the show we went and saw the Benton St. Blues Band at the Po’ Boy’s Bistro nearby. Great band, and the food was okay.

Hiking in the Diablo Mountains near San Jose, the Levin park, plenty of cows around, dig this long gate panorama, such nice rhythm.

Before Christmas, Sylvia got this shot of the Santa Cruz surfer statue with a Santa hat.

Did I post this image yet? It’s the “Old Fire God” from an archeological site in Mexico. Saw other sculptures of this guy, and he always looks the same. I guess that’s a fire pit on his back.

Another day in Cruz…near dusk, near Steamer’s Lane, so perfect, the tubes. As the slogan read on the Last Whole Earth Catalog: “We don’t have to get it together. It is together.”

Sylvia and daughter Isabel near a good “healthy food” snack shack across the street from Steamer’s Lane. Dig the gnarly stump, and the mist on the field.

And a shot of Sylvia and me taken by Isabel. The golden hour of light.

Shot of our cozy home, processed by the Pixma “cartoon” filter. See you later!

“Surfers at the End of Time” is the seventh story that Marc Laidlaw and I have collaborated on. All but one of the tales are SF surfing stories that feature two guys called Zep and Del.

Often when I collaborate, I’ll do what I call a transreal move, that is, I’ll have the story be about two people, and one of the characters is somewhat like me, and the other is like my co-author. To some extent Zep is like me, and Del is like Marc. This said, we often ventriloquize each other’s characters, in that Marc might write Zep scenes and I might write Del.

This time out, we wanted to do a time-travel story. We’d talked about this for a few years. At first we were focused on the notion of flooded cities, with the sea-level half-way up on the sky-scrapers. This theme was featured in the excellent 2001 Brian Aldiss inspired movie, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and there’s a touch of it in Tomorrowland too. Marc had imagined surf contests amid the buildings. But in 2017, just as we were ready to start, Kim Stanley Robinson pretty much used up the trope with his New York 2140. Marc and I did write some nice flooded-San-Francisco scenes, but we needed more.

Marc was enthused about the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine—and about the 1960 movie version directed by George Pal. I watched the movie online, and I dug it. We wanted to use Wells’s classic scene where the Time Traveler goes so far into the future that the sun is bloated and the Earth is nearly lifeless. Thus our title: “Surfers at the End of Time.” I like to pronounce the last word like I’m in an echo chamber: “Tiyiyiyiyiiiiiimmmme.” You know.

Since Marc and I both know Ocean Beach in San Francisco pretty well, we decided to start our story there. A significant research element was William Finnegan’s memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. The book has a long section about Mark “Doc” Renneker surfing the intensely cold and gnarly waves at the SF beach—you can read it online in the New Yorker.

We felt the time machine should be in some sense a surfboard, and I spotted a cool-looking little “hand board” in the wee Santa Cruz Museum of Surfing which is inside a diminutive lighthouse by Steamers Lane.. Marc had the idea of having the boys activate the time machine by scribing an intricate mandala-like sigil upon the face of the sea.

I expanded on the notion of a time sigil by imagining an intricate, arabesque spacetime diagram of our boys’ worldlines. I redrew the figure ten times while we where working on the story. I’m a little surprised how complicated it turned out, but that’s where the logic leads. I kept sending the successive diagrams to Marc, but he wasn’t all that into trying to decipher them. The dude wasn’t a math major!

The diagram helped me a lot in terms of planning the complex plot of the story. Time travel is a bitch. Like, you need to be careful not to imagine that the characters can predict the abrupt and non-causal appearances of time travelers. And, as I’ll discuss below, there’s the matter of time paradoxes.

In the diagram, you’ll notice five names at the top, and these names correspond to the five worldlines below. Gother and Sally are women that Zep and Del meet, and Lars is kind of gnome called a murg. As I’ll discuss shortly, he has a closed-loop worldline.

In time travel stories you always have to deal with the issue of possible time paradoxes. There are two main types of problems.

(1) Closed Causal Loop. A creature like Lars the murg appears at time and place X with a handboard time machine. You hang out with him for awhile, making your way forward in time. And once you and Lars are in the future, he uses his time machine to hop back to the time and place X. Who produced the murg? Who invented the time machine? They produced themselves. Their worldlines are loops. Is this a problem? Not really. There’s no real contradiction in a Closed Causal Loop. It’s just odd. But we can live with odd. Especially in a Zep & Del surfin’ SF story!

(2) Yes and No. Your future self comes back in time and chops you and your friend in half with a broadsword. If you die, then your future self doesn’t exist, so he doesn’t kill you, so then your future self exists, so he does come back and kill you. A contradictory situation. A standard journeyman SF-writer solution is to say that, when you travel back in time, you don’t actually go back into your own timeline. You go into the past of a parallel world. I don’t like this solution; I think it’s facile and dull. My deeper problem is that, if there a zillion parallel worlds, then everything happens. An if everything happens, then nothing matters. And then cares what happens to your characters?

Once in awhile, sure, I’ll invoke an alternate world—like if I need a world who’s physics is wildly different from ours—like if I want a world with infinitely high mountains, or with an endlessly wide plain. But it seem cheap to invoke parallel worlds just to avoid a piddling little yes-and-no time travel paradox. Like using an H-bomb to light a joint. There’s always gonna be a tricky way out of any seeming paradox, if you think hard enough.

In “Surfers at the End of Time” our characters Zep and Del travel up and down the timeline, and they do, at times, encounter past or future versions of themselves. So how do we avoid Yes and No paradoxes without invoking alternate worlds? As the great logician Kurt Gödel once suggested to me, “Let’s suppose that the world always arranges itself so that these paradoxes do not occur. If something is logically impossible, then it doesn’t happen. A priori logic is very powerful.”

As I’ve already hinted, in the opening sections of our story, it appears as if a Viking-like Zep from the future comes back and slices both the original Zep and the original Del in half. Ye and No paradox? Well, it doesn’t have to be—if our boys don’t die. But how do they survive being chopped in half across their waists by a huge broadsword? Well, not to give too much away, let’s just suppose that the boys’ severed halves are treated with some special futuristic biomedicine… Like good old Kurt Gödel says: “The a priori is very powerful!”

By the way, I got the idea of future Zep being like a Viking when my wife and I went to our son Rudy’s family Halloween party in San Francisco. And in the kitchen I met a friend of Rudy’s named John Bowling. He was wearing a horned Viking helmet, and had his long hair partly in braids, and he had a long beard. He was wiry and lively, and he told me he’s a big wave surfer and that he lived in a condo on the Great Highway by San Francisco’s Ocean Beach—exactly where Marc and I wanted Zep and Del to live. I texted Marc a photo of the Viking surfer dude, and Marc texts back, “HE’S A TIME TRAVELLER, DUDE.” Synchronicity! Times like this I feel like I’m dancing with the Muse.

It was fun to work with Marc Laidlaw again, and not by writing on my own. Collaborating takes longer than writing alone, and at times it’s a little stressful to iron out the necessary shared decisions. But a collaborator like Marc puts in all kinds of beautiful, inspired stuff that I would never have thought of. And I end up thinking about the story more deeply. And the story ends up being funnier. I’m not necessarily trying to write funny stories—I’d hate to be called an SF humorist—but I like it if a story makes people smile or even laugh out loud. And it’s even better if it’s kind of sad and tragic and romantic as well. Like life itself.