Observer Effect: On Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “God Human Animal Machine”
Meghan O’Gieblyn | God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning | Doubleday | 2021 | 304 Pages
The other day, while I was exploring the fringes of a high-altitude, frozen lake with my partner, she said something startling to me. The wind was relentless, slicing through our thin jackets and under-dressed legs and off of snow-blasted mountaintops. Looking out across the embedded rocks and ice-choked logs of the lake’s edge, the ice itself milky blue or dark as lapis in bands and bubbles, she observed she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was deeply wrong with how inhospitable this landscape was, how hostile to life.
She pointed out that we often talk about the earth as if it’s a friendly place. The two of us watch a lot of nature documentaries together. While there’s never any direct allusion to God or intelligent design, Nature and the earth itself are often attributed an agentive, almost willful power as the architects of life’s intense beauty and variety.
Standing in this barren place with me, she was finding it suddenly difficult to accept that there actually are massive swathes of our planet where life is close to impossible: hot or cold deserts, salt-dead or dark deep seas, sweeps of tundra we shrink down at the limits of the map. The earth was not at all made to someday host plants, animals, or us. Life, in its tenacity, has just scratched out a little foothold. None of this is for us. Really: None of this is for anything at all.
This knowledge—better named a philosophy, a way of thinking—is the world I would like to believe I have always known. The proper term for it is materialism, as it privileges above all else what we understand to be physical reality, and it is the basis of modern scientific practice. As I’ve spent a lot of my life dedicated to the sciences, particularly the worlds of artificial intelligence and, before that, physics, I’d like to claim I never make the mistake of ascribing something like “intent” to the geographic idiosyncrasies of the earth, or the fusion of molecules, or the trajectories of the stars.
But here’s the truth. I admitted to my partner, who I should mention is a scientist herself, I could remember a particular moment when I felt the same way. It was in the Himalayas, near Everest. The word that had overwhelmed me there was “lunar:” gray and white shambles of rock in which nothing could grow; veins of gravelly ice churning slow rivers down the mountainside; clear, thin air that left every breath more than half-empty; and the chasm of the blue-purple sky above, as merciless as the jagged theater of stone that ringed it. I was convinced that I was walking across the surface of the moon. But she was right. It wasn’t extraterrestrial at all: That’s all that the earth really is. A rock hurtling through space.
When we came down from the lake, I curled up with a cup of tea and Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine. There’s overlap between what interests O’Gieblyn as a writer and my practice when I was a scientist, so the book presented a fascinating opportunity to read about those same topics from a subjectivity vastly different than my own. I was never really philosophical about the work I did. I skirted the gnarly, destabilizing questions AI raises about human consciousness, or quantum mechanics raises about the underlying nature of reality, to better get my hands dirty with the practical details. O’Gieblyn spends the book looking at those concepts full on.
God Human Animal Machine is about interrogating the modern “disenchanted world”: the earth, and the universe, as material, physical realms without any purposeful design. The enchanted world of medieval Christianity was one animated by meaning. Any rock may have been placed with intention. The river cuts through the valley in order to make it fertile. Then along came Descartes: I think, therefore I am. In his footsteps, modern science has displaced God, and we claim to believe that matter is only matter.
O’Gieblyn traces how the old metaphors of Christian thought are as pernicious as life itself. She maps how the mind-matter dichotomy becomes welded to metaphors of software, hardware, and computation. Hopes for the afterlife rest on the mind’s far-future uploading to the cloud. Algorithmic prediction resurrects determinism, except its predestination is not dictated by a Calvinist God but by the Machine, equally inscrutable to human logic. All we can do is submit.
She is uniquely suited to reveal this trajectory because it mirrors her life. Born into fundamentalist Christianity, she studied religion and philosophy in a Bible college. Afterwards, she experienced the pain of disenchantment herself and developed a fascination with science and technology. She critically consumed work on everything from transhumanism to quantum mechanics to the hard problem of consciousness. In those fields, she found herself hearing the echoes of the same questions she’d always studied. She writes, “Human consciousness is a meaning-making machine, and once it takes note of some coincidence or pattern, it will obsessively search for more evidence to corroborate it.” I get that. I feel that. But still, something about her book troubles me. Driving home from Colorado with her words still ringing in my head, Nebraskan highways became the unspooling canvas for my thoughts.
O’Gieblyn at one point remarks that meaning itself, the very concept of meaning at all, is anthropocentric. I fully accept that discovering patterns and then making meaning out of them is a fundamentally human thing to do. I can also accept that the ghosts of medieval thought are still with us, with me. But the pill I can’t swallow easily is that meaning itself is anthropocentric—as in, no meaning exists beyond us? To believe that would suggest we’re trapped in an infinity room, a boundless pairing of mirrored walls, in which no matter how deep we peer, we’re never able to see past ourselves and into the unknown lying beyond.
To be clear, this is not O’Gieblyn’s thesis. But it’s a thought that peeks around the corner of the page a few times, an existential threat, a black hole. I can’t ignore it. Instead, I find it vital to interrogate what I believe, to expose the foundations of why I think how I think.
Whereas O’Gieblyn was born into Christianity, I was born into science. Let me call it properly an indoctrination. My father hand-drew me coloring books of DNA’s helical spiral, coding the two base pairs as red/yellow and blue/green. I had three picture books belonging to a series which I believed circumscribed my entire future. There were cartoon scientists in pleasant white lab coats on the cover of each—one for physics, one for biology, one for chemistry. My child-mind interpreted those three paths as my only options. Other people might become lawyers, or chefs, or architects, but not me. I chose the physicist, and taped printouts of space shuttles and planets to the wall above my bed.
From then on, I grew up in aspirational worship of the scientist. There’s an archetype here, that used to be concretely composed of a few recurrent images and postures. I picture the image quality of documentary film in the 80s and 90s. A talking head with a thin bar across the bottom of the screen, their name and profession in neat type beneath. Someone you’d see feature in NOVA episodes, or a three-minute bit in the local news, or a special one-hour presentation at the local planetarium. See also, the movie Contact with Jodie Foster. Or Alan Grant at the start of Jurassic Park.
A familiar scene: The computer whirs and whines as it churns out a roll of calculations, holes punched out peppering each margin. The scientists laugh in awe, almost with tears in their eyes, as they read the longed-for result: the flicker of a signal, or the hitherto undetected signature of a rare element. Do you see it too? Do you feel it too?
Hidden in the warmth of this archetype was something else, something darker and less often spoken. What is it like to live in the constant recognition that human life is so, so small? In the perspective of this scientific archetype, the human mind is a remarkable entity, but housed in the fluke that is life on earth, and before the great forces that move beneath, above, beyond us, only flimsy, ready to be blown apart like tissue. Disintegrate.
Right before my road trip, I attended an early screening of the new documentary Love on Fire on Katia and Maurice Krafft, a pair of married volcanologists who died together in the pyroclastic flow of Mount Unzen in 1991. Their own footage is the backbone of the film, and it is glorious, downright ecstatic. Lava breathes, blooms, bursts. Katia and Maurice don shimmering silver suits and negotiate the crater’s edge within a small stumble of liquid rock, spacemen on an alien world. The film knows you can’t say anything about science without also talking about love. For the Kraffts, that meant their love for each other, their love for the scorching powers of the earth, and their love for their own meekness in comparison. The film is roughly chronological. As a viewer, I watched knowing fully that they marched towards death.
So, here’s the catch I felt reading God Human Animal Machine: You don’t give your life for a world that is disenchanted. What animates the enchanted world of the scientist? As we drove across Nebraska, my partner and I crossed paths with the migration of sandhill cranes. She delighted in identifying a flock cooling their legs in a silvery pond we swept past. Hundreds, she told me, we must’ve already seen hundreds today. My eyes were largely stuck on the road, but I was thrilled for her. This is where science begins, with observation. Attentiveness to the world around you. Is this the seeds of what I’m calling love?
The scientific method is about developing understanding. Through observation, experimentation, and quantification, the scientific method pokes at the vast mystery of reality. It thinly scratches a surface and analyzes the residue. It shouts into a cave and charts the echo. Then it posits a theory and waits for someone else to provide new evidence. All of this relies on a shared definition of what comprises the objective. Correlation and causation must be delicately weeded apart. The observer effect—the impact of instrumentation or interaction in the process of observation—needs to be measured, controlled for, and ultimately minimized.
O’Gieblyn wonders if, despite all that, hyper-materialist science still privileges the human. Whether we work to erase or valorize human subjectivity—the seeing eye that I am—we are still there, the ones doing the seeing, and that must have an effect. As she puts it, “The more we try to rid the world of our image, the more we end up coloring it with human faults and fantasies.” When we insist on removing the self, we render the self a blind spot. We can no longer account or control for the prejudicial ripple effects of subjectivity. As a writer of personal essays, that makes all the sense in the world to me. As a former physicist, it is uncomfortable. After all, quantum mechanics has famously problematized the primary tool of observation in scientific practice.
The classic example of the observer effect in quantum mechanics is the double-slit experiment. Shine a beam of light at two parallel slits cut into a barrier. An interference pattern—alternating narrow bands of bright and dark, as fine and regular as the teeth of a comb—will appear on the wall behind the two slits. That’s due to the wave nature of light. I’ve done this experiment a few times, first as an early physics student, later as a teaching assistant guiding students, taping a piece of paper against the wall behind and using a pencil to make tick marks at the edge of each band.
Now here is where the observer comes in. Introduce a photon detector at each slit, which will register which slit an individual photon has passed through. All at once, the bands of light and dark disappear; the light is spread diffusely. This is because the detector has “observed” the light, and instead of wave behavior, in which the light-as-wave flows through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself against the wall, light has collapsed into its particle form. Individual photons travel through individual slits, like balls lobbed through a window.
Observation here entails interaction with another system or apparatus. As Heisenberg put it, “the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature.” Instead, maybe just as radically, quantum theory asserts there’s no such thing as observing anything without incidentally changing it, destroying its previous state.
In this, I am reminded of Solaris, the 1961 Polish science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. It’s one of my favorite books, so it’s not surprising that within my own subjectivity I perceive its oceanic currents pulling against the text on the page of God Human Animal Machine. It’s a book tying together science, love, and impossible questions. I first read Solaris on a Boeing 747 where I was one of three passengers, and all the window shades were drawn down. A short novel, I consumed it during the four hours of the flight, breathless in the cabin’s ambient hum and bands of blue light, like I was also enclosed in the novel’s space station.
In the novel, three scientists orbit and study the planet Solaris, which is engulfed entirely by an intelligent sea. The surface continually roils beneath them, in my imagination as fantastic as the Krafft’s footage of lava. The protagonist, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent by HQ to counsel the scientists through their apparent mental breakdowns. His old friend, one of the three original scientists, commits suicide right before Kelvin arrives. Kelvin discovers that Solaris has gifted each of them some kind of secret human simulacrum drawn from their memories, fantasies, dark dreams. Soon, Kelvin awakes to a “guest” of his own: his dead wife, Harey, in bed beside him, confused, wearing a dress with only the appearance of a zipper, and having forgotten that she killed herself years ago.
Is this mindless mimicry, or an attempt to communicate? Is it torturing them? Does it love them? None of the guests it sends them are able to offer any insight into its motives; Harey is just as mystified as Kelvin. What is clear is that the scientists’ act of observation is not passive. They are in interaction with Solaris. They are observed as much, or more so, than they observe.
In a classic line of the novel, one of the scientists reflects on the futility of their inquest. He says, “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.” They’ve gone as far from Earth and humanity as conceivable, but when they look down upon the watery surface of Solaris, seeking answers to its mysteries, all they can see is a mirror reflecting their own faces back. The novel ends with no answers.
At the end of the day, I do believe there are fundamental truths behind reality that science can slowly unearth. But we are limited by our languages, of speech and of mathematics; by our tools of perception, embodied or externalized in instrumentation; and by our cognition, by the patterns we seek to realize, by what we recognize as pattern in the first place. We remain meaning-making machines. Reading God Human Animal Machine, I bumped against that concept of the inescapable mirror, the human-shaped blind spot, as a warning. What if all the time I have spent in my life trying to look out, I was only looking in? It’s a criticism shared in writing, the fear that, in our attempts to write about other people and things, we fail to realize it’s the self we are still in mired in. Embrace the self instead, I’ve been coaching myself: Write first in and then through. Recognize the gaps.
And of course, in science, there are so many gaps. A few days after I’d finished the book and made it home from my road trip, I tugged God Human Animal Machine off the shelf to revisit a scene about midway through, in which O’Gieblyn and a CERN physicist discuss the paradox of universal constants. Nestled into our current fundamental laws and theorems are a handful of very important concrete numbers, which we’ve calculated out to the nth digit of precision. Values like the speed of light. O’Gieblyn points out if those universal constants were any different, the laws of physics that govern the birth of stars, the orbits of planets, even the binding of atoms would change so radically that nothing as we now know it could exist. It is almost an argument for intelligent design: universal constants happen to be just right to support life, the universe, everything. She recognizes this is something of a tautology. Of course, those universal constants are what they are, because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to measure them at all. But still.
The CERN physicist proposes the multiverse theory as an explanation. Through various theoretical mechanisms, many universes exist or have once existed, encompassing a range of potential values for our universal constants. We happen to be in one in which the numbers are suitable. She is familiar with this theory already and seems to ultimately find it a dissatisfying answer: “I was not about to get into a debate with a CERN physicist about the validity of his position. So I said only that the multiverse theory seemed to require some measure of faith.” The physicist then makes his own confession: “when he thought about the strangeness of the cosmos and the possibility of multiple cosmos, he could not but feel overwhelmed by religious awe.” O’Gieblyn refrains from letting us into her emotional reaction to his speech, but I’m left with the impression that she was not so moved.
She’s completely right in that there’s no evidence for or against a multiverse right now; to take it as an explanation to her question would have to be “on faith.” Still, as I reread their conversation, I became more certain that was the single moment where I most sensed the distance between myself and O’Gieblyn as narrator. Confronted with an exponential multiplication of the universe, I share in his enchantment. I also feel something adjacent, I imagine, to religious awe. A theory is only a theory, but the universe is consistently stranger than we could’ve ever guessed.
That awe I’ve personally discovered is strongest after an intense experience of “wrongness,” as my partner felt by the lake, as I had felt in the extraterrestrial landscape of the Himalayas. Cold and woozy with altitude sickness, the sun chasing toward the high and ragged horizon, my first instinct had been to blink, like there might’ve been a smudge in my eye—or to just pinch myself, shiver and shudder until my skin made sense—as if the error had to be somewhere in the perceptual interface between the world and me, instead of inside me, inside my mind.
Moments like these are opportunities to examine the gaps in our own subjectivities. We’re only human. Of course, we want to have more than an incidental place in the universe. But when I take account of all I’ve ever learned, I’m left with the following facts: nothing in the universe exists for me; my existence itself is almost astronomically improbable; and yet I am still here. Isn’t that a thrill?
Here I am. At a frozen lake’s shore. At a high saddle point between mountains. Behind the light of a laser in a still and silent lab. I look out, up, and in. I observe and in so doing I also interact, revealing myself to be part of a whole I will never fully understand.