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This is the great astonishment: that we come from a lineage of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, that however precisely we may trace the causality of the forces and phenomena leading to the improbable fact of us, still the most powerful and enchanting experiences of our lives — those things that didn’t have to exist: music, beauty, love — are beyond the reach of why.

“Why is the universe? To shape God,” wrote Octavia Butler, who favored science over religion. “Why is God? To shape the universe.”

Perhaps God is just the name we give the wonders beyond why.

Among this world’s most staggering whyless wonders are the birds-of-paradise, native to the island of New Guinea — strange shamans of transformation with plumage so beautiful and behavior so baffling, so far beyond the evolutionary demands of sexual selection, that no causal account of their speciation seems adequate. And yet here they are — here is beauty that didn’t have to exist, here is nature turned supranatural, here is wonder beyond why.

Close kin of the crow and cousins of the bowerbird — itself a living astonishment — the birds-of-paradise puzzled Darwin. He struggled to understand the need for such ostentatious displays of beauty in the context of evolutionary theory — feathers so long and lavish that they constrict flight, making the birds vastly more vulnerable to predators; courtship dances so extraordinary and effortful that mate selection, so much simpler and safer in all other bird species, becomes not the blind mechanism of gene propagation but a spectacle of wonder.

While Darwin was desperately searching for an explanation in the laboratory of the mind, Alfred Russell Wallace chose the observatory of the world and set out to see these living marvels with his own eyes.

Born before photography, having only written accounts and dead specimens to work with, he must have intuited that the mystery of the birds-of-paradise was the mystery of life itself — a mystery shaped by the complexity of context and the urgency of connection, best apprehended by living observation.

Five years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, fomented by the joint paper on natural selection he had written with Wallace, the thirty-one-year-old Wallace undertook the first of several voyages searching for the birds-of-paradise. In the five years he spent living in and around New Guinea, he became the first European to observe these strange and wondrous creatures in their native habitat, to see them dance and hear them sing.

“It seems as if Nature had taken precautions that these her choicest treasures should not be made too common, and thus be undervalued,” he rued after managing to obtain only five specimens in all his travels. He returned thinking them “the most wonderful productions of Nature.”

Recounting his voyages in the 1869 book The Malay Archipelago, which he dedicated to Darwin, Wallace exulted:

[Their] exquisite beauty of form and colour and strange developments of plumage are calculated to excite the wonder and admiration of the most civilized and the most intellectual of mankind, and to furnish inexhaustible materials for study to the naturalist, and for speculation to the philosopher.

But while his book sparked an intellectual interest in the birds-of-paradise, words failed to convey the feeling-tone of wonder — this most enchanted passageway between eye and brain, between sight and spirit. It was the 1888 completion of the long-labored Birds of New Guinea by John Gould — whose wife Elizabeth had catapulted him into fame with her stunning drawings of the birds of the Himalayas half a century earlier — that achieved this.

By the time the book was published, both John and Elizabeth were dead. But the consummate illustrations in it became the standard lithographs reproduced in countless subsequent volumes on the birds-of-paradise.

Still, illustration could only capture the static beauty of the birds — not the dynamic astonishment of their behavior: their courtship dances, their strange songs, their flash transformation from ordinary bird to extraordinary feathered deity. It took more than a century for the young science of photography to catalyze the art of moving images and give us a way of conveying wonder across space and time.

Evolutionary biologist Ed Scholes and National Geographic wildlife photographer Tim Laman spent a decade documenting for the first time the thirty-nine known species that dwell in the rainforests of New Guinea, detailing these living wonders in their book Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World’s Most Extraordinary Birds (public library) and contributing to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s excellent Birds-of-Paradise Project.

Emerging from the majesty and mystery of the birds-of-paradise, from the disorienting sense that we may never discern what evolution intended with such bewildering extravagance, is the urgent humility physicist Richard Feynman captured in the recognition that “the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”

That we may never know why such a wonder exists only deepens the loveliness of the mystery that is always haunting knowledge — the mystery we are.

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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her landmark treatise on the intelligence of emotions, “they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Two decades later, this elemental truth about the nature of living things has migrated from the realm of philosophy to the realm of physical science as we discover that feeling gave rise to sentience and not the other way around, as we reckon with the inner life of dogs, as we concede wonder-smitten that something not mechanistic but mysterious and lush with feeling is animating the bowerbird’s astonishing enchantment in blue.

Out of this recognition has arisen a new biology that is revolutionizing everything we thought we knew about life, just as the revelation of the quantum realm a century ago revolutionized everything we thought we knew about matter — a biology of feeling and interdependence, in which everything alive is in conviviality with everything else, part of a vast symphony of vitality sonorous with feeling.

A century and a half after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology to give shape to the interlaced foundation of the living world, the German marine biologist and cultural scholar Andreas Weber explores this new understanding of life in The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (public library) — a nuanced and deeply original inquiry into the fundamental question of what life is, how it lives itself in us, and what part we play in the grand symphony.

Weber writes:

Organisms are not clocks assembled from discrete, mechanical pieces; rather, they are unities held together by a mighty force: feeling what is good or bad for them. Biology… is discovering how the individual experiencing self is connected with all life and how this meaningful self must be seen as the basic principle of organic existence… Feeling and experience are not human add-ons to an otherwise meaningless biosphere. Rather, selves, meaning and imagination are the guiding principles of ecological functioning. The biosphere is made up of subjects with their idiosyncratic points of view and emotions. Scientists have started to recognize that only when they understand organisms as feeling, emotional, sentient systems that interpret their environments — and not as automatons slavishly obeying stimuli — can they ever expect answers to the great enigmas of life.

At the heart of Weber’s view of life is his notion of poetic ecology — an ecology in its recognition that “all life builds on relations and unfolds through mutual transformations,” and poetic in its understanding of feeling and expression not as epiphenomena or observer’s bias, as Western science has assumed at least since Descartes, but as “necessary dimensions of the existential reality of organisms.”

Poetic ecology restores the human to its rightful place within “nature” — without sacrificing the otherness, the strangeness and the nobility of other beings. It can be read as a scientific argument that explains why the deep wonder, the romantic connection and the feeling of being at home in nature are legitimate — and how these experiences help us to develop a new view of life as a creative reality that is based on our profound, first-person observations of ecological relations. Poetic ecology allows us to find our place in the grand whole again.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Denise Levertov’s exquisite poem about our self-expatriation from nature, Weber adds:

This understanding provides us with a home in the wilderness again, in the creative natura naturans, that so many people are longing for in their private lives, that they create in their gardens, that they visit during hikes in the wilderness and that they seek to protect.

Central to this poetic ecology is the concept of enlivenment, which holds that “every living being is fundamentally connected to reality through the irreducible experience of being alive” — the biological affirmation of quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like insight that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.”

Much of this biological cosmogony rests upon the legacy of the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, whose Gaia hypothesis gave shape to the then-radical insight that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact,” and that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” Central to it also E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis — the idea that we, with all our feeling and sentience, evolved to seek connection with the rest of nature.

Echoing Rachel Carson’s poetic insistence that because our origins are of the Earth, “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Weber writes:

Nature… is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts.

[…]

All our qualities — and particularly the most human ones like our need to be in connection, to be perceived as an individual, to be welcomed by other life and give life, in short, our need to love — spring forth from an organic “soil.” We are part of a web of meaningful inter-penetrations of being that are corporeal and psychologically real at the same time. Humans can only fully comprehend their own inwardness if they understand their existence as cultural beings who are existentially tied to the symbolic processes active inside nature.

There is consolation in this view of life, this fidelity to the natural poetics of ecology — it gives us a more spacious way of bearing our own mortality. A century after the dying Tolstoy took solace in the knowledge that in nature “when existing forms are destroyed, this only means a new form is taking shape,” Weber reflects:

Perhaps the most important psychological role that other beings play is to help us reconcile ourselves with our pain, our inevitable separation as individuals from the remainder of the web of life and our ephemeral existences. The primal feature of nature is that it always rises again, bringing forth new life. Even the most devastating catastrophe gives way over time to green shoots of rebirth and productivity and therefore to hope for ourselves.

In consonance with Carson’s passionate belief in wonder as the antidote to self-destruction, Weber insists that owning up to our interrelation with the rest of life — to the fact that each of us is a living verse in the epic poem of nature — is our only path to our planetary salvation:

The conceptual framework that we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our environmental catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to its actual character… The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.

Complement The Biology of Wonder — a deeply enlivening read in its entirety — with the pioneering neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington on the spirituality of nature, Hermann Hesse on wonder and how to be more alive, and Rachel Carson on how to save a world, then revisit ecological superhero Christiana Figueres — who carries Carson’s torch in our own time — on the spirituality of regeneration.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark chamber is not raw reality but our hopes and fears magnified — a rendering not of the world as it is but as we are: frightened, confused, hopeful creatures trying to make sense of the mystery that enfolds us, the mystery that we are.

This reality-warping begins as the frights and fantasies of childhood, and evolves into the necessary illusions without which our lives would be unlivable. It permeates everything from our mythologies to our mathematics.

In the Dark (public library) by poet Kate Hoefler and artist Corinna Luyken brings that touching fundament of human nature to life with great levity and sweetness, radiating a reminder that if we are willing to walk through the darkness not with fear but with curiosity, we are saved by wonder.

Two girls venture cautiously into the dark forest, convinced that witches dwell there. Shadows fly across the sky that seem to confirm their conviction and deepen their fear.

But page by poetic page, as they keep walking and keep looking, they come to see that the shadows are not witches but “a wood full of birds.”

The birds, they realize, are kites flown from the hands of kindly strangers — people who have waded into the darkness to make their own light, the light of community and connection, the light of wonder.

Couple In the Dark with Henry Beston’s lyrical century-old manifesto for how darkness nourishes the human spirit and the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love, then revisit My Heart — the emotional intelligence primer that first enchanted me with Corinna Luyken’s work — and her tender painted poem The Tree in Me.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“From Boole, with his Laws of Thought in the 1850s, to the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence at the present day,” Oliver Sacks wrote as he reckoned with consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning thirty years before chatGPT, “there has been a persistent notion that one may have an intelligence or a language based on pure logic, without anything so messy as ‘meaning’ being involved.”

That this can never be the case, he observed, is “a neurological learning as well as a spiritual learning.”

I regard this learning as the haunting recognition that our technology — like our literature, like love, like life itself — is just a story we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world works.

Benjamín Labatut takes up the immense and enduring questions of the limits of logic and the tension between meaning-making and reality in his novel The MANIAC (public library), routed in the real life and legacy of the visionary mathematician and artificial intelligence pioneer John von Neumann (December 28, 1903–February 8, 1957), who originated the field of game theory, paved the way for the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics, anticipated the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, and became a founding father of digital computing, his mind the hungry ghost in the machine of our everyday lives.

Reminding us that the history of our species is the history of mistaking our labels and models of things for the things themselves, Labatut paints the backdrop against which Von Neumann and his peers try to infer reality from their logical models of reality, forever haunted by the limits of logic itself:

The mathematical universe is built much like the pyramids of the ancient pharaohs. Each theorem rests on a deeper and more elementary substrate. But what supports the bottom of the pyramid? Is there anything solid to be found there, or does it all float on the void, like an abandoned spiderweb blowing in the morning wind, already unraveling at the edges, held together merely by frail and thinning strands of thought, custom, and belief?… Mathematicians… keep working on faith or delve down to the very heart of mathematics to try to find the cornerstones that upheld the entire structure. But uncovering foundations is always dangerous, for who can tell what lies in wait among the fault lines in the logic of our universe, what creatures sleep and dream amid the tangle of roots from which human knowledge grows?

With an eye to the often imperceptible catalysts of revelation — those trap doors that suddenly open beneath us to reveal whole other regions of being, a function partly of the blind spots of our self-knowledge and partly of our hopelessly selective lens on reality, amid a universe that is “nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything” — Labatut adds:

Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective, because through it a higher order of being is trying to express itself. These unlikely happenings could be hidden all around us, lying in wait on the border of our awareness, or floating quietly amid the sea of information that we drown in, each one bearing the potential to bloom and irradiate violently, prying apart the floorboards of this world to show us what lies beneath.

The earliest seeds of artificial intelligence, Labatut intimates throughout the novel, were precisely such a small, potent lever of prying open a hidden world — a world both wondrous and menacing, mirroring back to us our highest potential and our greatest follies. A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the rise of a new kingdom of life in our machines, Labatut ventriloquizes Von Neumann as a character in a novel animated by the realities of the past century of technology. The words he gives this prophet-pioneer are the words of our history and of our future:

At its lower levels, complexity is probably degenerative, so every automaton would only be able to produce less complicated ones; but there is a certain level beyond which the phenomenon could become explosive, with unimaginable consequences; in other words, where each machine could produce offspring of higher and higher potentialities.

[…]

If my automata were allowed to evolve freely in the unbounded matrix of an ever-expanding digital cosmos… they could take on unimaginable forms, recapitulating the stages of biological evolution at an inconceivably faster pace than things of flesh and blood. By crossbreeding and pollinating, they would eventually surpass us in number, and perhaps, one day, reach a point where they could become rivals to our own intelligence. Their progress, at first, would be slow and silent. But then they would spawn and burst into our lives like so many hungry locusts, fighting for their rightful place in the world, carving their own path toward the future.

Von Neumann died in an era when the entirety of computer memory in the world amounted to a handful of kilobytes, yet his life had already seeded the digital universe and all its anxious silicon tendrils reaching for the substrate of consciousness. Nearly a century after Alan Turing envisioned machine sentience as he wondered whether a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream, Labatut channels Von Neumann’s parting vision for what it would take for AI to cusp on consciousness:

Before he became unresponsive and refused to speak even to his family or friends, von Neumann was asked what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being.

He took a very long time before answering, in a voice that was no louder than a whisper.

He said that it would have to grow, not be built.

He said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, to speak.

And he said that it would have to play, like a child.

Couple with the poetic science of how a cold cosmos kindled the wonder of consciousness, then revisit Alan Turing on the binary code of body and spirit.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.