Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Guided By Voices (r)

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

 Philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen tells us the story of Pythagoras and the fifth hammer and how Kant and Kepler both tried (and failed) to record the universal harmonies Pythagoras once heard. Your host sets out to make some money doing experimental medical testing, and gets the chance to record the voice in his head.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Guided by Voices. There are a number of accounts in antiquity of the discovery of the irrational. But it's striking that these accounts all lead back in different ways to Pythagoreans. In fact, there are two accounts. In both accounts, there's a Pythagorean who is punished for having done something terrible. He's banished from the community of Pythagoreans.

People erect a tomb for him as if he were dead, although he's alive. Or he's drowned at sea, either by human beings or by the gods, for having done something truly impious. So the question is, what's the impious act he did? According to one theory, he discovered the irrational. That is, he discovered that in nature, there are things that are absolutely disproportionate,

things you cannot compare by means of a number. According to the other theory, Things you cannot compare by means of a number. According to the other theory, the crime was divulging the irrational, the disharmony of the world. Not so much recognizing that there was a disharmony in the world, but making it known that there were things in nature which were absolutely disharmonious. There seems to be a strong current in ancient thought, in fact there are texts that say this explicitly, that if you discover something disharmonious. There seems to be a strong current in ancient thought, in fact there are texts that say this explicitly, that if you discover something disharmonious in nature,

it's better not to tell anyone. We mostly know Pythagoras through the cult that he founded, a cult dedicated to the secret harmonies and proportions of everything. But for the philosopher Daniel Heller Rosen, Pythagoras was one of the first thinkers who came face to face with the disharmony of the universe. And this encounter took place because Pythagoras was first and foremost obsessed with sound.

He wanted to understand the nature of sounds, and he wanted to, in order to understand their nature, he wanted to understand what was eternally true about the nature of sounds. But there was a problem. Pythagoras wasn't getting anywhere with his research. And so one day, he stormed out of his workshop and went on a walk.

And this is where the story begins for Daniel Heller Rosen. In fact, this is how his book, The Fifth Hammer, starts off. Pythagoras walks by a forge, and then something catches his ear. Within the forge comes a wonderful sound. Pythagoras goes in to investigate, and he walks in and sees five smiths hammering. First he thinks that the beautiful sound

has to do with the force with which each man is hammering. So he makes them exchange their hammers, and the sound remains. Then he concludes that the sound, the harmony which he's heard, isn't in the men or in their muscles, it's in the instruments. The instruments all have very specific weights. He measures the weights of the instruments, and he discovers that four of the five hammers are in a marvelous set of proportions.

One measures 12, one measures 9, one measures eight, one measures six. But there was also a fifth hammer, which is inconsistent with everything, discordant with all the others. So he throws it away. And that's when he goes home and begins all of his calculations, which will lead to the first sketch of harmony as we know it. The first idea that sounds can be reasoned by numbers. Kant said more than once that the real founder of philosophy, the first philosopher, was Pythagoras. And I think he says this because Kant accords a great deal of importance

to something which clearly interested the Pythagoreans, and that is the harmony of nature. And Kant, too, believed that it was essential that philosophy be able to account for the harmony of nature, that philosophy allow for the possibility of a scientific knowledge of the universe. Kant means that his project is Pythagoras' project. In fact, that every philosopher's project is Pythagoras' project. That everyone since Pythagoras, who has practiced philosophy, has been trying to understand the harmony of nature.

That is to say, everyone who's been practicing philosophy since the beginning has been running into the problem of the disharmony of the world. Kant is no exception. In his book, The Critique of Judgment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant attempts to account for the nature of the universe, an order of all things. But for Daniel Heller Rosen, this is not what connects Kant with Pythagoras.

Rather, it is Kant's refusal to acknowledge even the possibility of the irrational or the disharmonious. Kant says that science demands that we be able to think of nature as a totality. That is to say, you begin classifying, say you're working as a botanist or as a biologist, you begin classifying species and genera and ordering various phenomena you find in nature. It's a presupposition from the beginning that you think as you order nature that you'll be able to classify lesser species under higher genera, that these various things will form a kind of system.

You don't know this, but you take for granted, you take it as axiomatic that the various things you're discovering will somehow be such that you can set them into a whole system. It could be, however, that this is simply not the case. It could be that nature is utterly chaotic, that you find one example of one thing, another example of something else. They're utterly heterogeneous.

There's no law that subsumes them. There's no concept which can grasp them. There's no higher genus in which you can set your very species. This is an intrinsic possibility in any scientific exploration. It's the possibility of disharmony, that nature is simply such that it cannot be cognized as a totality. Kant sees this and he retreats from it. Kant perceives the possibility of a disharmony of nature

and he turns his back on it. And in retreating from it, he repeats Pythagoras' gesture. Kant discovers something very, quite remarkable in this book, The Critique of Judgment, and it's something that involves the notion of infinity. Kant suggests that if you are dealing with numbers or mathematical sizes in science, you can always go from one magnitude, from one size to a larger size, and you can keep going. You can do these things with numbers, one, two, three. You can always imagine a bigger number. There's no problem there. It goes on to infinity. But he suggests that when you're perceiving something, and you begin perceiving things which are progressively larger, there's a certain point at which you reach a limit.

You simply can't take in something beyond a certain limit. So his example is St. Peter's at the Vatican or the Egyptian pyramids. You look at a part, you look at a bigger part, you look at a bigger part, you try and take the whole thing in and you can't. You can apprehend the part and another part, but you can't comprehend them all in a single instant. But our reason demands that we comprehend it in a single instant. And according to Kant, we have a sort of impelled to try and comprehend even an infinity within a single instant. We fail. We fail to do it in sensation. And yet in the moment in which you fail to do this, Kant says, this experience

triggers in us a sense of something which is truly infinite and which is not in nature, but which is in us. And that's the will, the freedom of the will. And so the moment of failure before the immensity of nature or the immensity of a human construction like a pyramid. In that moment of failure, we hear the voice of reason, which calls us to an infinity which we can think, which nothing hinders. A couple of weeks ago, I got a Facebook request from an old girlfriend who wrote how thrilled she was to have finally found me. She's now living in Seattle. She's married to a successful trial lawyer. She has two gifted and talented children.

She's the director of a world-famous medical research center. She lives in a giant house on the ocean. She has an estate in Spain. And she looks like she hasn't aged a day since she dumped me 13 years ago. Obviously, she's fabulously wealthy, or at least able to afford a good plastic surgeon. Well, I made a mistake in accepting her friend request because every night she sends me a stream of inappropriate messages. A few nights ago, she wrote to tell me how she'd spent an hour perusing my profile and my wall

and how proud she is of me. It's so great you stuck with the bohemian thing, she wrote, and it's so great to see you're still doing your important volunteer radio work. It's only been a few weeks and she's already acting like she's my life coach. Last night she sent me a message telling me to keep posting updates about my podcast, even though it's obvious that all of my friends could care less about it. You have to get them to unblock you, she wrote. She also repeatedly tells me that I must remind myself every day how lucky I am that I get

to devote myself to creative pursuits. Why, if you only knew about some of the things I have to do at my world-famous medical center, she wrote, you would die. It's totally soul-crushing. And here she inserted 12 extra U's into crushing to better make her point. I almost responded to that one.

I wanted to remind her that she had already taught me everything I could possibly learn about soul crushing when she left me. But I didn't. I get the sense she's long forgotten that she once broke my heart. She has not forgotten, however, the circumstances under which we met. In fact, she's brought this up in a number of her messages. These are the really inappropriate ones, most likely written after a few glasses of wine. All her spelling is slurred.

But the meaning is clear. She wants me to know that she still fantasizes about that time I climbed out of the MRI machine and took off my flashing goggles and kissed her. When I was 26, I was supporting myself through medical testing. This was back when the economy was booming and many of the research facilities in the Boston area were flush. I cashed in by

subjecting myself to science. I was the subject for a countless number of eating, sleeping, physical exertion, blood, tissue, organ, and brain studies. But my favorite was the cocaine study I did every month at McLean's Hospital. Once a month, they'd send a cab to fetch me from my unheated basement apartment. And when I arrived at the hospital, they'd shoot me full of cocaine. Then they'd strap on these flashing goggles to my face and dump me into an MRI machine. She was one of the graduate assistants working for the doctor who ran the study. She was gorgeous. And one day, perhaps overstimulated, I climbed out of the MRI machine and kissed her.

We saw each other for about six months. She was amazing. Whenever she had time for a study break, she would call me up and I would rush over on my bicycle. She was independent and caught up in her own work. I thought we were perfect for each other. But when she finished medical school, she dumped me. She told me that while I was the perfect boyfriend for a girl in grad school, I just wasn't suitable for real life.

This blast from the past did get me thinking, though. Perhaps I could get back into medical testing. I am, after all, indigent, and now that my body's falling apart, I should qualify for all sorts of studies. Perhaps I might even, well, on Craigslist, mixed in with the missed connections and the casual encounters, there are, it turns out, tons of medical testing opportunities. And many of them look quite lucrative. But yesterday morning, I found one that took my breath away. It went like this. Have you ever wondered about that voice in your head? Have you ever wondered what you really sound like?

A renowned scientist is launching a study to isolate and record the inner voice. And you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate. If you're willing to undergo a minor brain operation and are free to spend two weeks in our lab, then this study is for you. Compensation generous. I immediately replied to the email and the ad expressing my interest. And within five minutes, I got a reply asking if I was available to meet at noon outside the Dunkin' Donuts slash Baskin Robbins on First Avenue near the NYU Medical School. When I showed up at the Dunkin' Donuts slash Baskin Robbins, there was a man outside, leaning up against the building. He was wearing a lab coat, but he didn't look like a scientist or a doctor.

He looked more like a hospital security guard. But when I flashed him a quizzical expression, he sprang to attention. Look at all these people, with their phones and their pods and their pads, he said, waving his hand at the throngs of white ear-butted people walking by. And not a single one of them could tell us, if we asked, why they do it, why they drown out the sound of their true selves with audio sewage. As he was saying this, I discreetly tried to ball up the iPhone headphones I had in my left hand. But before I could finish, he snatched them away and flung them into the air.

And then, with lightning reflexes, using only his thumb and forefinger, he plucked the eighth-inch jack out of the air and held it up in front of my face. Would it not be great, he said, if you could plug this into your head? His name was Dr. Steele. Well, that's how he introduced himself to me. Dr. Steele, the world's greatest authority on the inner voice of man. The inner voice, he said, has always been linked to the self. Most people, in fact, believe that the inner voice is the actual I talking, like in a first-person narrative.

But until now, science has only been able to study secondhand accounts of our inner voice. Research subjects can only report on what they hear after they've heard it. There's still a filter, an interface. But that, he said, is now going to change. Because I have figured out a way to wire up the brain for sound. And if you're lucky enough to participate in my revolutionary groundbreaking study, I will drill a hole in your head. At this point, his assistant comes barging out of the Dunkin' Donuts slash Baskin Robbins. She's carrying a clipboard.

She's not really that attractive, but she does present me with a contract that says I will receive $10,000 if the experiment is successful. But what happens if it's not, I ask. Well, the assistant replied sheepishly, then you'd be dead. But that's not going to happen, Dr. Steele said

in a very reassuring tone. So reassuring, in fact, I signed the contract. Thank you. I can't recall what happened after I signed the contract to participate in Dr. Steele's medical experiment. I do remember crossing First Avenue with Dr. Steele and his assistant, but then everything fades to black. When I came to, I was in the front seat of a van, and there was a woman, a police officer holding an ice pack to my head. Across the street, the neon Dunkin' Donuts slash Baskin-Robbins sign pulsated in the early evening twilight. Then I caught sight of Dr. Steele and his assistant.

They were being shoved into a police car. They were both wearing handcuffs. What's going on, I asked the policewoman. Rogue science, she replied. Apparently, Dr. Steele isn't a real scientist. His experiments are unethical and illegal. The authorities have had him under surveillance for months now, and just as he began operating on me in the back of his mobile van lab, a SWAT team descended upon him.

You are lucky we showed up when we did, the policewoman said. There's no telling what he would have done to you. I wanted to give her a kiss to show her how grateful I was, but my head was throbbing. I could barely move. Eventually, they put me in a cab, and when I got to my apartment, I crawled into my bed and fell into a deep, deep sleep. When I woke up this morning, I discovered to my astonishment that there is now a hole in my head on my right temple.

That quack doctor drilled an eighth-inch audio jack into my brain. So I've decided that we are going to test this thing out together. I've brought with me a mini-to-mini cable here to the studio tonight, and we are going to plug my head directly into the board and see if this works. So when I pull this fader up, we should hear my inner voice. Is this thing on? Hi, everybody! Hi! No, no, no. I do not sound like that. I don't know who you are, but this is how I sound.

I must have like a loose connection. That tickles. That tickles. Who are you? We are the same person. Wait, there's two of you? Actually, I should say hi, too. We're like a big gang.

Don't you wish you were cool enough to be in the gang? He's not welcome. Definitely not. Hold on a second. What's with the hostility? This is like a momentous occasion and you guys are being dicks. We just don't like you. Who are you?

I told you, we're a gang. How many of you are there? We are Legion. Unbelievable. Are you stupid? Are you stupid? Oh, come on. Are you stupid? Are you stupid? Oh, come on. Are you stupid? Are you stupid?

Do you guys really need to do this? This is humiliating. You are humiliating me on my own podcast. I can't believe it. I'm going to have to grow out my sideburns or something. Well, one thing's for sure. This is the last we'll be hearing of you. Soul crushing.

Can't you hear? The history of ideas is filled with philosophers and mathematicians who've claimed to be disciples and descendants of Pythagoras. But in the 16th century, the German scientist Johannes Kepler claimed he was Pythagoras. Kepler suggested that it was entirely possible that long after dying, Pythagoras' soul migrated into another body. In fact, it was possible that Pythagoras' soul

had migrated into the body of a German astronomer and metaphysician, that is to say, Johannes Kepler himself. Kepler believed, or suggests, perhaps in part in jest, but not entirely, I think, that he, Kepler, was the reincarnation of Pythagoras. Now, Kepler made this ridiculous claim only once, in a letter. But for Daniel Heller Rosen, Kepler is the man who makes the greatest attempt

to complete Pythagoras' project, unlocking the harmonies of the universe. At many points, he makes it clear that his project, as he understands it, is Pythagoras'. And so he has no qualms about pointing out where Pythagoras went wrong. Kepler believes that Pythagoras and his disciples didn't trust their ears enough. He thinks that early on, the Pythagoreans put their faith in calculations rather than in perceptions. If the ancient Pythagoreans had trusted more in their own hearing, then they would have

been led to the principles of modern music. That's what Kepler thinks. And Kepler believes that he, the first successful Pythagorean, can demonstrate that all of nature has been ordered in accordance with the principle of harmony which is to say also with the laws of music and he shows this in his last major work of scientific innovation which is a book called the harmony of the world This is the work in which Kepler formulates for the first time his laws of planetary motion. In the discussion of the laws of planetary motion, it's quite clear that Kepler believes that when he discovers physical regularities in the universe, when he discovers

the path that each planet takes, how it accelerates and decelerates depending on its distance from the sun. When he discovers these principles, Kepler believes he is discovering the harmony of the universe. He's discovering that the planets have been set where they are and move in different speeds because the planets are executing a kind of astronomical harmony. In fact, in a certain sense, they are truly executing a kind of harmony, because Kepler's book aims to show that the relations between the planets' speeds are harmonic in nature. And what Kepler does is he takes his astronomical findings, which he made starting when he was in his youth, when he was the assistant to the great astronomer of the time, Tycho Brahe.

He takes all of his measurements and he tries to show that they lead to a single consequence. And that is that the various planets in our solar system are playing a music. They're playing a divine music, which is comprehensible only from the center of the universe, which is to say only from the sun. In Kepler's vision of the universe, God is the sun. And around him, all the planets are moving at different speeds, and they're producing harmonies, proportions, which are pleasing in kind.

Kepler, who was in a way, he's the figure who in the scientific revolution, you could say, it has been said, Kepler went further than anyone in imagining the physical structure of the universe. But he did so in order to fulfill the dream of Pythagoras. He did so because Kepler was a figure with one foot in the ancient world and one foot in the modern world. He discovered the laws of planetary motion because he was trying to solve Pythagoras' project. And yet, in conceiving of the laws of the modern universe, you could say that Kepler believes that he can solve the riddle of the fifth hammer.

But Kepler runs into a disharmony which is unavoidable. He ran into the problem of the infinite universe. Kepler believed all the planets move around the sun because he was a Copernican. He believed the sun was the center of the universe. But Kepler was aware that this claim could be questioned. As soon as Copernicus suggested that the center of the universe was not the Earth, but the sun,

people immediately started wondering, if the sun is the center of the universe, where are the edges of the universe? Aristotle had an explanation to the question. Aristotle believed he could show that there was a center of the universe and there was a limit to the universe. There was a center and there was an edge. But many people in the 16th century, when Kepler was writing, began to doubt that the

universe might have an edge. They began to suggest that the universe might go on forever. In other words, many people in Kepler's time suggested that the universe was infinite. And so Kepler was led to confront the problem of an infinite universe. If the universe is infinite, Kepler realized this right away, if the universe is infinite, it doesn't have a center. The center is anywhere and everywhere. If the universe is infinite and there's no center, then why observe the planets from

the point of view of the sun? You could just as well observe them from another point of view. And if you do, the harmony vanishes. And in conceiving of this possibility, albeit in horror, Kepler throws away the fifth hammer. He sees the fifth hammer. The fifth hammer is the possibility of an unlimited universe, a universe with no order. He sees this possibility, and he too, like Kant, like Pythagoras, retreats from it. He retreats from it in his own way, and that is by insisting that the universe be finite

and that it have a center. Because if the universe is infinite, then it has no order. It has no harmony. It's chaos. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Gu produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Daniel Heller-Rosen. Bill Bowen mixed the whole thing, and Ethan Cheal is the TOE production assistant.

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