CHAPTER XV
THE PSEUDO-LIVING ORGANISMS

We have seen that organic structure is likely to be
found in either section of the universe in the minority
tendency. In the case of the negative section of the
universe, where most objects are alive, this minority
tendency will be the positive tendency. Thus the organic
structures in the negative part of the universe are not
living but lifeless beings, though having certain
appearances of life. These we have called pseudo-living
organisms, which, though in certain respects they appear
like living beings, yet their motions are of a passive rather
than an active character.
Inasmuch as, on reversal with respect to time, a
negative universe becomes a positive one, and the
norganic life that is found in the negative section of the
universe corresponds to the ordinary lifeless inorganic
bodies that we observe, so we may notice that these
pseudo-living organisms are the exact reverse of the
living organisms that can be observed in the positive
section of the universe.
We have seen that, at ordinary temperatures, these
pseudo-living organisms, in order to keep existing, must
have a constant metabolic process always going on; this
being the exact reverse of the metabolic process going
on in living organisms in the positive section. In fact, take
any process going on in living organisms, and its exact
reverse with respect to time will give us the corresponding
process going on in pseudo-living organisms.
Take, for example, the sensitiveness that is
characteristic of nearly all life. This will, indeed, be found
also in the inorganic life in the negative section of the universe.
But the pseudo-living organisms have nothing of the sort.
They are not sensitive to causes, but to effects; for a small
effect may, in these organisms, be the result of a large cause,
as we should expect from the second law of thermodynamics.
Thus, while all living substance is sensitive to the past, all
lifeless substance is similarly sensitive to the future. This is
indicated in ordinary physical objects by the fact that it is
easier, where both are unknown, to trace the future than the
past. The same will be true of the pseudo-living organisms,
which are but complicated physical bodies surrounded by
living substance. Such organisms will be organized to be
able to feel, but not what has already happened. As to the
past, anything in those organisms that may possibly be called
feeling would be absolutely blank.
In the case of living organisms, this feeling, it its most
elementary form, consists merely of that irritability which we
have already identified with the reversal of the second law of
thermodynamics. That is, feeling consists, in its most
elementary form, of a stimulus releasing reserve energy and
making it available energy or else actually using it. On the
contrary, the pseudo-living feeling would be exactly the reverse,
turning available energy into a store of reserve energy as
effectually as may be. In the more complex living organisms,
special organs of feeling are developed, which are of
special irritability, organs which are specially efficient in
extracting available energy out of reserve energy. In fact, in
those special organs of feeling (the nervous system) is
concentrated most of the mechanical efficiency with respect
to extracting available energy to be used as molar motion.
Finally, we have the development of a brain, a central organ
in which the reserve energy is stored as a result of special
stimuli, and which can use that energy to produce molar motion.
In the pseudo-living organism, which is the exact reverse of
the living organism, this nervous system and brain would
constitute a system of extremely low mechanical efficiency,
that is, a system for doing as nearly nothing as possible. It
would indeed store up immense amounts of reserve energy,
or rather, of partly available energy, which would be almost
as good as unavailable.
Thus the nervous system and the brain, which in living
organisms is the most active part of the organism, would also
be found in the pseudo-living organism, with the same size,
shape, position, substance, etc., but would, instead of being
extremely active, be the deadest part of an apparently dead
organism. And the reason for this obvious, if we will but
consider. The physical body, and especially the pseudo-living
organism, is sensitive only to the future. If something strikes it,
or if any other stimulus is applied to it, this immediately
becomes a past phenomenon and the organism can no
longer take cognisance of it. But should it ever happen that
the body itself produces a visible effect in the manner of
motion, sound, heat, etc, the body shows it by its internal
condition before the effect is produces, though, as soon as
the effect appears, this abnormal condition of the body
disappears. The body can feel what is going to happen, not
indeed what is going to happen to it, but what is going to
happen as a result of it; and the moment the event happens,
all is forgotten, as it were, that is, no resulting internal
condition is noticeable. In pseudo-living organisms, special
lifeless organisms built up by living surroundings to resemble
in certain respects the living beings that we see, these
phenomena will, in the more complex cases, be specialized
into a nervous system. Thus the phenomena under the
positive tendency, and in particular in the pseudo-living
organisms, that are analogous to feeling, refer not to past
causes, nor indeed to future causes (this not being the true
reverse of past causes), but to the direct reverse of past
causes, namely, to future effects.
Where, in a living organism, we have enough
complexity to find such an organ as a brain, we immediately
have the brain reactions which are known as mental
phenomena. These are the centralized stores of available
energy which the nervous system has extracted from the
outside reserve energy, and which can be used under a
stimulus to produce molar motion. The mind is thus part
of the brain-machinery, a highly complex and
specialized machinery for the extraction of reserve energy
and its final conversion into molar energy. The extraction
of reserve energy in the original process is sensation; the
energy stored up in the brain at a higher level is the mental
process; and this mind can only feel sensations, and retain
traces of processes, that have already happened, and refer
them to the past. On the contrary, in the pseudo-living
organism, the similarly complex and specialized process
will merely produce reserve energy for the outside world to
use, and any mental process in such organism could only
refer not to the past causes but, like all feeling under the
positive tendency, to future effects, which, however, would
be felt as stimuli and not as effects; for the object itself
would under a strain as if stimulated. In other words, this
pseudo-living mind, this machine for doing nothing as
effectually as possible, could only perceive and remember
the future, and would conceive of that future as the reverse
of what it really is, namely, as stimulus instead of effect.
Since the ordinary organic bodies are the simplest
forms out of which the pseudo-living organism develops as
a high degree of complexity, just as the inorganic life of the
negative section of the universe is the simple form of which
living organisms are a higher development, we may easily
suppose that ordinary inorganic bodies such as we constantly
observe have this reversed feeling; but, as mental processes
are a result of a highly complicated and specialized organism,
we cannot attribute to ordinary physical objects anything like
a mind.
It has been a favorite theory of the late Prof. Josiah Royce
that physical objects are alive and even endowed with a mind,
but that we cannot communicate with them or observe that
mind on account of the difference in reaction-time. According
to his theory, while we react to a stimulus in, let us say, a tenth
of a second, let us suppose that there is being that reacts in a
thousand years. The motions of that being will be so slow that
to us he will appear practically motionless and dead, while, on
the other hand, our motions will be so rapid that he will be totally
unable to perceive them, so that he will also think us dead. The
theory indicates that a difference in reaction-time might be the
cause of our not attributing life and feeling to physical objects.
Under our theory of reversibility, the same will be true, only the
reaction-time of a physical object will not merely be different
from ours, but negative, so that all means of our observing the
similarity would be cut off.
This does not, of course, mean, that there are no
observations or experiments possible from which we could
indirectly infer such similarity, but merely that we could not
possibly observe it directly, because it is superficially different
almost in kind from living feeling. It is not, of course, quite true,
that physical objects do not show the effects of stimuli; they do
indeed, in some cases, but to a markedly less degree than
they show the incubation of future effects. Thus, if this sensitivity
could be at all called feeling, a physical object, once an event
is past, would feel it vaguely if at all, and with a great
uncertainty. To the pseudo-living organism, the past has
the same vagueness and uncertainty as the future has for us,
though some dim guesses as to the past might conceivably
be made by the pseudo-living mind.
But it still remains true, that if we were transported into a negative
section of the universe, though the pseudo-living organism would appear in
shape, substance, structure, etc., exactly like the living organisms we are
accustomed to, yet we should not recognize the existence of sensitivity or
mental phenomena in them at all, and they should appear to us as lifeless
bodies, which indeed they are. They would appear to us merely as
extremely well preserved corpses. And, because we cannot feel what the
pseudo-living analogue of a mind would conceive as a stimulus, and would
not react to it, those organisms would similarly think of us as dead.