Figure 1. Protein Data Bank ID 6NY9 (doi.org/10.2210/pdb6NY9/pdb) originally deposited by Cao, Y., Rice, P.A., Dickinson, B.C. Image made with Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) (www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd). VMD is developed with NIH support by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This is one of Maxwell’s many daemons. It is an imperceptible cognizer that sorts and organizes, a little weaver of negentropy. A beast stranger than our myths imagined hitherto: nothing anthropomorphic, no friendly or fearsome faces for us, just an absurd mass of loops and tendrils with no apparent end and no apparent end. Even Ezekiel’s wheels had eyes, those most ensouled organs. H. R. Giger’s monstrosities entranced precisely through their entelechies; though always just beyond reach, their presence was obvious at first glance: factory and organism in familiar dress, screaming telos. Our daemons, however, seem like nothing but a heap of kindling.

And where is the ignition? Which gear is it that breathes? Here is no factory, with no worker bees, warm or cold, fashioning order. For that, we must zoom farther out, or else turn on the clock and watch the actors of metabolism dance with this assembly worker. But this is illusory: in its cramped cellular gel and without trajectories smoothed, the Brownian mask of entropy revives its opacity. It is only our soundings that have tried to chart an ocean in which Spirit lives in austerity.

Moreso the burning than what burns: daemons immeasurable in number, in all manner of shapes, borne of the pregnant magic of combination. They drone the tune of a fantastic geometry. Crystals with pneuma! dancing in and through and by us hum across basins of thousand-layered spaces. We will edit Pythagoras’ scheme: amend “mineral” to “crystal.” Having come this far, why not subsume all under this taxon? The engines of life are the same ringings of geometric notes. The chords are just hopelessly messier. The wisdom of the biochemists: Perfection reveals, imperfection creates.

I have heard it said that science explores human experience, while religion transcends it. But might we, after all, have anything to do with the latter? Is it so sinful to think? We romance the obscure and abstruse, alien, Weird, those who buzz on timescales impossible, unconcerned with us (and are us!), not perceived, never to be perceived, caught only through dint of echoed inference and faith. Bogged down with piecemeal work we forget these glories. If pressed, we retreat to the desert and speak, often circuitously, of useful fictions. “Forgive us our perverse abstractions, pray see they were of some use, my lord!”

But who of us with any fire in our breast, seeing any glimmer of that illustrious vision, can abstain from the realm where semiosis is mimesis, where we feel our pale shadows a projection of more and struggle to apprehend what we can only gesture towards? No chemist would imagine our representations capture all of what little we know. We try—whether or not in vain—to point to a realm forever beyond us. We cast our nets for refracted scintillations and pray that we remake the stars. Our experience may not be a satori or samādhi. We are not shamans who descend below and watch ourselves consumed by demons. But in living what we cannot see, cannot sketch, cannot know?, I will suggest that our daemons are not something so cleanly separate.

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Jason D. Josephson is a PhD candidate in chemistry at the University of Ottawa and has co-authored papers using proteomics, machine learning, and computational chemistry to study chemical biology. He is interested in philosophy, science, art, and the interrelations therein (jasondjosephson.com).

Biochemistry, Cellular, Mind, Religion, Science, Technology