Fantastic Metropolis

Magic was originally conceived of as a study of the natural world and the way to manipulate it via will: alchemy, for example, that field of study that gave us the phlogiston theory that Priestley would die believing in, was a quest for purity, for perfection ultimately of the self. The study of the elemental forms of the universe was a study of the self, an attempt to learn the old Hermetic lesson of macrocosm, that as above, so below. Franklin was known to have stated that he believed it was possible for man to live forever so long as the will was present. Perhaps he had a plan to achieve it, a plan that involved his huge web of correspondences and contacts, a great varied series of precise alterations to the world itself? Keep in mind that Franklin was intimately aware of information, of its storage, of its dissemination, and of the effect it could have on the minds of others.

There is even evidence that these same characteristics are built into the nature of the perceptual process itself. In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications. Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades of hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience.

—Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn’t be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms… of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you’ll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.

—Judy Jones and William Wilson, An Incomplete Education

So what if you control the defining set of rules? It’s one thing to be on the cusp of a shift in the way things are conceived of, especially if you can imagine well enough to foresee the way the shift will shift everything around it… the seismic impact of the Industrial Revolution on religion, on philosophy, on social theory, on the way we examine our own biology and our origins, the makeup of the physical world down to the nature of electricity, the chemicals that make up our existence, the existence or nonexistence of phlogiston (which, if we remember from our original alchemical speculation, was an undetectable field or presence within all things that could be returned to them, recreating them after it had been released, so that if you could introduce phlogiston to a burned object that object would be recreated, similar to Paracelsus’ true essences, that which was reflected by the exterior appearance of an object… sounds vaguely like, you guessed it, one of those morphic fields, that old Quantum Darwinism of Bohm and Sheldrake. The phlogiston was a casualty of the shift of mind the same way the etheric vortex would be later)... in short, if you can perceive the epistemic changes, and even figure out the exact crisis points and work to direct them properly then you can control not what people think, but what people can think, the very nature of their reality. One of the most interesting consequences of the card experiment Kuhn mentions above is the ten percent of the people who “cannot accept the shift”: if they notice the anomalies, they won’t be able to make the jump to a new paradigm of thought. A direct quote from one of the subjects of the experiment: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is or whether it is a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!” The process is fascinating because it reveals much about how we think, that the information we process as we develop shapes our minds to such an extent that some of us become incapable of accepting any information that contradicts that worldview: shape the worldview and you will be able to prevent certain people from coming up with certain ideas.

My theory is this: Franklin, Jefferson, Lavoisier, Priestley, and others involved in the Lunar Society had no intention of dying. Franklin himself stated that life could be extended indefinitely, while Lavoisier was so indifferent to the idea of being beheaded that in one famous apocryphal story he had an assistant on hand for his execution during the French Revolution (an execution that led to two famous aphorisms, one being the judge at his sentence of death stating, “France has no need for geniuses,” and another being Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s even more widespread, “It took only a moment for this head to fall and a hundred years will not see its like”) and as Lavoisier’s indeed brilliant head fell into the basket, his assistant counted the number of times the head blinked after decapitation. It takes a pretty tightly wrapped mind to come up with that idea while waiting to die… unless death wasn’t considered a permanent problem, just an inconvenience to be overcome. And how were they going to overcome it?

By becoming phlogiston.