A banded garden spider in the woods in Troy. Photo by Dana Wilde

If you spend much time in the woods doing nothing, you get the feeling things are going on that you can’t see.

I don’t mean the deer you don’t see until your eye starts picking them up in the spruce distance. Or the redstarts enclosed in maple branches. Or the thousands of spiders, squirrels, chipmunks, weasels and fungi your eye misses even a few feet away. A strand of spider’s silk glinting and disappearing. The way sunlight strikes hemlock needles.

An October field in Troy. Photo by Dana Wilde

I mean the feeling that the woods are a layer over a silence that seems to be speaking. People go into the woods, or to the ocean, lake or desert to listen for it. And you know, some of us do it for day-trip recreation, and some of us do it for a week or two to vacate the work cacophony and regain a semblance of reality. And a few — I won’t say “we” — detach themselves more or less completely from the world of punch and money in order to peel away as many layers as possible standing between them and the divine, which is one word for the speaking that isn’t heard.

What it is, no one has ever been able to precisely say, of course, and there are schools of thought (and note: there always have been) that dismiss the possibility of any divinity whatsoever. And they have a point. It just isn’t logical.

The scientific method in about 500 years has revealed more about the workings of the natural world almost than can be believed. The intricacies and details uncovered in biochemistry, physics and just sheer zoological taxonomy (there are thought to be at least 175,000 species of spiders with about 125,000 of them still unnamed) are mind-boggling, when you think about it. And it was human minds, collaborating, who figured it all out by careful rational, catalogical attention to things as they are, rather than as they’re speculated to be.

By all accounts — and one in particular — this analytical capability is accelerating. Technology, and especially electronic computers since they were invented in the 1930s, do more and more things people can do — and can’t do, as it were. Statistical analyses of progress have shown that the rate of increase of multi-complicated tasks performed by technology increases exponentially, meaning the intricate factors of technology accelerate at a measurable rate. In one school of thought, computers are progressing so rapidly that they are going to dramatically alter human life and possibly give rise to a sort of neo-humanity. It is thought that this will happen by the year 2045. This turning-point moment in human-computer interface is called The Singularity.

A singularity, in physics, is a point in space-time so warped by extreme local conditions (such as gravity) that its curvature becomes infinite, like at the edge of a black hole, and it essentially vanishes from our experience; its boundary, beyond which nothing can be detected, is called an event horizon. The Singularity, by neoloppropriation, is “the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence,” which will be an event so radically transformative that it is a social, cultural and scientific event horizon. So goes the thinking, anyway.

The prediction is that supercomputers will simulate layer after layer of human mindwork so completely that they will essentially become conscious beings. Humans will plug their brains directly into the computers and add terabytes of thinkapacity. We’ll scan the biochemical patterns of our brains into circuitry and become amaranthine in there. Artificial intelligence will be orders of matrixtude faster and more layerplex than chemico-rationality, and if the machines do not junk us in our obsolescence, we’ll become completely new uberbeings. Imagine the astounding thoughts you could think after computerfication.

A veil of summer hail on the back deck in Troy. Photo by Dana Wilde

If you get your brain chemistry scanned onto a computer chip so the computer’s video and audio components behave like you, is it really you in there, or is it the computer giving the appearance that it’s you?

Meanwhile, in the backwoods of Troy, there sometimes arises a sense that is not made of thoughts at all. It’s just an echo in an inner ear that hears no sounds but, when things are sufficiently quiet, detects something just beyond the periphery of the tree line that cannot be pinned to any of the five senses or even thought about, only noticed. It is a perplexing thing. It is not the trees, not the redstarts, not the sky, not the breeze, not the lichens, not the invisible deer, not the gurgle of the brook. It is just out beyond them all. It’s not even a thought, which swims like a water bug on the surface of a stream. It’s not an emotion, either, which is like bubbles from the stream bottom popping the surface. It’s not moral feelings, which are neither emotions nor thoughts but which occupy both, nor is it even what we refer to vaguely as “intuitions,” or realizations that come from no identifiable place under the deep-running stream.

Einstein himself observed that even scientific ideas seem to come less from logic than from nowhere. In the old way of speaking of it, the woods are like a veil between us and wherever that is what we hear being quiet. It’s been described in philosophy as “maya,” which refers to the illusion set up by the material world, and in science by E=mc2 which indicates that matter is an illusion set up by temporary configurations of energy.

The super-AI will not hear any silence, will not understand words that aren’t words, and will not be able to analyze nothing. The nothing whose boundary is nearer in the woods than it is in pictures of woods on a screen.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at [email protected]. His book “Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.