Is there anything more theological than late modern scientific speculations on the birth(s) and end(s) of the universe? I am referring to a theology after Nietzsche’s proclaimed “death of God.” [i] By the end of the 19th century, the Second Law of thermodynamics was thought to announce the inevitable “heat death” of the universe itself. [ii] Boltzmann’s theorems explaining the seemingly irreversible increase of entropy along the arrow of time made the idea of God as Creator of a perfect order irremediably passé. Yet by the mid-20th century, this explanation of entropy based on statistical mechanics had given rise to a series of paradoxes which formed the basis for a veritable late modern mythology or theology of entropy as both a world-destroying and world-creating principle, central to which was the struggle with “Maxwell’s demon”[iii]. I propose to read Philip K. Dick’s novella Ubik as a thermodynamical fable in which the fundamental problem posed by entropy, namely, how to explain irreversible physical processes by appealing only to time-reversible physical laws, offers a key to decode the novel’s politico-theological significance.
The basic conflict of the novel mimics the tension between two antagonistic principles of the physical universe: gravity and entropy, the tendency of matter to clump together versus the tendency of energy/heat to disperse. In Ubik’s futuristic world, organizations of telepaths or mind-readers (“pre-cogs”) intent on industrial espionage are battled by organizations of mind-blockers (“inertials”) intent on neutralizing their psychic fields. The former are agents of entropy, the latter agents of gravity. The protagonist of the novel, Joe Chip, works for a company of inertials, while the villainess of the novel, the seductive double-agent Pat Conley, appears to be an “inertial” only to reveal herself as the ultimate “pre-cog,” capable of redirecting the arrow of time and changing the course of events without the people affected realizing this has happened: in effect, what they believe to be their future is Pat’s past. Chip, his group of top inertials, and the owner of the company, Runciter, realize too late that they have been drawn into a trap by Pat, and midway in the novel they are all killed by a bomb explosion. Here begins the infamous confusion into which the reader of Ubik is thrown, because the main plot of the novel turns on who is alive in the “real” world and who is merely gestating in a “moratorium,” cryogenic environments that extend brain activity in dead bodies into a “half-life,” in the hope that the “souls” of the deceased will find new bodies to incarnate themselves into in some unspecified future.
The novel questions whether “real life” is more real than “half life” and thereby becomes an allegory for how the “other world” of religious imagination colonizes “this world”. Dick constructs the relation between the “real world” and the “other world,” between immanence and transcendence, according to the psycho-dynamics of revealed, monotheistic religion. Through a series of “manifestations” Runciter (who appears to have survived in the real world) reveals to Chip and the others (who are physically dead but spiritually alive in the moratorium) the truth of their post-mortem condition, thereby unveiling a terrifying scenario (an “apocalypse”) in the world of “half-life”: a malevolent or demonic force, called Jory, has figured out how to extend his own “half-life” by “eating” the cerebral energies (the “free energy”) of the other frozen interns of the moratorium.
Much like Maxwell’s demon, Jory uses the remaining psychic energy of the brains of his fellow interns to stave off the end of his half-life but increases the total entropy of the system. This “spiritual” metabolism between brains in half-life is experienced by half-lifers as if their bodies and their environments “de-evolve” into earlier past forms of themselves, in order to finally disintegrate completely. Dick describes the world of half-life as an alternate universe in which the arrow of time runs backwards (and can be actually experienced as moving backwards in time by half-lifers, something that Boltzmann denies is possible in reality), and from a low-entropy present everything is rushing towards its high-entropy past (rather than towards the high-entropy future, as corresponds to our lived experience of the universe). As in any respectable apocalyptic narrative, salvation is also at hand in the form of Runciter’s deceased young wife, Ella, who is also interned in the cryogenic facility. Ella seems to have devised a product, called Ubiq, the veritable deus ex machina of the novel. Conveniently contained within a spray can, Ubiq is a substance that can reverse the reversion of entropy and thus keep the world of half-life moving along the same arrow of time shared by the real world, that is, on a gradient from low-entropy energy to high-entropy energy. The final part of the novel is centred on the struggle between Chip, intent on securing Ubiq in the half-life, and Jory, intent on preventing him from doing so by accelerating the de-evolution of all things into unusable junk, including Ubiq.
My hypothesis is that Dick’s novel mobilizes aspects of the two most famous paradoxes of reversibility that emerge from Boltzmann’s theory. The first paradox, attributed to Boltzmann’s department colleague, Johann Loschmidt, is called the “reversibility paradox”: it basically states that it is equally probable, by the reversibility of mechanical laws, that atoms could exactly reverse the momentums that led them initially to spread out and thus to cool down the closed system. This reversal would move the total state of the system from a high-entropy back to a low-entropy state, negating the Second Law of thermodynamics. [iv]
Loschmidt’s paradox seems to offer one explanation for the degradation or de-evolution of all things to their earliest forms that occurs in the half-life of Ubiq. This process is essentially the attempt by a world to reduce the complexity that is increasing its entropy by moving backwards in time towards a simpler, more ordered state of itself. Loschmidt’s point is that the reason why we only seem to have experience of an increase in entropy (no one seems to experience the omelette reverting to a whole egg) is due to having arbitrarily chosen an “initial condition” that is of low-entropy (viz., to make the omelette in the first place, by definition we needed a whole egg). However, there is no physical reason based on mechanical laws why the universe should start out with whole eggs and evolve into omelettes rather than start with omelettes and evolve into whole eggs.
Contemporary physics has recognized the validity of Loschmidt’s paradox. In terms of Dick’s novel, this standpoint of contemporary physics amounts to assuming that the time reversal conditions featured in half-life cannot be excluded as a possibility within real-life, while maintaining the arrow of time as condition for real-life experience. The way both things are kept compatible, just like in theology one keeps heaven and earth distinct but together, is by introducing an “extra assumption,” namely, that the universe began in a low-entropy state, which is termed the “Past Hypothesis”. This “boundary” condition that accounts for the arrow of time as we experience it is “not part of the laws of physics themselves” (Carroll 174). The only reason we never seem to experience the arrow of time running backwards, and only experience the arrow moving from past to future is due to the Past Hypothesis. Without it, we would only have illusory memories of having evolved from an ordered past, and our existence would become a cosmically random affair: we would lose all hope of being a coherent self who is capable of leading a coherent life. The Past Hypothesis is a veil of Maya meant to keep us from witnessing the horror of Maxwell’s demon.
But why should the universe be so structured as to make human-all-too-human aspirations to coherence and meaning “necessary”? Ubiq seems to raise an objection through its own narrative structure to this imperative of “sensible” narration, which is another version of the anthropic principle. It is as if Dick’s intentionally misleading and undecidable narrative chronology were designed to bracket the Past Hypothesis (an hypothesis that was already discussed, but not with this name, by Richard Feynman in his famous 1961-1964 Caltech lectures on physics, so it is possible that Dick could have had access to them in some form when preparing Ubiq).
So, what happens if we do not appeal to the Past Hypothesis? What happens is that eternal recurrence of the same becomes our key principle of reality. A few years after Loschmidt’s objection, a young student of Max Planck, Ernst Zermelo, brought forward another objection to the mechanical explanation of entropy: the so-called “recurrence paradox”. Zermelo relied on Poincaré’s 1893 paper which proved that all mechanical systems, left to their own devices and given sufficient time, would eventually return to their initial conditions, and the same cycle would eternally repeat itself: “according to this theory to see heat pass from a cold body to a warm one, it will not be necessary to have the acute vision, the intelligence and the dexterity of Maxwell’s demon; it will suffice to have a little patience” (Poincaré cited in Carroll, 207).
Now, if the Past Hypothesis supposedly helps us cope with Loschmidt’s objection, Carroll admits that “we can’t rely on the Past Hypothesis to save us from the problem raised by recurrence.” If the universe lasts forever, eventually entropy will decrease and time will run backwards. The usual way out of the paradox of recurrence is the Big Bang model: we assume that the universe might have a beginning, and it would be a low-entropy boundary condition; space-time is neither infinite nor eternal but it has a “beginning” and it is “bounded”. If the system of the universe starts off in a low-entropy condition then there is an enormous likelihood that it will transition towards equilibrium and entropy increases throughout the system. However, Boltzmann also worked with the possibility that the eternal recurrence of the same is a valid hypothesis, if considered statistically.[v] On this scenario, it is possible for random fluctuations out of equilibrium to exist, if one waits long enough. This means that the amount of entropy is time- and space-variant: the universe overall rests in equilibrium but in certain regions of space-time there occur random fluctuations towards lower-entropy states which then evolve back to the equilibrium of higher-entropy states. It’s as if the frozen universe, in certain parts and in certain times, would jolt itself, for a brief time, out of death and into a sort of “half-life”.
This scenario raises the ultimate religious question: in a universe that is overwhelmingly in equilibrium and “dead,” why are we the only ones “alive”? For Boltzmann, the universe has the capacity to create “worlds” or “environments” that feature “random fluctuations away from equilibrium, where we can possibly live” – in these localizations the flow of time from past to future corresponds to the transition from low-entropy to high-entropy states, and since we happen to be living beings, “it’s not much surprise that we find ourselves there” (Carroll 215).
But the fluctuation that happens to us and places us in such a “middle” (milieu) condition of entropy – and out of which we are evolving towards higher entropy, that is, towards equilibrium – must necessarily comport the inverse transition from high-entropy to low-entropy, that is, it must have involved the backwards flow of time. In this reverse fluctuation, “stars and galaxies would un-form, omelettes would turn into eggs, objects in equilibrium would spontaneously develop substantial temperature gradients” (Caroll 221). Here we can see that the reversal of time, or eternal recurrence, becomes a necessary condition of possibility for the emergence of life in the universe. On this picture, there is a sense in which the time-reversing world of half-life is the condition of possibility of the time-progressing world of lived experience and the “real world”, something that Ubik tries to render by its constant intimations that the “real world” of normal experience might itself be an artificial world created by the inhabitants of “half-life”. The scenario is not that different from the one represented by the Matrix films.
In Ubiq the brains in half-life have the capacity to recreate worlds for themselves that are entirely virtual, and that other brains in half-life inhabit as if in a simulation. Here the possibility of returning to an “original” or “real” world has vanished entirely (except for the religious hope in re-incarnation, metempsychosis). This aspect of Ubiq is the one that perhaps speaks most directly to our current cultural predicament in which a substantial part of humanity is spending more and more time on digital platforms that generate virtual realities through which our thoughts and affects are not only surveilled and tracked, but also predicted and harvested as if our minds had become food for AI generated and managed algorithms.
This scenario is known in physics as the hypothesis that we may be nothing but “Boltzmann brains” (Caroll 222). If we discard the Past Hypothesis and our universe is the result of random fluctuations that generate spikes of low-entropy “initial” conditions required for our evolution, then the most probable and economical outcome of the evolution of the universe is not the edifying “deep history” that has become so popular recently. Rather, all that would be needed is for the universe to generate a single, disembodied brain, a “Boltzmann brain” and all our memories, our sense of history and biography, our belief that we were born from our mothers, these are all false memories or illusions. By the end of Ubiq one gets the sense that all characters might be Boltzmann brains preying on each other.
Of course, physicists are not novelists, and Richard Feynman already developed an answer to conjure away the terrifying spectre of Jory. The “proper” answer to the reductio ad absurdum of the “real” world to the “half-life” of the moratorium is this: “It’s not right to say, ‘I know I am not a Boltzmann brain, so clearly the universe is not a random fluctuation’. The right things to say is: ‘if I were a Boltzmann brain there would be a strong prediction: everything else about the universe should be in equilibrium. But it’s not. Therefore the universe is not a random fluctuation.” (Carroll 223) Ubiq calls into question this certainty that the strong prediction is wrong, for in the frozen environment of “half-life” it happens to be more or less true that “everything else about the universe” is in thermal equilibrium; everything, that is, except what is touched by ubiq, the ultimate negentropic device or exosomatic creation of a Boltzmann brain, a simulation of “redemption” from a simulated world. I suppose the question for us today is this: is our “cloud-based,” “meta-versed” stage of capitalism sticking closer to Dick’s Ubiq script, or to that of our “realist” and “rationalist” scientific popularizers?
[i] For examples, see Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Peter Sloterdijk, After God (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2020).
[ii] Entropy is a measure of the disorder in a closed system that is closely associated with the use of energy for work and the necessary dissipation of heat during this process. Entropy is formulated by the Second Law of thermodynamics: “A cyclic transformation whose only final result is to transfer heat from a body at a given temperature to a body at a higher temperature is impossible” (Clausius’s formulation).
[iii] Maxwell’s demon designates the possibility that an omniscient and very quick demon could manipulate particles, without generating heat, in a closed system in such a way as to crowd the high-energy ones in one half of the system and let all low-energy particles crowd in the other half, thereby raising the temperature of a closed system without any external addition of energy. See Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, “Maxwell’s Demon,” The Journal of Philosophy 107 (2010), and Stanley N. Salthe and Gary Fuhrman, “The Cosmic Bellows: The Big Bang and the Second Law,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2005).
[iv] Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here. The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Penguin Random House, 2010), 174. I employ Carroll’s description of the paradoxes throughout for purposes of economy, they follow quite closely Stephen G. Brush, The Kind of Motion We Call Heat, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1976), 627-638.
[v] Boltzmann’s “final, dramatic suggestion… maybe the assumptions underlying the recurrence theorem are valid” (Carroll, 214, emphasis mine).
