Emergences and emergencies

On the limits of our ability to recognize and act upon dangerous situations before it's too late

If I had to pick a favorite book, wasn’t worried that others would judge me for it, it would definitely be Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008), a work of speculative/science fiction. Its plot is inherently difficult to describe, especially if one is attentive to avoiding spoilers. It is not set on Earth, but on an Earth-like planet that has its own complicated history, and is narrated by someone who is essentially a scholar-monk and is very embedded in the history of science and philosophy of his world. So it is a book about alternative modes of knowledge production (“what if universities were more like monasteries?”), a complex, alternative history of philosophy, and it’s a sci-fi adventure story. It’s not for everyone, but it is almost perfectly attuned to my interests, for whatever reason.

One of Stephenson’s conceits in the book is that because it is not Earth, some of the terms in the narrator’s language are not directly translatable to Earth concepts, and so he invents words that are sort of halfway between two English words to represent the ambiguities of the translation. So the title, anathem, is a mash-up of anthem and anathema, and refers to the chant that is sung when one of these scholar-monks is expelled from their university-monasteries.

Another idea that comes up several times in the book is that of an emergence, which is deliberately meant to invoke both the literal sense of the word in English (something coming into view), but with an inflection of the term emergency. It refers to the difficulty of being able to identify when a true emergency has arrived: “the idea being that all the training in the world was of no use, maybe even worse than useless, if you did not know when to use it, and knowing when to use it was a lot harder than it sounded, because sometimes, if you waited too long to go into action, it was too late, and other times, if you did it too early, you only made matters worse.”

I think about this a lot. Especially these days. Most people, I think, have various in-built biases against recognizing “emergencies” and acting on them swiftly. This takes place at difference scales, of course, from the immediacy of ignoring an alarm (even a nuclear attack alert), to the difficulty of acting upon longer-term, broader problems like climate change. As individuals, we’ve all known the tension, I suspect, between wondering if things have gone too far, or if we’re being overly paranoid, hasty, fearful. How do we simultaneously avoid worrying about everything, all the time, while also making sure that we don’t miss the serious warning signs? And more importantly, if we do see the warning signs, do we know what to do then, and do we have the means to do it?

I’ve been fortunate to have only been in an “Emergence” a few times, myself. Below is one of the times, and while like all memories one has worked over many times, it is, as far as I can remember it, essentially true.

The scene of our story, today, via Google Street View.

It must have been a morning in fall 2005 or so, when I was making my way to my Russian class in graduate school. I was walking down the familiar red-bricked sidewalk in Harvard Square, along the south side of the university’s main wall, along Massachusetts Avenue, when suddenly I perceived that something had simply manifested, out of nothingness, on the sidewalk maybe ten feet in front of me, slightly to my left. I had no conception of this thing having traveled there in time and space: there was nothing there, and suddenly there was something there. It was one of those rare moments when my confusion about my basic perceptions was so profound that I felt like I could feel gears turning in my brain, trying to make sense of it. The thing was, I concluded: a squeegee. Huh, was about all I consciously thought.

In what felt like nearly the same moment — but in retrospect, my perception of time was itself dramatically slowed down as a result of my confusion — something else appeared at around the same distance from me, but slightly to my right: a man, lying on the ground, face down, motionless.

Again, that feeling of mental gears, gnashing. Squeegee? And a man?? I perceived them both appearing instantly, with no apparent cause, creating a ferocious puzzle that my mind struggled to solve. How? Why? What!? I am grateful, I suppose, that I have rarely been as truly confused as I was in that moment. (Perhaps this is what animals are thinking when they see magic tricks?) My brain’s computation felt like it was going as slow as molasses, putting together a coherent narrative that explained its visual input. No doubt, on some subconscious level, my mind understood that something was wrong, which is why it spurred the conscious portion of it to figure out what.

My gaze then panned from the man on the right, to the squeegee on the left, and then, finally, up the building next to it. And in a small window, jutting out of the third floor of a very old yellow building — Wadsworth House, the second-oldest building on campus — was a small and pointedly empty scaffold for a window washer.¹

Finally, my pathetically slow conscious mind put together the narrative: the squeegee and the man were both sitting on that rig, and both fell off of it, to ill effect. When it had happened my gaze had been down and my thoughts had been elsewhere, and so I perceived their appearance as something like teleportation. At this point, I looked back at the man, and saw he still not moving, and that blood was in fact seeping out of his head, onto the bricks.

The above must have only taken a few seconds in real time, but through some mental process, in subjective time it felt like it took several minutes. At that point, my perception of time became something more like normal, and I looked around and saw that there were other onlookers in a state of shock.² Perhaps some of them saw the full action happen and thus were less confused about what had occurred than I was. A few were even starting to approach the man, asking if he was OK. He was plainly not OK.

I was a Boy Scout, even longer ago, and although I was not a particularly good or enthusiastic Boy Scout, I did learn enough about basic first aid to know when someone is beyond the help of basic first aid, and that you should not touch people who have possibly suffered a neck or back injury. This is beyond our capabilities, I remember thinking, and immediately whipped out my (pre-smart phone) cell phone, dialed 9-1-1, and told the people approaching not to touch him.

“What’s your emergency?” “A window washer fell out of a window!” “A window washer fell out of a window!?” “Exactly!” I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but it went something like this — I very distinctly remember the shock of the emergency responder repeating back what I had said, though.

Fortunately for the man, there was a hospital of sorts immediately across the street from where he had fallen, and so an ambulance arrived within a minute or less of my making the call. My recollection is that they came, scooped him into the ambulance rather quickly, and took off. Police also arrived, and someone cleaned the blood of the sidewalk. Amazingly, only about five minutes had passed since I first perceived the squeegee. I continued on my way to class and wasn’t even late. (I attempted, in my terrible second-semester Russian, to explain what had happened to my Russian teacher, and she reacted with appropriate incredulity that I meant what I was trying to say.)³

I think of the above incident from my life whenever I am thinking about the conditions that are required to take action when something has veered off of the rails — about recognizing that an Emergence has occurred, in Stephenson’s language. I am reasonably sure I was the first responder in this instance, and I believe I was the first person on the scene to a) piece together what had happened, b) comprehend its medical seriousness, c) overcome that fear we have, in such situations, of either overreacting or somehow making a bad situation worse by “escalating” it to the point of calling for help, and thus, d) actually act upon the situation. It required all four of those things to actually get a useful result.

This was despite the fact that I was evidently quite hampered in accomplishing the first bit of this sequence, because my proximity to the man made it hard for my brain to understand exactly what sequence of events had transpired. In the comprehension of the medical seriousness, I benefited from a little bit of training (as a Boy Scout), which allowed me to immediately conclude that a man who in motionless and whose head is bleeding after falling out of a window requires serious medical attention from professionals and should not be moved. This also, in turn, allowed me to overcome the aversion engage emergency services, because I was totally confident that this was neither an overreaction nor an escalation.

I say this not to give myself too much personal credit. I had just enough training to be useful (enough to recognize my individual limits), and enough self-awareness about these things to know that someone has to take on the responsibility for action very consciously, and that in such situations it is common for no one to do it. I don’t know if the latter was somehow absorbed from the Boy Scouts, or other aspects of my upbringing, or maybe just the fantasies of being “the hero” (fed by an endless stream of “heroic” media), but the end result is the same, either way.

Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, at left, conversing with American physicist Ernest Lawrence at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, DC, in 1935. Source: Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, American Institute of Physics.

The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard — the same one who in 1939 co-wrote a letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt warning of the possibilities of atomic bombs — told a story that I have long found to be rather profound its relevance to the question of “Emergence” and action. It is about when he decided that it was time to leave Germany in the spring of 1933.

He dictated a somewhat long version of it in 1960 for use in potential memoirs, which I quote here (and have tidied up and corrected a bit):⁴

Perhaps because such an important part of my life evolved during the first World War. I had the tendency to limit my possessions to what could be held in two suitcases. I think I would have preferred to have roots, but I couldn’t have roots because I wanted to have wings, and to be able to move at a moment’s notice came to be important to me. Now that, for a second time, there was a major upheaval in Europe — now that there was war again — I benefited from having wings and of not having roots.

After the Reichstag was put on fire, I lingered for few more days in Berlin. Having given up my apartment there, I lived in the Harnack House of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, and was thus in close touch with the scientific community of this Institute. My colleagues found it difficult to bring themselves to believe that the Reichstag was set on fire on orders of the German Government. Germany has always been a very orderly country and setting fire to the Reichstag appeared to be a very disorderly thing.

After a few days, having listened to all of my friends give their interpretation of the situation, I took a taxi — I locked and picked up my two suitcases and drove to the railroad station where I took the night train to Vienna. I expected the train to be packed; it was empty. There were Nazi guards on the frontier, but they didn’t bother any of the few passengers who were on the train.⁵

In contrast to this, the same train which reached the Austrian frontier on day later, was jam-packed. The passengers were asked to leave the train on the Austrian frontier and their luggage was searched and their purses were searched. Many were turned back and were refused permission to leave.

From the above incident, Szilard drew a conclusion that says much about his mindset:

All this goes to show that in order to succeed in this life, you do not have to be clever. All you have to be is a tiny little bit cleverer than most other people are. You don’t have to know what the future may bring. All you have to do is understand what the future may bring one day before most of the others do.

This is an interesting idea, and not so far from the concept of the Emergence. But Szilard’s account, here, misses a few key details. It is not just that he saw things were going in a direction that was going to lead to ruin if he did not escape quickly. It is that he was willing and able to act upon it. And part of that comes from this idea of the “wings” versus the “roots.”

Szilard, I think, misidentifies possessions as the “roots.” Of course, they can be that, especially in a world where certain possessions — like property — can represent a substantial investment of resources. But possessions are probably the easiest “roots” to shed. The hardest “roots” are people: what if Szilard had needed to “uproot” a family to make this move? How likely would it have been that he would have made it, then? A family would add stakes to the problem in both directions: higher consequences for being “right” and “wrong.” And all of this ignores the fact that Szilard was confident that he would not starve if he simply picked up and left — something that reflects not more than a little bit of privilege.⁶

The people in Stephenson’s book who talk about the concept of Emergence emphasize, at a later point in the book, that it is not just about observing that an emergency is occurring. It is about being in the position for action, for knowing that in the moment of the emergency it is too late to spend time planning things out in detail. You either have to be trained to adapt to any situation, or have the plans worked out well ahead of time. And that’s a very tall order.

1. Parts of the above are latter reconstructions, of course. I recall the building was yellow and across from what is now the Smith Campus Center, but was something else in those days. Wadsworth House fits the bill and is the only such building over there that directly abuts the sidewalk, as opposed to being behind a wall. I do not recall exactly what floor the window washing equipment was on; it might have been the second story, although it is hard for me to imagine how the man’s body could have been oriented as I remember it if he only fell from the second story. But the entire story is, in part, about mediated perceptions, and memory is included in that, so I take such details with a grain of salt.

2. As a small detail: I have no memory of any sound during any of the previous events (something that, as an aside, parallels most accounts from survivors of the atomic bombings).

Of course, this entire thing is about memory, and who knows to what degree my memory of the experiences of my own conscious processes during this unusual episode are correct. The whole thing is one of those thankfully-unusual episodes that calls one’s entire apparatus of consciousness into question, a rare moment (for me, anyway) where I feel, in retrospect, that I got a glimpse “behind the scenes” of how consciousness and meaning is made. The sense of time slowing down — what is up with that? Is it chemical in nature, something like adrenaline? (I do not recall feeling the effects of adrenaline during the above story, but it might be that I did not get recorded in my memories, or I edited it out, or something. It’s also entirely possible that I do not remember exactly when the sensation started — perhaps it was not the squeegee, but the man, that started it.)

Googling this topic brought me to this fascinating and strange little article that claims that it is possible to learn how to induce this state at will: Ralf Buckley, “Slow time perception can be learned,” Frontiers of Psychology 5 (March 2015), 209. I am bit skeptical — big claims, little evidence. But I do think it is interesting. Also interesting is the report that in most cases, this sensation is caused by extreme fear or stress. In my case, I did not consciously understand what had happened until after the time slowness had concluded, so my unconscious mind must have understood at some level that something anomalous was occurring — had perceived things, for example, falling near me without my having consciously seen it, and somehow judged that this required a lot more perception than would be normally available to me.

It would be interesting to be able to induce this state at will, although for my purposes I don’t know how useful it would be. In my own case, my memory of it is that my rational faculties were also slowed down — that “gearbox” feeling I describe — even though my ability to take in information seems to have “sped up” relative to the actual flow of time. So when I was in this “bullet time” I could see things, and understand that I saw them, but not understand them. (Who is “I” in this self-description? What part of my consciousness is separate from my rational faculties? I don’t know. This is all very interesting to me, but this kind of thing raises more questions than it answers.)

3. I have left out one further detail from the main story, because it digresses from the point I am trying to make in this presentation of it, but I include it here for the truly interested. Before leaving the scene of the accident, I approached one of the police officers who had arrived, and asked him if he needed me, as a witness, to give a statement about what had happened. He looked at me with the great skepticism that only Boston cops can have for students and academics. “You saw it happen?,” he asked me, with the classic non-rhotic accent, which happens to convey doubt so well. “Well, I didn’t actually see him fall, but —” I started. “Then you didn’t see nothing,” he concluded, and turned away from me.

And I realized, immediately, that he was totally correct. For I had seen no more than the police man himself had seen, when he arrived onto the scene a few minutes afterwards — an injured man, a squeegee, a washing rig. I hadn’t actually seen what had happened, just the consequences. And from a police perspective, that means I saw nothing of interest. I couldn’t testify that he had fallen accidentally, because I didn’t know. Maybe he was pushed? Maybe he jumped? Maybe he truly materialized out of thin air, as I had perceived him to, and was the result of some bizarre scientific or magical anomaly? My inductive approach — squeegee + man + rig = a window-washing accident — was a solid hypothesis, but it wasn’t anything that the cop felt was worth writing down. I tell this extended version of the story to classes, sometimes, when talking about the limits of induction. The cop was no David Hume, but he had immediately identified the major flaw in my reasoning, at least from a legal perspective.

4. “Memoirs,” dictated by Leo Szilard (1960), manuscript, held in Leo Szilard Papers (MSS 32), University of California, San Diego, Box 40, Folder 10. I have lightly edited it (e.g., the original has “Berlin Garden” for “Berlin-Dahlem,” and “Secretary House” for “Harnack House,” which are both attested to as where Szilard was living at the time in William Lanouette’s biography of Szilard, Genius in the Shadows).

In Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, edited by Spencer Weart and Getrud Weiss Szilard (1980), there is a shorter version: “I left Germany a few days after the Reichstag fire. How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes.”

5. One thing that Szilard leaves out in this account, according to Lanouette, is that he had purposefully booked a first-class of seat on the train, in the hope that he would be afforded less scrutiny — in part because he had hidden bundles of bank notes into his luggage.

6. Szilard also, Lanouette points out, is undercutting some of the actual trauma in this version of it: “At the German-Czech border after midnight the next evening—as the Nazis' anti Jewish boycott began—that same train from Berlin was overcrowded. Troopers questioned every passenger, holding back those deemed ‘non-Aryan’ or seizing their most valuable possessions. This close call so frightened Szilard that anxiety about his personal safety endured for the rest of his life. From then on, he always kept two bags packed. But to mask his fears, Szilard made light of his escape years later, only using the incident to boast.” William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 116.