Arrival, time, intelligence
I discovered Ted Chiang's novel – The story of your life – soon after watching the movie in a plane on my way to Norway, where I was enrolled for my Ph.D.
It was 2016, I had wrapped up all the experiments, that demonstrated that my model of neuron and nervous system was able to mimic 3 key things that any representative of any animal species do, and that no other model had been able to mimic even partly. I was quite happy with myself.
But as a scientist working from the perspective that I should do my very best to falsify my hypotheses and my findings, I came up with a simple question: Does the reaction time of my organisms match the propagation of the information from sensory neurons to motor neurons?. I needed to dot the i-s and cross the t-s. I dug into it, and found out something very puzzling: for all the behaviours, the rection time was much shorter than the shortest propagation time inside the network. In other words, the – artificial – organisms were reacting long before the information reached the muscles after a stimulation: they acted as if they were predicting the future.
I spent an awful amount of time checking everything, from every possible angle. I even described the workings of the nervous system in a mathematical form, as to get a radical approach to spotting the problem. That didn't work.
Then I realised that one of my ground postulate could be wrong: there are many quantum physics experiments that don't look the same at the microscopic and macroscopic levels, philosophers study inverse causality, there are physicists who challenge the perceived notion of time... May be the t-s and i-s I was trying to cross and dot, could not be crossed or dotted... Had any biologist / ethologist / neuroscientist already made that surprising observation before me?
The answer is definitely yes. It was never reported in the title or the summary of the articles, but as low key notes in the discussion section. The observation had been made, acknowledged, and tucked at the end of the paper, written in a double-negative form, in order to not attract the attention of the unsuspecting reader.
And then I watched Arrival, and realised how pervasive is the notion – that the macroscopic perception of time must be mirrored in the microscopic levels –, from the original approach to quantum physics and gravitation, to genetics and neuroscience. In all cases this is just a postulate, a dogma, of the most stupid kind, since there's nothing that builds on it. A time waster. As for neuroscience, nervous systems do not need to predict the future. This is another bad choice of words to describe an observation. Almost all the time, any nervous system (any representative from any animal species) performs timely macroscopic actions while the actual propagation time in the network is much slower. We just need to build new explanations for what stares us in the face and doesn't fit "what we believe to know".
How many more postulates do we nurture, that are unnecessary in order to make good science?
How many more postulates do we nurture, that prevent us to live a peaceful life?
(updated 5 Aug. 2026)