The day before deciding to write this chapter, I looked over the shoulder of my teenage son watching his favorite TV program. The episode of Family Guy coincidentally reminded me of a personal life-changing event twenty years ago which I had almost forgotten. In the TV episode a teleportation to a casino in Las Vegas that went wrong sends, in a kind of quantum superposition, two versions of the duo Stewie and Brian, one lucky, the other unlucky. The unlucky Stewie passes a roulette table on his way to buy an ice cream. In his characteristically casual style, he gambles all their strenuously collected money on the number 16 ‘because of that Taylor Swift song: Sixteen’. The song, Brian drily corrects him, is called ‘Fifteen’. The ball on the roulette wheel comes up 15.

Precisely those two numbers had fascinated me and a close friend in 1998, the year preceding the Y2K craze. The numbers gave comfort to two minds in grief after the loss of a mutual friend. In the world of fiction, we could let our imagination run riot. The pair of numbers offered a peek into the real from a place unencumbered by empirical fact. Speculating on forms of pre-ception, we hoped spacetime would give us a sign from beyond. ‘Talk to me!’: for weekends on end our desperate minds spoke with the words the South African street vendor at Khayelitsha station repeats, carrying loads of parcels of candy, cakes, pencils and the like on his chest and back, which he has a hard time selling among the silent black crowd waiting for a train that never seems to come. My friend and I had obsessively tossed the two numbers about as they appeared again and again, ‘coincidentally’ so, in fantastic feats of popular culture at the time. Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, The Truman Show, The Matrix. Always the number 16 surfaced. With significance, like the digit ‘6’ dangling behind the digit ‘1’ on a door after the upper nail holding the ‘9’ fell.

Here is why we wanted to be talked to from elsewhere. The following event’s location is the illuminated highway network of Belgium renowned in the 1990s for being visible from space.

Friday the 10 th of July 1998. My close friend Dirk and I are having an evening drive and we say words we had never spoken before, about readiness to spot a UFO. Coming from Roermond we drive on the well-lit highway to Leuven. Dirk drives his Citroën 2CV slowly as we approach the bridge of Lummen intersecting with a second major highway. On the other side of the bridge the lights are out. We see no cars before or after us, which is fairly strange on a Belgian highway anytime. But up in the rather misty sky in the distance, a set of lit spheres appears. Straight ahead in front of our windshield, the object starts to slowly hover around our car. I peer through each window to follow it and beg Dirk to stop the car to have a look outside since nobody is around. He says he can’t. By the time the thing reaches the front again to make full circle, it vanishes. Straight away the lights on the highway are on again. I am both thrilled and afraid.

Back at Dirk’s apartment we decide to separately draw what we have seen. The figures are the same. They look like sets of light balls. Spheres. A pentagon of five spheres is enveloped by a larger pentagon demarcated by ten spheres, one at each angle and one in the middle of each side. The total is fifteen spheres. Then we notice a difference between the figures. Dirk saw a lit sphere in the middle too. That makes sixteen. I had not seen the sphere at the center. I wondered why.

A discussion ensued that night, as we imagined some sort of sign had to be interpreted in relation to the death of our mutual friend. In February that year he had died in a ski elevator accident in Cavalese, following a failed illicit stunt of a US fighter pilot hitting the elevator’s cable. In the mortuary, standing at our friend’s coffin in the company of the other doctoral students and our supervisors, I could come up with nothing better than to audibly whisper a question. I asked him for some sign, about his whereabouts after life, to close a philosophical discussion we had the weekend before he went to ski. Like most students present we were ex-Catholics who had lost their faith after a period of doubt including the inevitable discussion about the hypothesis of a hereafter.

That summer in 1998 the puzzlement of Dirk and me did not subside. So, I found the courage to call the police of Lummen and reported our sighting. (By the way the association with the Latin lumen, light, had struck us as a funny coincidence. That it also sounded like the subject of many a Saturday night, Luhmann, the impenetrable sociologist Dirk’s never-ending doctoral research grappled with was a bonus.) I asked the officer on the phone whether other sightings had been reported. There had not. I wondered aloud whether the object could have been a laser light whose beams were hidden by the mist. He hesitantly replied that a party had been organized nearby. Maybe that was it after all.

I did not check further. Perhaps I realized that the origin of the lights did not matter. The striking thing had occurred the day after the event. A sort of sign did produce. Not in a perception, but in a calculation. Still dazzled by our encounter with that unidentified hovering bunch of lights, I could not stop pondering the next day whether or not I had seen a light in the middle of the double pentagon. The TV had to distract me. The lottery draw was on. Suddenly came the conviction that the draw would communicate whether the right number was fifteen or sixteen. The strange thing was that I had no doubt in my mind what was going to unfold, indeed like in a pre-ception. After counting the digits of the first pair 7 and 18, which form 16, I knew what the sum of the next pairs would be. The result of the draw on 11 July 1998 can be consulted on the lottery website. Footnote 1 Each of the three subsequent pairs totaled sixteen. 7, 18. 19, 24. 33, 37.

A very unlikely chain of events indeed. But it did happen.

Years later I discovered that the Italian court had filed our friend as victim number 16.

What are the odds? A colleague, a renowned statistician, recently told me. He did the calculation. The figure was disappointing. I expected an impressively small chance for such event to occur. The probability of those pairs totaling 16 each was 0.0006. One chance out of 1600. The reader may be slightly impressed by the recurrence of 16, but the chance of one gambler out of 1600 guessing right is not a big deal. The improbability does not even come close to the rarity of an event that nonetheless does happen almost every week somewhere in Europe on a Saturday, when future winners of the lottery guess it will be their lucky day.

Yes, one could quarrel with statisticians about the interpretation of the statistic. The probability calculated above pertains to lottery draws organized weekly. Should we not calculate the much less likely probability of someone thinking up the plan of totaling digits in a certain way just as it happens? That would be like the inventor of the lottery winning the first draw. What are those odds? And how to explain the certainty I felt about doing the math as the draw began? I clearly remember the moment of pre-ception. That certainty of the inventor must be an incredibly improbable occurrence.

The point remains that the population on this planet is so immense, almost each inhabitant so busy speculating about the future, and calculating, that the kind of experience I had was bound to happen somewhere some time to somebody. It just happened to be me. And, on the scale of the universe’s existence, a comparable improbability should occur many times over.

The next question is which position I hold dear. If I focus on personal experience, the event looks unique and should be life-changing. I was in tune with spacetime and it gave me a sign in response to my request six months before. Through a number. Hence, our deceased friend on that extraordinary day would have confirmed to us, in presumably the only way the universe permits, the existence of something like a hereafter. The central role of chance, a lottery, is significant in that light.

If I adopt the viewpoint at the macro-level of the network, the event is not exceptional, statistically. The rational conclusion would be to append no conclusion save to warn about the wishful thinking of the previous position. Nonetheless, for all that position’s sensational appeal, which admittedly makes it suspicious, final proof to reject it we do not have either. Which position should I choose?

Throughout this book my attempt has not been to make a choice between propositions but to trace their experiential frames whose intimate relation in a sphere of exchange points to a distinct relationship to life. Thus we found out the intimate relation between animism and naturalism, medicine and bewitchment, chiefship and kingship, soccer and American football, rapper and word-police, Democrat and Republican, mirrorist and modelist, individual and collective reason, atomism and holism, among others. Wave and particle are the quantum physicist’s equivalent of parallel frames. Frameshift is a dynamic expressed by a tensor. The pattern of 16 my friend and I detected everywhere in popular culture was a simplication, a logos sculpted from viscerally chaotic nomos. It became a simplex when steering our lives, and later again when rejected as a delusion. Avoiding to preclude the alternative is a tensorial exercise. With the emphasis on exercise this time, to add a degree of freedom in thought.

The remedy I proposed throughout the book consists of three steps. It starts with a vector: ‘16 was no coincidence. The number arrived from somewhere.’ The implication is that another species or intelligence managed to enter the moment of contingency, and animated this void by immiting meaning. The opposite vector says: ‘16 was a coincidence. The number arrived from nowhere.’ Pure chance was at work. Inanimate contingency.

The two observers might go on pitting one view against the other. The first could in the name of ‘religion’, the second in the name of ‘science’. Arguments pro and contra will have their gratifying effect, but the effect is fleeting. The investment of effort necessary to influence the other is telling. The vector is not sustainable. In the next step we integrate the alternative position in a matrix. We thus move from simplex (one-layered) to multiplex (multi-layered) meaning. However, do we experience a world of possibility? A contrast between original position and alternative appears. The matrix does not suspend (dis)belief, but chooses. The choice does not differ from the vectorial; it is just contextualized (adding cultural to social analysis). If the matrix lets the two frames exist in parallel, we would have reached an attitude of inclusive (instead of exclusive) disjunctivity. A critical voice may retort that this suspense of belief disempowers by postponing choice. Whether blue or red, you must swallow a pill. Run the program.

The juxtaposition of vectors in a matrix gives the impression of neutrality. In the third step a choice is made, but not by going back to the simplex and mobilize allies to have them demonstrate, threaten, revolt, ride the vector ‘science’ or ‘religion’ on every media channel (to harness the energy of a model to fool the collective into the ‘right’ conduct). The change a simplex energizes can never be more than a hype, the figment of individual reason. To let collective reason speak, we do not return to the vector. We go for a tensor, which opens up the matrix to the sensing of life and the sources of production behind the sphere’s frames. Then the embracing of inclusive disjunctivity can actually feel viable and become a choice. It was in my case. I felt that to be a sustainable attitude. I had intra-mediated, verified with myself what the impact could be on life: ‘Suppose the event of 16 meant definite proof of a hereafter, how scary might that be. Suppose we knew it could never be proof, how discouraging.’

The Congolese cabdriver prefigured this tensor in his multiplex practice of plural religions for parents and for kids. The Melanesian cloud seer was a guide as well, describing an intersubjective mood rather than an individual’s responsibility. Therapists reconciling us to our repressed past share a similar inclusive-disjunctive attitude. Ethnographers do too, thoroughly altered by the field and therefore able to shift perspective.

In brief, my proposal for us all is to build life-sensing, an intuitive capacity. We can do this through de-simplication, ethnography, intercultural exercise, games of the real, interspecies communication, pre-ceptive experiences, the ritual initiation into tensors, the intuition of collective reason, and more. Hereby we pursue a scientifically spiritual duty. Humans hunger for tensors, whereupon the survival of the species depends. Simplexes, atoms without real, instantly gratify, but are not viable. The five chapters of the first part and the ten of the second part that revolve around it together reassemble this feeling I had when peering over my son’s shoulder. A tensor to humanize the system.