I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking “Why?” forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can’t answer, but if we can answer the “How?” questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. From Aristotle’s prime mover to the Catholic Church’s first cause, we’re always driven to the idea of something eternal.

If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object—infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it’s infinite, it’s infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book. But if you can show how a set of physical mechanisms can bring about our universe, that itself is an amazing thing and it’s worth celebrating.

I don’t ever claim to resolve that infinite regress of why-why-why-why-why; as far as I’m concerned it’s turtles all the way down. The multiverse could explain it by being eternal, in the same way that God explains it by being eternal, but there’s a huge difference: the multiverse is well motivated and God is just an invention of lazy minds.

Here Krauss betrays his metaphysical game and tells us that, in his opinion, why questions are less important than how questions. There may be some or considerable justification for thinking this, but it is an ought preference rather than an is reality. I certainly prefer how questions and think they shed much light on why questions, but this is my own preference and acknowledge it as such.

Krauss also shows he isn’t bound to data or averse to speculation. When he starts talking about the unobservable possibility of multiverses, he has ventured beyond the empirical-evidentiary reservation. As Claude Levi-Strauss might say, such things may be good to think but we don’t know if they are real.

Krauss is on a mission not just to rid the world of religion, but also of philosophy. This is the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you don’t understand what philosophy is or what it does. On that score, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci settled some with this post on Krauss.

The take-downs have been occasioned by a peculiar kind of belief: the faith that science has explained everything, there are no mysteries, and there is nothing intractable left to ponder. While I greatly admire science and have few problems with what some derisively call scientism, I recognize there is much science hasn’t solved and may never solve.

This is not, of course, a warrant for the supernatural. As John Wilkins explained in this superb post, beliefs should be warranted. Science has provided us with a pretty good warrant to date and it’s only getting better. But as the Columbia philosophers recognize, a good warrant is different from an absolute or complete warrant.

Here is Philip Kitcher on Rosenberg’s book:

The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist’s Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.

The conclusions are premature. Although microphysics can help illuminate the chemical bond and the periodic table, very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles. Rosenberg’s cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg’s book is evolutionary psychology on stilts. Similarly, the neuroscientific discussions serenely extrapolate from what has been carefully demonstrated for the sea slug to conclusions about Homo sapiens.

And here is David Albert on Krauss’ book:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.

Following Albert’s quick, crude, and concrete demonstration that Krauss hasn’t explained the origins of everything, he concludes with this:

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

Because the philosophers here have struck the right chords and are on key, it brings to mind a juxtaposition: I can’t help but think that evangelical atheists, for all their scientific learning, are tone-deaf and atonal. This seems to be what happens when humility and wonder aren’t taken seriously. Our approaches to the cosmos and life should be positivist (sensu lato) and polyvalent.

While Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne think the consequences are enormous, and the religionists who oppose them agree, it doesn’t really matter to those not locked into the polar and artificial world of their debates. When New Atheist scholars square off against Templeton Foundation scholars on free will, it amounts to a tempest in an uninteresting teapot. Neither side is very good at philosophy.

Despite these glum facts, their debate is getting lots of attention. When Coyne publishes an article denying free will in USA Today, you know the world is askew. For those who aren’t familiar with the issues and arguments, The Chronicle of Higher Ed is hosting a symposium — Is Free Will an Illusion? — with six posts by various scholars. The most sensible are from Owen Jones, who argues for a kind of Darwinian pragmatism, and Paul Bloom, who understands that nothing too serious flows from determinism.

From Jones:

The problem with free will is that we keep dwelling on it. Really, this has to stop. Free will is to human behavior what a perfect vacuum is to terrestrial physics—a largely abstract endpoint from which to begin thinking, before immediately moving on to consider and confront the practical frictions of daily existence.

I do get it. People don’t like to be caused. It conflicts with their preference to be fully self-actualized. So it is understandable that, at base, free-will discussions tend to center on whether people have the ability to make choices uncaused by anything other than themselves. But there’s a clear answer: They don’t. Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy.)

All animals are choice machines for two simple reasons. First, no organism can behave in all physically possible ways simultaneously. Second, alternative courses are not all equal. At any given moment, there are far more ways to behave disastrously than successfully (just as there are more ways to break a machine than to fix it). So persistence of existence consistently depends on one’s ability to choose nondisastrous courses of action.

Yet (indeed, fortunately) that choosing is channeled. Choices are initially constrained by the obvious—the time one has to decide, and the volume of brain tissue one can deploy to the task. Choices are also constrained by things we have long suspected but which science now increasingly clarifies.

From Bloom:

Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying “no” when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.

This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.

I agree with the consensus, but it’s not the big news that many of my colleagues seem to think it is. For one thing, it isn’t news at all. Determinism has been part of Philosophy 101 for quite a while now, and arguments against free will were around centuries before we knew anything about genes or neurons. It’s long been a concern in theology; Moses Maimonides, in the 1100s, phrased the problem in terms of divine omniscience: If God already knows what you will do, how could you be free to choose?

More important, it’s not clear what difference it makes. Many scholars do draw profound implications from the rejection of free will.

It doesn’t make much difference except to those who believe it makes a big difference. We know who they are.

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.

At this point, the interviewer — perhaps sensing Walser has just made a personal confession that is not generalizable — asks the obvious question: Why?

Walser responds:

Because we would have to admit that we were crazy. You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

While we shouldn’t be fearful to find that our ancestors were wrong or a bit crazy, Walser is right to sense that this remains an interesting question. He is carrying on, without much luck it appears, in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Barth, and Nietzsche.

I get the sense that Walser’s empathetic range is limited and he is projecting, but judge for yourself.

If what you say is true – and I believe the evidence is unquestionable in this regard – then economics is not a science whatsoever. It more so resembles a school of morality or even a philosophical cult. The old Greek Stoics spring to mind. They were a school of philosophy that not only taught certain ideas but demanded that their followers live these ideas in their day-to-day lives. But in economics the students aren’t even told that they’re signing up for a moral vision, a sort of religion or belief system, they’re told that they’re being initiated into an objective science. Perhaps you could reflect a little in that direction and its implications?

In his response, Varoufakis ascertains voodoo in economics:

Quite so. It is a priesthood that truly believes it is not a priesthood but, rather, a community of scientists. How do they manage to maintain this delusion? The simple answer is because their incantations involve rather advanced mathematics and their rituals are steeped in statistical tests and projections….

This is a most peculiar failure: The hapless economist uses the same tools as acclaimed physicists and astronomers. She has trained for years to speak precisely the same language as them, to understand the same advanced mathematics, to deploy most complex statistical methods which are an essential part of the scientific toolbox. It is, understandably, incredibly difficult to accept that her work is a form of higher order superstition; a religion couched in the language of mathematics and statistics. Tragically, this is precisely what it is. Come to think of it, what is it that separates science from mythology? The fact that scientific propositions are not self-referential. That, in science (unlike in mythology), when the facts clash with the theory it is too bad for the theory.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard (the famous anthropologist) once offered a brilliant insight into the social success of the priesthood within the Azande society. The question he asked is similar to yours (regarding economists): If they get it so wrong so often, how should we explain their continuing dominance? When the Azande priests and oracles failed to predict or avert disasters, why did people continue to believe them? His explanation of the Azande’s unshakeable belief in witchcraft, oracles and magic goes like this:

Azande see as well as we that the failure of their oracle to prophesy truly calls for explanation, but so entangled are they in mystical notions that they must make use of them to account for failure. The contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is explained by reference to other mystical notions. Evans-Pritchard in his Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937

Economics, I submit to you, is not much different. Whenever it fails to predict properly some economic phenomenon (which is more often than not), that failure is accounted for by appealing to the same mystical economic notions which failed in the first place.

It reminds me of this prayer algorithm (by LOL god), which Craig Martin describes as impervious ideology: “it can’t be dented or contradicted by any empirical data. Or, rather, incoming data is slotted into existing categories (God’s work or God’s mysterious ways), and in such a way that anomalies aren’t allowed.”

In this piece on the distinctions between mainstream and fringe physicists, we something similar at work. One group thinks it is dealing in reality even though its basic assumptions rest on some mathematical sleights of hand which can’t be tested. The other group thinks this is hocum and searches for alternative realities. But perhaps the most important difference between them is personal: “beyond their divergent appetites for mathematics and willingness to shut up and calculate, physicists and fringers might be separated by something else quite basic—a different appreciation for what counts as beautiful.”

Whether talking about different approaches to philosophy or physics, I think Nietzsche was right. However wrapped, the ultimate justification for our preferred approach is what counts as beautiful.

The history of ideas is also strange. Few modern materialists realize that the road from dualism to monism was paved primarily by Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a Viennese physician whose fame (or infamy) today is due mostly to his status as the founder of phrenology. Gall has gotten a bad rap and deserves rehabilitation. Phrenology, for all its popular quackery, contained key insights into localization of function — the idea that certain parts of the brain are dedicated to particular tasks. Another aspect of Gall’s phrenology, one for which he should be remembered, is that the brain alone gives rise to thinking and constitutes the self.

From Cartesian Dualism to Gallian Monism

Alcmaeon of Croton, a Greek philosopher and physician who lived around 500 BC, is credited with being the first to assert that the brain was the seat of the mind. He also was one of the first to claim that humans possess a soul, and it was the soul that animated living things. In so doing, Alcmaeon set the stage for a dualism that would persist for nearly two millennia.

Plato preferred Alcmaeon the philosopher and greatly expanded on his ideas regarding the soul. Hippocrates preferred Alcmaeon the physician and derived his concept of the four “humours” (blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm) from Alcmaeon’s idea that an imbalance of “powers” (wet, dry, hot, cold) caused disease. While many would attempt to maintain a distinction between the physical (which was the province of medicine) and mental (which was the province of philosophy), the boundary was always fuzzy: ailments of the body could be afflictions of the soul.

While there was general agreement on the existence of a soul, there was no agreement as to its location and the mechanics whereby it interacted with the body. Some argued for the heart and others for the head. Everyone agreed, however, that the soul and mind were closely linked, if not identical. Human uniqueness was firmly based on the soul-mind, regardless of its physical location.

In 1641, Rene Descartes formalized nearly two thousand years of mind-body dualism with the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he unequivocally separated mind (soul) from matter (body). Metaphysical speculations about the mind did not begin to give way to material understandings until the 1660s, when Thomas Willis and his Oxford Circle colleagues established that the brain was closely linked to behavior. Although Willis’ explanations of the brain and its workings still bore the trappings of Hippocratic humours and Galenist spirits, they are nonetheless recognizable as the first mechanical account of the nervous system.

In 1664 Willis published Cerebri Anatome, a landmark work which effectively established neurology as a scientific discipline. For all his accomplishments, Willis remained a devout dualist who believed that the soul-mind was seated in the brain. Descartes, for his part, had no doubt that the soul was located in the brain; he placed it in the pineal gland. During the century after Willis, those interested in the nervous system spent most of their time dissecting and mapping. While they provided ever more refined anatomical descriptions of the brain, they did not attempt to explain how it related to mind or behavior. Because dualism was still dominant, most what was known about the mind continued to come from introspective philosophy.

This state of affairs changed dramatically in the early 1800s when Franz Joseph Gall began lecturing and publishing on cerebral anatomy and localized function. Although Gall is today known – and ridiculed – as the founder of phrenology, his reputation is largely undeserved. Because phrenology was but one part of Gall’s work that was popularized by others, primarily for profit, most treatments of Gall tend toward caricature.

Franz Joseph Gall -- Founder of Phrenology

Gall was, in some respects, the founder of modern neuroscience. He published his major work, Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, in four volumes between 1810-1819. In this work and others, Gall espoused many of the ideas that continue to guide the mind sciences, and which frame several current disputes within those sciences. Among these are: (1) the brain is the physical locus of the mind; (2) mind arises from physical matter; (3) the brain-mind is the basis for behavior; (4) the brain has separate and distinct regions or parts; (5) each region or part of the brain has a particular and specific function; and (6) these functions or “faculties” are innate. Collectively, these ideas establish Gall as the first mind-matter monist.

Gall’s monistic materialism was so threatening to religious dualists that the Austrian emperor proscribed his lectures and the Catholic church listed his books in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum. These were not, however, the ideas for which Gall was most famous. Fusing his empirical neurology with Johann Lavater’s physiognomy, Gall asserted that the various mental faculties corresponded to specific regions of the brain, and that the relative development of these faculties shaped the brain in ways that corresponded to bumps on the skull. Phrenology was thus born.

It is difficult to understate the social and cultural impact that phrenology had in Europe and America between 1815 and 1845: “For the early Victorian generation, phrenology represented a widespread movement affecting science, philosophy, religion, and education” (McLaren 1974:87; McLaren 1981). By 1836, there were more than thirty phrenological societies in Europe and nearly as many in the United States; many members were physicians and professionals. That same year, interest was so intense that Hewett Watson (1836) published Statistics on Phrenology, in which he meticulously noted that 64,000 works on phrenology had been sold and more than 15,000 plaster heads molded. George Combe’s hugely popular Elements of Phrenology was first published in 1824, went through several additions, and sold more than 100,000 copies.

Phrenological Materialism and Monism

Regardless of its scientific validity, phrenology was a naturalistic and secular doctrine that had a corrosive impact on dualism and religion. Commenting on this fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “Gall and Spurzheim’s Phrenology laid a rough hand on the mystery of animal and spiritual nature, dragging down every sacred secret to a street show. The attempt was coarse and odious to scientific men, but had a certain truth in it; it felt connection where the professors denied it, and was leading to a truth which had not yet been announced.”

The truth not yet announced was, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Since Darwin’s time, most scientists have come to accept that material matter is solely responsible for immaterial thought. While Darwin deservedly gets much credit for this development, some of the debt is owed to Gall, the original mind-matter monist.

References:

McLaren, Angus. (1974). Phrenology: Medium and Message. The Journal of Modern History, 46 (1) DOI: 10.1086/241166

Castro-Caldas, A., & Grafman, J. (2000). Those Were the (Phrenological) Days The Neuroscientist, 6 (4), 297-302 DOI: 10.1177/107385840000600412

McLaren Angus. (1981). A prehistory of the social sciences: phrenology in France. Comparative studies in society and history, 23 (1), 3-22 PMID: 11614370

Work in this field began with Aleksandr Oparin (1894-1980), a renowned Soviet biochemist who postulated that a young and cooling earth possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor. Oparin asserted that these were the raw materials for the evolution of “life” (like many biochemists, Oparin rejected any strict separation between life and non-life). Over time, and with energy inputs from lightning, magma, and radiation, chemicals can combine in ways that led to colloidal enlargement, stability, and perhaps even replication.

Although Oparin never conducted experiments along the lines he suggested in Origin of Life (1938), his ideas were championed by Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winning chemist at the University of Chicago. In 1952, Urey published “On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life,” in which he offered explanations for the initial formation of organic compounds and suggested experiments involving methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and an electrical charge (simulating lightning).

It was not long before one of Urey’s graduate students, Stanley Miller, conducted an experiment mimicking the hypothesized conditions of early earth. Miller built a laboratory apparatus containing a mixture of water, hydrogen, ammonia and methane, all of which were early earth ingredients. He then introduced electricity (“lightning”) in the form of 60,000 volt sparks, and trapped the resulting gases in a filter. When he analyzed the contents, Miller found that the molecules had combined into new and larger configurations. Four such configurations were amino acids, which are constituent components of proteins.  The Miller-Urey experiments were widely accepted as a model of prebiotic synthesis.

Subsequent electrical-discharge experiments by prebiotic researchers have produced additional amino acids, and remarkably, the constituent elements of both RNA and DNA. Oro and Kimball synthesized adenine from hydrogen cyanide and ammonia. Sanchez and colleagues synthesized cyanoacetylene, a source for the pyrimidine bases uracil and cytosine, from a mixture of methane and nitrogen. Research into prebiotic chemistry continues unabated, with an ever increasing variety of precursor organics being produced in the laboratory, and multiple pathways to the formation of RNA and DNA being suggested. The long and short of all this research is that there are many plausible chemical paths to the formation of things that contain RNA/DNA and which produce proteins.

Plausible is not, however, either probable or provable and the gap from there to here is, even today, immense. This gap is fraught with difficulty, perhaps none more so than the issue of replication. Two of the primary issues surrounding replication are metabolism and autcatalysis. Self-sustaining chemical reactions are unusual, requiring both energy sources and catalytic enzymes. When all prebiotic combinations and conditions are considered together, the emerging consensus revolves around three scenarios: (1) synthesis in a reducing atmosphere; (2) organic inputs from meteorites or comets; and (3) synthesis of metal sulfides in deep sea vents.

What all these hypotheses all have in common is a strictly material, physical and chemical cause resulting in a molecule that replicates itself. This replicating molecule,  composed of sugar, phosphate and five acid bases, is uniquely vital: “A fundamental property of living systems is that they have a chemical basis for storage of genetic information. RNA, DNA and other nucleic-acid-like compounds are informational macromolecules that have inherent template properties and so lend themselves in a straightforward way to both storing information and replicating it.”

Given the pace and innovation of research into origins, it seems just a matter of time before life is produced in a laboratory. When that happens, the Designer will be pushed back even further in time, with the Big Bang being the obvious point of retreat.

Reference:

Urey, Harold. (1952). On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 38 (4), 351-363 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.38.4.351

Peretó J (2005). Controversies on the origin of life. International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology, 8 (1), 23-31 PMID: 15906258

Joyce, G. (1989). RNA evolution and the origins of life Nature, 338 (6212), 217-224 DOI: 10.1038/338217a0

Orgel LE (1998). The origin of life–a review of facts and speculations. Trends in biochemical sciences, 23 (12), 491-5 PMID: 9868373

My suggestion is this: Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. There’s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It’s just impossible. Since common sense is an inconsistent system, you can’t respect it all. Every metaphysician will have to violate it somewhere.

Common sense, as Schwitzgebel frames it, has “everyday practical interactions with the world.” In broad evolutionary terms, this is the sense formed over millions of years in mostly African environments. The brain-mind which gives rise to “common sense” evolved to handle all sorts of practical and social problems, none of which have anything to do with metaphysics. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a mismatch between the commonsense mind and the metaphysical mind.

Left Fork: Ancestral Mind/ Right Fork: Metaphysical Mind

Knowing that the mind which evolved in ancestral environments is capable of metaphysics doesn’t mean it is good at metaphysics. And if we take the history of metaphysics as a guide or proof, it doesn’t appear we have made much progress or come into closer contact with the singular “Truth” which seems to be its goal.

For me the more fundamental question revolves around what Schwitzgebel calls an “ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system.” Why is this desirable? Why is it needed? What would it do?

The quest for a single consistent system seems to be a psychological need which finds its greatest expression among metaphysicians and religionists. I’m not sure why such a system is good or needed for the rest of us.

Why not have one “system” for one class of problems and another “system” for another class of problems? There are different approaches to different problems.  What causes the impulse towards unification, systematization, and consistency? Like Nietzsche and Emerson, I’m suspicious of systematizers and consistency.

Although systematizers are often associated with metaphysics-religion, they also appear in science-atheism. The latter, with whom I often sympathize, have an unfortunate tendency to overstate the case and overestimate what is known. For them, Schwitzgebel has this crazy advice:

You can’t do an empirical study, for example, to determine whether there really is a material world out there or whether everything is instead just ideas in our minds coordinated by god. You can’t do an empirical study to determine whether there really exist an infinite number of universes with different laws of physics, entirely out of causal contact with our own. We’re stuck with common sense, plausibility arguments, and theoretical elegance – and none of these should rightly be regarded as decisive on such matters, whenever there are several very different and yet attractive contender positions, as there always are.

I conclude that regarding the fundamental structure of the universe in general and the mind-body relation in particular something that seems crazy must be true, but we have no way to know what the truth is among a variety of crazy possibilities. I call this position “crazyism.”

Crazyism appears to have great promise; I predict that positivism writ large will eventually prove it true.

Philosophy and cosmology have long been linked and in some ways are the same subject. Knowing this, it is slightly odd to see a piece over at the Atlantic subtitled “The New Philosophy of Cosmology.” Because philosophy has been doing cosmology for a long time, this implies that it is now doing it some new kind of way. Perhaps. It could be that theoretical physics has run up against a wall and philosophy is required to re-think foundations and ask fresh questions.

Several such questions were posed to NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, who had some interesting things to say. I encourage you to read the entire interview but want to extract these nuggets for brief comment:

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don’t change — which is perfectly true — and then you’re always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn’t change, because your representations of it don’t.

This has long been one of my pet peeves: just because mathematics can accurately describe and predict certain things, it doesn’t mean that the universe or reality is itself nothing more than the unfolding of some quantitative essence. In fact there many things that math can’t describe or predict. Math is an incredibly useful and revealing technique for describing certain aspects of the universe; it does not constitute reality. Math is not a metaphorical god, though the theologically inclined often fall into this kind of tautological thinking.

In another portion of the interview, Maudlin comments on evolutionary process:

When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you’ll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value.

We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

Here Maudlin describes another error often made by the theologically inclined. An anthropocentric view which places humans at the center of everything creates the illusion that evolution is directed toward some goal. It isn’t. Life began on earth some 3 billion years ago and after 3 billion years of evolution, the vast majority of life forms remains simple. We live in a microbial world, not an intelligent one.

If microbes could write evolutionary history, things would look much different. In the absence of such a history the next best thing is Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House (1997), which shatters the illusion that evolution is progressive. The greatest frequency of life on earth, in terms of biomass and diversity, remains firmly against the left wall of minimal complexity, close to where it began:

Graph Depicts Mode or Frequency of Both Past and Present Life Forms on Earth

The preceding post prompted this observation from my blogging friend Tom Rees: “The graph does show that evolution is directional. Complex brains have to build on less complex brains.” Without the accompanying text from Gould’s Full House, I see how it could be interpreted this way. So let me summarize and gloss the arguments which explain the graph:

Directional evolution is in the eye of the human (or primate or mammal) beholder. The mode of life — its greatest frequency, biomass, and diversity — is up against (or near) the left wall of non-complexity. It started there, and after evolving for over 3 billion years, it has remained there. This doesn’t look very directional.

Toward the left side of non-complexity and non-intelligence, we have microbes and, moving toward the right, we have insects. In terms of numbers, species, biomass, and diversity, these are the dominant forms of life on earth. These forms are still evolving, but they aren’t evolving towards complexity or intelligence.

Our multicellular prejudice — our love for big things that we can easily observe — causes us to focus on the right side of complexity and intelligence, and then claim that these relatively few and non-diverse species indicate evolution is directional. I don’t see how we can justify this argument.

Isolating a single and uncommon strand of evolution, such as the right tail of complexity or intelligence, doesn’t make evolution directional to the right. The fact remains that the isolated right tail of evolution is dwarfed by the diversity and mass of life to the left, which is non-complex and non-intelligent. This mass of life to the left has not been static either; it too has evolved — it just hasn’t evolved towards complexity or intelligence.

I’m not sure what the rationale or argument would be for mono-focusing on the right tail, which is an evolutionary outlier, and not considering everything to the left. If we look at the whole or entire picture of evolutionary life, it is non-directional. If evolution were directional, then all forms of life would show movement toward the right or towards multi-cellularity, complexity, sentience, and intelligence. That hasn’t happened and isn’t happening.

Have complexity and intelligence evolved? Yes. Does this mean evolution is directional? No.