Days passed in complete solitude. The remote parts of the island were my sanctuaries. I had places where I could sit and stare out at the gray sea and sky, content that no other conscious being was sharing my precious piece of space-time. This was surely my solipsistic universe. The volume of space was no more than a few miles in dimension but the time dimension stretched back over half a century. This time dimension was sited solely in my mind - more particularly in my store of memory. It was not an ordered dimension in that events were not stored linearly. Rather there was a chaos to the storage whose order was deeply hidden. Thoughts could pop into existence without cause or antecedent. It was like a dream world where the memory banks were sampled arbitrarily and the results had no meaning. To generate meaning meant to formulate a plan and to use this plan as a way of organized sampling of memory. This was too much like studying for an exam which is in effect an exercise of labeling order onto memory and being able to tap into this discrete ordered area of the mind to pull out structured data. This requires much training and long hours of study. Even then the mechanism is only good for the short present. The structure is not indelibly written in the mind structure but disappears quickly after exams or when the need dissipates.
Even concert pianists must practice incessantly to keep up their artistry otherwise the chaotic order will once again take over. The mind is not designed for order. It operates on the principle of chaos. It is this chaos that gives it its creativity, allowing it to sample the recorded world of experience in an evolutionary manner. Arbitrary thoughts can impregnate others and the result may or may not be fruitful. If thought only operated like an algorithm that knew precisely where to get its required inputs then there could be no new creation. Life would be mechanical and purely deterministic. Because life is not like that the brain has evolved to reflect the lack of order in the nature surrounding it. The brain has evolved from nature and its working reflects the underlying laws of the natural world.
Too often the brain is compared to a computer. This way of seeing the human mind has hampered the understanding of consciousness. The computer is an output of the human brain. It certainly reflects how the brain operates at some level. To go further and say that the mind is a super biochemical quantum computer is to miss the blatantly obvious. Computers have been designed to compute - not to think. Human minds have evolved to think not to compute. That is why computers are immensely better, faster and more reliable at doing computations. On that score they win hands down. Yet not even the fastest, biggest, most technologically advanced computer can produce anything remotely like a simple thought. There is no fear of computers becoming human.
The brain has evolved to handle the inputs from the senses and to use them to enhance the survivability of the life form in the environment in which it finds itself. We share this aspect of brain with our animal cousins but where we are totally different from them is where we have used our brain to see things beyond our sense range. Our eyes see light and this allows us to discriminate the color spectrum from red to blue. Yet the vast range of the now known electromagnetic spectrum - from infra-red, microwaves or radio waves, to ultraviolet, x-rays or gamma rays - is not accessible to our eyes. They have been revealed to us by our minds. Minds such as Maxwell who used the mathematics developed over centuries to conceive of equations whose solutions foretold of the existence of these new radiations. The mind saw with the tool of mathematical formalism and revealed a part of our world that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Very soon these creative discoveries were made physical by their manifestation in experiments. In a similar manner, P M Dirac, one of the great founders of quantum theory, used mathematical formalisms to predict a new type of matter - the positron. Once again it was found to exist by experiment. These are the ultimate achievements of the far-seeing human brain. They followed in a long stream of explorers of the world of science and mathematics whose experimental and theoretical exploits far outweigh the explorations of the great geographers who mapped out the contours of the planet on which we live.
In order to expand on the human view of reality of the universe, the brain developed new stratagems to escape the confines of human bodily perceptive ability. The development of the telescope and the microscope allowed the boundaries of the big and the small to be pushed back well beyond the feeble eye. When the limits of technology are reached the brain developed models using the language of mathematics to predict what reality should look like to an all-seeing demon. These models became more and more complex and the computations required took an excessive time to compute. The brain responded by developing the computer to carry out these tedious exercises more efficiently and with less human cost.
The most up to date and successful model of reality that accounts for nearly all of the visible matter in the universe - the Standard Model of Particles - is a complex model requiring huge amounts of computation to derive its solutions. Its outputs provide us with the mass of the proton and the neutron and predict a host of other hadrons as part of the mathematical formalism. With the aid of modern supercomputing running continuously for literally months, the fit of the model has been proven to correlate with the known reality. This has led to the discovery of scores of new particles that, without the power of the model and its subsequent testing by the computer power, would be forever off-limits to human perception. They are the extended senses of the human body that will allow exploration of new uncharted realms of reality.
The computer is a tool of the brain just as the telescope and the microscope are tools for the eye. Yet to say that some day they may become comparable is to deny our solipsistic knowledge of how our own brain works. The computer is basically a simple tool. Its building blocks are binary bits - on or off, open or closed. There is no room for the in-between, the continuous which is the norm of our everyday experience. One could argue that quantum theory tells us that the world at its basic is made up of quantum bits of Planck magnitude but to treat the world at that level would require models of such complexity that computers as large as the known universe itself would not suffice. In reality, models like the Standard Model look only at a small discrete number of particles and even in this infinitely truncated reality the computation required stretches our modern capability. To extend it to the bio world could not be achieved with current technology in the lifetime of the universe. Only the future development of quantum computing may change this outlook but even then the principle of irreducible complexity - whereby the complexity is such that it can only be recreated by going through each step individually with no short-circuiting laws to reduce the computations - will be a barrier to modeling real life.
Is human striving to model reality thus doomed to failure? The answer has to be no. There are and have been pockets of reality whereby simple laws have been utilized to predict results of evolution. The laws of gravity as devised by Newton are such. They operate well for a specific domain and the fact that they are not general or universal does not affect their efficacy in local space travel and astronomy. The pragmatic approach to science is very necessary for progress. It is only by using models and delineating their effective boundaries that new and better models are developed. That is how science progresses and how technology arises as a side-effect.
In using models mankind is reacting to the environment in which he finds himself at this particular point in space-time. They are a form of evolution at least as powerful as the eye or the nose. The sense of smell that was once very necessary for survival now has a very subsidiary place in our existence. The eye became the dominant sense and its dominance led to the evolution of the brain. Modern language is based on visual sense. Words denote objects of reality by visual recognition. If someone says the word tree I immediately picture a tree even though there may be none in my immediate presence. A new language not based on the visual has been developed and it is the language of mathematics. It is a more complex language where the individual words are variables and the meaning is in the values given to the variables
within the confines of the formulas or equations. This new language allows us to see parts of reality that we can’t visualize. Like all languages it has to be learned by tedious rote and example. If a baby has been denied social contact for its formative years it becomes socially retarded in later life with poor verbal skills. Most of us are currently mathematically retarded and are unable to see the new emerging layers of reality. Maybe teaching basic maths is too late by the time a child enters the educational system. His innate language acquiring skills from birth are wasted. To create the evolution of the new brain that will be capable of exploring the outer bounds of reality and the universe we live in, generation after generation must become conversant in the language that allows us to see the un-seeable.
All the great religions realized this from a very early stage. It is religious education that makes faith such a powerful paradigm - so powerful that it hypnotizes the believer to carry out tasks that few ordinary mortals would undertake - such as, tragically, suicide bombings. Setting aside such extreme negative effects, the continuous exposure of children to the language of religion gives them the ability to see the spiritual side of life that cannot be expressed in mere spoken tongue. This spiritual access is similar to that experienced by the person steeped in science who glimpses the hidden nature of reality. Unfortunately religious revelation is a primitive phenomenon that has a nature to exclude change of the basic tenets of its theory - the original book or act of revelation. It is curious that all religions that are practiced by the majority of the world’s populations have their origin in old tribal texts that objectively are more notable for their errors and myth than for any specific truths. Yet children are trained to overlook these defects by rote of early learning. Religion is an acquired other language that the child uses for looking at the immaterial side of life.
Science and more particularly mathematical thought can displace the role of religious education in the development of the person. The general thrust of religion to look beyond the material is aligned with the stages to which science and the philosophy of science have reached. Scientific theories of reality deal with Platonic ideals of mathematical structures that cannot be translated directly into the real world as we currently sense it. Our minds must evolve so that we see mathematically and then the vastness of the immaterial world will reveal itself to us. No longer will we have to rely on the tribal stories, those old mythical allegories, for a basic representation of our place in the world. To understand our place in the world we first have to know what it is that the world consists of. The ancients saw their world as a very local space determined by the speed at which they could move on foot and the constraints of expanding into unsafe territory. Overhead was a mysterious shroud that changed color and hue and alternated between light and dark. A magnificent fire patrolled the periods of light and a changing orb the fearful darkness. The Greeks put more order on this world. Aristotle saw layers of order going from the earthbound to the skies and then the immutable heavens. It took more than a thousand years for the understanding of our place to take on the seeds of modernity. Copernicus and Galileo opened up the skies. Newton showed that the sun was the focus of all the planetary movement and described precise laws for that movement. The development of the telescope let mankind in on the secret of the heavens. The universe was revealed in all its magnificence and glory. Mankind saw that it occupied a totally insignificant place in the greater picture of reality.
In modern times the revelation of aspects of the universe has gone into overdrive. First there was the theory proposed by the young Einstein that the universe was not a spatially flat Euclidian space but was curved by the presence of matter in the form of stars and galaxies. Then Hubble discovered that the universe was not stationary but was expanding. The development of quantum theory in the early part of the twentieth century was shedding new light on reality at its smallest dimension. Both realms were linked by the theory of the Big Bang. If the universe is expanding then a replay of time in the reverse direction would see the matter coming together in a big crunch. The temperatures of such a big crunch leads to matter breaking down to its primal components - protons, neutrons and electrons and then ultimately to quarks, anti-quarks and gluons and then who knows the ultimate particle or wavelet.
Mankind now saw his place in a reality that extended from fiery birth some thirteen billions of years ago to the present era when the size of the known universe is dictated by the distance traveled at the speed of light in that time. He looked at the firmament and wondered at the stars and the Milky Way and the billions of distant galaxies. Yet his vision provided by eyes that evolved for a very localized environment failed him once again. The matter he sees twinkling overhead in the crisp night air is only five per cent of all the substance of the universe. Gravitational analysis of the stars and galaxies has revealed that about twenty per cent of the universe is made up of dark matter that is distributed in clumps in and around galaxies. The balance, some seventy per cent of all that there is, is uniformly distributed throughout the whole universe as dark energy. We know nothing about this dark matter or energy. It’s only trace is the gravitational effect and perhaps the reason behind the expansion of the universe.
Man lives in a shadowy world where what he sees is only a tiny fraction of what is around him. He is at a similar stage to ancient hunter-gatherer man in that his view of the world is highly blinkered. The universe may not even begin at a Big Bang. This universe may be part of a universe of universes. Ancients thought that the earth was all there was and that the firmament was a decorous roof to their abode. Then the world view expanded and the earth was just one of many planets around a sun of many suns in a galaxy of many galaxies in a universe of many universes?
Does it actually matter to humanity if it has a blinkered view of its place in the cosmos? This is tantamount to asking if it matters if a man remains ignorant. That knowledge has a value is at the kernel of all human activity. The person with knowledge is ahead in the game of survival and in all societies is revered for his intellectual abilities. The essence of humanity is its desire to attain more knowledge.
Placing mankind in the greater vista of an expanding universe, perhaps in a sea of expanding universes, has great existential implications. The ‘purpose’ of life, always a mysterious question, now takes on greater impenetrability. In a closed society where knowledge is constrained by ignorance and confinement, the purpose of life took on simple clothing. Life was created by God for his own godly purposes and mere man should not question his intent. Obedience to the will of a mysterious God was the fulcrum of all religious observance. Questions based on emerging rationality had to remain underground. As the laws of science stubbornly emerged from their imprisonment of the middle ages, the new paradigm was of God, the celestial designer, who set these laws in motion towards his mysterious ends. The Enlightenment helped humanity break free from this stranglehold and the enlightened countries of western Europe led a new phase of economic and general prosperity that has spread over increasing swathes of the world.
It is only in recent times that the God-centered answer to the purpose of life has become questioned by society at large. The increased levels of education and the permeation of knowledge through modern computer technology have empowered the individual to address this important question. No consensus has emerged but the debates remain healthy in that questioning is both tolerated and promoted in a world where the power of ancient beliefs and myths has been diluted by the rationality of critical thinking and scientific enquiry.
Where science, and perhaps philosophy, has failed is in not encouraging and placing center-stage these difficult questions. Science for much of the twentieth century took refuge in Positivism and Instrumentalism where the pragmatic approach of just accepting and using the mathematical formalisms to provide answers and solutions to limited questions and problems was the norm for most practitioners. Philosophy took refuge in language and avoided the questions that it could not answer. Contemporary a
nalytic philosophy has become a form of metaphysics divorced from the emerging scientific rationale of the quantum and the cosmos. It is based on the mere intuition of a set of philosophers accepted by a nepotistic academia.
The question of the purpose and meaning of life is at the core of human activities. Each individual must of necessity address the question and come up with satisfactory answers that at least will allow him to get out of bed in the morning. When he wakes up, his first thoughts are focused on plans for the day. Life is structured such that most days the necessity to go to work, to earn money, to feed and support a lifestyle is the main purpose. These ‘local’ purposes can be so demanding that there is no room for deeper questioning. Life is the pursuit of pleasure for most. The larger questions may sometimes be most conveniently answered quite categorically by religious belief and the person can function adequately from day to day without being troubled by deeper questions of purpose.
These ‘local’ purposes are provided by the environment and lead to physical and mental reward or pain. It is the interaction with society that provides the bulk of purposeful drive. The individual is involved in a lifelong struggle with his solipsistic environment whose stimuli drive him back and forth along life’s short path. Coping with the seeming chaos and mayhem of this personal world leaves no room for the bigger picture. The individual leads a reactive life by necessity of the lack of control he has over his environment. He is like a cork bobbling on a sea of waves, seeking always to stay afloat but never having time to see distant shores or passing ships. In times past, the way to overcome this tumultuous environment was to retreat from life. Hermits and monks in secluded monasteries were able to absent themselves from the frenzies of everyday life to contemplate the distant shores. Through the lens of then current knowledge, they divined an ascetic, metaphysical, religious shore shining gloriously in the reflection of a resplendent God. Where are the modern monks who, armed with the vastly changed view of our place in the cosmos, scan the distance for sight of shore?
Life started on this rocky planet over four billion years ago not long after its very formation. Darwin’s theory of evolution has helped us understand how life has changed and evolved from its bacterial beginnings to the fecund planet we enjoy today. That theory instructs us that all life tries to survive from generation to generation. Most life forms failed and disappeared from the planet. This tells us that we, as a life form, are not protected from extinction. We must strive, like all other life forms, to cling to life. It is the species that strives, with each individual unit readily expendable without significant threat to the overall. The individual reflects the desire of the species to survive. He has been selected by the species over long periods of time as the best fit to survive in the environment of the time. Each individual’s effort is rolled up into the sum of the species’ survival effort - a contribution though statistically insignificant still a part of the overall. The behavior of the individual however marginal can in summation have large impact on the survival of the species. Also modern chaos theory suggests that infinitesimal actions can have major outcomes. This theory places increasing burden on the actions of the individual in relation to the human race as a whole.
The realization of this individual power gives increased self-worth to all human life because it is only human life that has developed the capacity to look at itself and to act freely. All other life follows strict laws of physical and biological science. Animals for all their mobility are bio-automatons and do not freely decide to act. Humanity alone has that capacity. The action of one person -when taken in the context of chaos theory and seeing the cosmos as one in a chaotic sea of worlds - can impact potentially catastrophically on the broader realities of the planet, the galaxy and the universe in a sea of universes. In fact modern quantum theory of measurement suggests this, as evidenced by Everett's theory of many worlds. Such a view places an undue burden on the individual and probably represents an extreme end of the hypothetical spectrum.
If even the impact were restricted to the local domain of the chaotic life journey on our planet Earth, it still places a strong onus on the individual to consider seriously his every action in terms of its resonance with the vibrations of life and the planet. If the system is truly chaotic then it is irrelevant what action may be taken because the essence of chaos is lack of predictability. Yet our intuition tells us that our actions should derive from the example that nature has already given us. We need to study nature to understand how it behaves and follow courses that enhance or preserve its existing systems. This is why an increased focus on science from an early age helps place the individual in a truer context with the world. The person who understands how delicately the biosphere is poised will be less likely to pollute or abuse it. The child who has respect for the environment will never throw litter on the pavement.
Fifteen
Ethics from Science