Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 15
How nature instructs us in conditioning our own behaviors is not easily ascertained. To learn from nature one must firstly understand nature’s laws and ways. The universality of the laws of science reveals that what applies on earth applies in the heavens. This universality or equality introduces the concept of justice or right. The same laws will be enacted on each and every one. Most modern democracies are working towards that social ideal but where there is most strife in the world is where such equality is most often flouted. The greatest strength of this example of universality is that the only laws that can be enacted are those that can be equally applied to all. Another outcome of universality is that our actions must be holistic rather than locally convenient.
That the individual must correlate his actions with those of nature so as to help maintain the existence of life provides a purpose to his life, a step above his own individual survival. Yet what might be called the real purpose of all life remains obscure. I have already examined how life is like the universe getting to know itself - developing memory. That provides scant existential impulse to the individual in his lonely journey through life. Not alone does he not understand why the universe might want to get to know itself but the connection of that exalted fact to his solipsistic world is very hazy.
The fact remains that we are stardust. Atoms that were synthesized in star formation and death billions of years ago. The laws that determined the form of these atoms are the same laws that govern our cosmos today. The laws of science are invariant in time. Because the earth was formed from such stellar residue, the basic imprint of the laws of the cosmos is written into the being of the earth. As biological life emerged from this planet with the energy supplied by the sun, it too must carry these ‘genes’ of the greater cosmos and its unchanging laws. In the Newtonian view of things, these laws were physically deterministic and implied strict cause and effect. This Newtonian world view meant that questions of purpose were totally rational and built into our human psyche. The advent of the quantum theoretical world changed this outlook radically. The world when not observed or left to its own devices is strictly deterministic according to the Schrodinger equation of wave function evolution. This is determinism in a Newtonian sense but the whole range of options for reality progress in tandem in a determinate fashion. It is as if all possible worlds progress according to set deterministic laws. Yet when life enters the drama, the collection of worlds suddenly contracts to a single one in the act of observation or measurement. That selected world is now fixed and its wave function progresses into the time future in a solidly deterministic fashion.
This analysis is unsatisfactory. It is a re-statement of the Anthropic principle - in that we find ourselves in a world that has led to our being, with all its various laws that encode our being, purely because we are looking at that world from within. We are part of the world and cannot escape it to really understand our place in it. In this sense questions of purpose become pointless. We can never see our ultimate purpose as only an external viewer with an appropriate ex-cosmic view can work out any potential purpose or meaning to our world. We are limited by the constraints of our four dimensional world. The answer to any possible purpose to our being must reside in the extra dimensions in which our cosmos is floating. With our limited physical senses this extra-dimensional world is forever lost to us. Yet there is hope and this perhaps is the real purpose of our existence - we can develop our thinking through the language of mathematics and science to ‘see’ beyond our world. Already modern theories of reality, such as string theory or the mysterious ‘M’ theory, are exploring the multi-dimensional world with its ten or perhaps twenty six dimensions that could be the birthplace of our own ‘tiny’ cosmos. This is, in a way, a continuation of the religious and mystic efforts of our forebears who through revelation felt glimpses of that other world beyond the materiality of our own. Their journey was internal and their example led to the foundations of religions whose teachings focused on the intuitive understanding of the extra-cosmic. The modern voyage of discovery takes a more difficult path. It is following rationality which, in its extreme, is leading to a potential irrational world. Yet the only tool to explore this world has to be the rationality built up by science over the centuries. It defines the point of embarkation and sets out a map that shows locations that can be revisited with verity every time. It has mapped our local reality with exemplary precision. Yet the bounds of this map become hazy. The laws of navigation begin to fail in these extremes. Ships that could navigate the nearer waters sink without trace. Mariners and explorers get lost in the theoretical storms that typify these distant oceans. Bravely new explorers, armed with the latest theoretical armory set off from the known world to battle the demons of the unknown.
Our purpose is to forever seek out our purpose. We seek, from the enclosure of our world, for a key that lies external to our world. The destiny of humanity is to explore its environment. It wants to place itself in the bigger picture where the existential being will have meaning that it can comprehend and make good sense of. It wants its existence to be exalted above the being of matter, plants or other bio-life. It is because it can place itself in its environment and be aware, that it seeks a reason for life. It is because it can perceive the concept of cause and effect that it must apply it to existence. So the explorer charted the shores of the land over the whole globe, driven by this impulse to set boundaries to his world. The more he sought the more the boundaries shifted. First the earth was no longer flat, then no longer the center of the world, then no longer a special place in the firmament and now potentially no longer a special world within an infinity of worlds.
The shifting of the boundaries to ever greater extents tells us that whatever the purpose of our being is, it has to be very special. We are the only known thinking life in all this expanse of space-time and the potential dimensions beyond. The Anthropic principle does not provide the answer to our dilemma - saying that we just happen to be here because we find ourselves here. It is more likely that the laws we have divined in our own universe are special cases of laws that exist in the multi-dimensionality of a multiverse. We can, using our developed scientific eyes, see into this world to decipher the laws of the ‘multicosm’. It is this potential ability that makes the human species very special. We know that the conditions necessary for life are likely to be extremely rare in our galaxy and perhaps in the whole universe. At the very least we are a very rare tribe in the life of the overall universe. Our goal is to search out our world to the very limits. Only then will the question of our ultimate purpose become meaningful.