Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 8
Material progress by its very nature is just a reordering of things. Whatever humanity receives in terms of supposed wealth it must take from its environment - it is simply a reordering of the local spacetime. Humanity lost the connection with the environment. It forgot that it, too, was a part of the cosmos, not set apart as many religions claim. In taking from the environment we are taking from ourselves at some other remove that eventually will come back to impact us. This inevitable feedback was ignored or perhaps humanity was not aware of it. This arrogant stance has much to do with the common religious view that the individual is special, set apart from the world. The world is there for the individual and may be exploited at his will. This primacy of the individual was reflected in the philosophies of the times. Philosophers never talk of the individual’s responsibility to the earth and its biosphere; rather they debate at length on the issues of an individual’s responsibility to either himself or to others. The vast philosophy of ethics has little to say about the earth or its sensitive atmosphere. In fact the trend of philosophy has been to deny the actual existence of external reality. All that exists are mere precepts of the individual. This relegating of reality and as a consequence the environment made the individual a selfish solipsistic existence divorced from the reality he was ironically deeply rooted in. Such attitudes pervaded into the world of science and economics.
Science rarely sits back and tries to look at itself objectively. It is too busy in the quest for the ‘how’ of things. There are too many new routes to follow, new discoveries to make, new ideas to fathom. The pace of scientific advance in the twentieth century and on into the twenty first has been staggering. To keep abreast of new ideas and developments takes all the time and energy of even the cleverest and most able in the various disciplines. How then can they be expected to have the time to stand back and look to the whole: see where it is all leading, examine what are its current impacts, check they on the right road. This disconnection with the overall view of the wholeness of our world, that we are simply part of a much larger system, is perhaps the most pressing issue facing science and indeed humanity. Unfettered science has already uncovered means to destroy humanity in its totality and perhaps even to destroy all life on this planet. The current nuclear arsenals are more than sufficient to do this. It has been left to the politicians of the world to ensure that buttons are not pressed to unleash this nightmarish Armageddon. The economic crash of the first decades of this century was not prevented by these same politicians. Can we be sure that they can avoid an even worse nuclear meltdown?
Philosophy and science must engage. They must learn from each other not as master and pupil but as equals in humanity’s endeavor to exist and to continue to exist. Science has been effective in dusting off some of the lazy metaphysics that has straitjacketed philosophy. It has described the stage on which we act out our lives from the grand scale of the cosmos to the tiny scale of the quantum. It has described ourselves, the actors, in fine biological and biochemical detail. It has revealed our evolutionary origins. Philosophy is the audience staring at the play and trying to decipher the plot, the interactions of the characters and the likely denouement.
There are two seemingly contradictory viewpoints emerging from science. On the one hand homo sapiens has come into being at a point in space-time that is of no particular significance in the overall scheme of cosmological evolution. His world line may be of infinitesimal length in the long duration of a potentially infinite space-time. What significance can this tiny world line have compared to the trillions upon trillions of other world lines in the great manifold of space-time existence? Yet on the scale of the infinitesimal, quantum theory places homo sapiens in a very privileged position as the observer that causes the spectrum of possible world lines of a system to collapse into one definite world line as soon as he makes an observation. This places conscious thought on a higher level than all other processes in its impact on the world. It places humanity once again at the center, at least, of his universe. Each of these views is polar-opposite in its aspect of where we see ourselves.
If we are a tiny droplet of life in the vast oceans of existence how can our being be of any value? The fate of humanity is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. It will hardly make even the most infinitesimal imprint in cosmic memory. Our legacy may the remnants of radio waves that have escaped into the vastness of space - a garbled legacy of indecipherable meaning and almost no chance of finding a receiver, least of all a conscious receiver. What we do matters not one whit to the cosmos. It is not for the sake of the cosmos that we must survive. In the short run our only impact is on our own home planet - the earth. Here we can certainly leave a more durable legacy. But we now realize through science that the life of the planet is finite just as is the life of our source of energy, the sun. So no matter what we do, we are ultimately doomed to disappear from the existence of the cosmos. Travel to other potentially habitable star systems is beyond even our future capability. We are designed by evolution for our own unique environment and even if we could gain access to other star systems, humanity as we currently know would have to evolve very quickly to survive the alien environments. Some futurists have dreamt up the idea of self replicating robots that could voyage forever in galactic space programmed for survival. Certainly these robots theoretically could survive but they survive as robots not as humanity no matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes. Biological humanity is doomed over time.
But each individual life is doomed as death is its final fate. Yet the individual doesn’t give up in depression at the existential pointlessness of it all. He makes the best of a life in which he finds himself. He struggles very hard to survive, to improve his material lot, to improve his psychological well-being, to increase his knowledge and wisdom. Why does the individual do this against such a negative backdrop? The selfish gene theory provides some light over why we struggle to reproduce and this can be extended into life, as all the aforementioned struggles assist in the main goal of passing on genes successfully. The gene theory suggests that life has an in-built desire to survive but has it? The actual survival of life is testimony only to the fact that it has actually survived. There are billions of extinct forms of life. It is more the norm that life becomes extinct. We too must expect that ultimately we will become extinct yet accept that we can fight extinction as best we can to put off the final moment.
On a personal level the best way to attain longevity is to adopt healthy lifestyles. We eat a good diet, exercise well both mentally and physically. We look after our internal environment. But we also interact with our external environment, with other individuals and society, and most importantly with the earth. The external environment can equally impact on our longevity. If our affairs and dealings with our fellow man are fractious or poor then mental health can be affected or in extremis violence can occur. Our life can easily be fore-shortened. Likewise the condition of our physical environment has large effects on our longevity. Pollution affects our health. Poor management of resources leads to famine and poverty. Mis-use of energy leads to global warming with all its ills. What this asserts is that our striving for personal survival is very much tied in to the survival of societies and of the environment. What we do at all levels of action impacts on the whole and through a sometimes complicated feedback loop impacts on ourselves. We should thus be driven by our contacts with society and with our environment to behave in a certain way that doesn’t negatively affect our own survival. Yet that complicated feedback system has been lost in the modern world. It was there at the more primitive times of living when humanity lived from the land and off the land by farming and hunting. Excessive consumption was always followed by local decrease in resources - animals over hunted or land over-used. In a modern globalized economy such feedback is not available at the local level as the supply and demand centers are geographically distant. There is no centralized mind looking at the whole system which is the earth itself to establish a sustainable equilib
rium.
Philosophers and scientists have to put forth persuasive arguments to society and peoples to get them to behave in ways that though there is no seeming local positive feedback, and even though the actions may be difficult or personally unappealing, will deliver what might the called the common good. The individual must curb his sense of free will for the greater good of humanity. This must be done by volition so that even when unobserved he does the right thing. In order to realize that seemingly difficult actions can be ultimately for your own good, it is necessary for the individual to be enlightened on a very broad basis of who and what he is and how he is part not just of a locality or society but a part of the whole earth and with it the cosmos.
The starting point for a new philosophy may be the new dualism presented by the world of quantum theory. This places the objective world independently evolving according to strict determinate laws. This world contains humanity and all living things as well as inanimate objects. All are composed of the same basic ingredients - atoms and molecules that have been created in the stew of the solar fires. All parts of this universe and others potentially parallel to it are on the same determinate footing but like the molecules in a hot gas the individual particle motions are lost in the infinite complexity of the molecular interactions. The complexity denies the ultimate determinate fate of any tiny sub-set of the whole. This complexity is fractal and no matter how small a sub-set is taken there is a similar degree of complexity in the deterministic dynamics of the system. This can be taken to the infinitesimal where the sub-set becomes an electron. The possible world lines of this electron, each individually deterministic, fan out over a bell shape distribution curve, each point of which is a measure of amplitude which relates to the probability that the electron will take that particular world line. The complexity of the degrees of freedom denies the determinism. The dualism arises because there is also an entity in the world that is set apart from the objective world of particles and their world lines and that entity is consciousness. Consciousness is not deterministic and has infinite degrees of freedom. These degrees of freedom constitute free will. The exercise of free will to select a particular world line for the electron and to test whether it is on that world line gives a result. The result is all or nothing - the electron is on that world line or else it is not. If it is found to be on that selected world line then it continues deterministically on that world line in the conscious mind of the observer. It has entered the knowledge of the consciousness. If the observer could detect the world line of the electron without interfering in any way with it then the overall bell curve of world lines remains as before. But that is not possible. To measure is to interfere. The world line is disturbed by the measurement and a new bell curve of world lines is formed by necessity. The measurement changes the future of the electron, resetting it on a new spectrum of possible deterministic courses.
The new duality is the existence of consciousness and the rest of the world. This is like a version of the old mind and matter paradigm but it is very different. There is no exclusivity between the two realms and neither is each on a par. The world of matter is on a scale incomparably greater than the world of consciousness. The level of interaction is infinitesimally tiny so much so as to have effectively no impact on the greater cosmos. Its impact though increasing all the time is purely local at the level of the planet that spawned the consciousness in the first place.
Consciousness is top of the pyramid of life. Its origin was the first chance measurement that was recorded at molecular level where, in the primordial lifeless stew of a young planet, the world line of an individual molecule interacted in such a way with others that allowed it to be recorded into the memory of those others. The configuration of the others becomes the memory. All life is based on memory that is stored in configurations of molecules. If the world lines of the original molecules were not strictly deterministic then the memory molecules would have to encode an infinitude of outcomes and life could not appear. But the laws of nature are deterministic and thus restricted the amount of memory needed to capture the first seedling of life. Once the initial memory was established then the process was repeated and repeated, leading to increasing complexity of entities that could interact and form more complex memory. Life happened by chance encounters of bits of memory. It evolved not according to any strict law but according to the rules of chance. The components of life were however ruled by the laws that governed the rest of the universe and if the presence of memory were not there then they evolve in a purely deterministic manner. Paradoxically, it is memory that creates indeterminacy in the universe.
The course of evolution of life is increasingly being revealed by the fossil record. If there is a direction then it is in the increasing content of memory in more complex organisms. Eventually the memory starts to self organize and special areas are reserved for memory and for transmission of memory. The roles of DNA and that special organ we call the brain are, now in the modern era of knowledge, recognized as being at the apex of importance in biological life. The separation of memory into the brain eventually has led to complexities that allows the brain to look not only at all the functions of the biological body but to look at the brain itself and how it organizes the memory stored within it. By having access to memory of the past the brain develops a sense of itself and consciousness appears. Consciousness has evolved from memory and is totally dependent on memory. A person with no memory is barely conscious living in a permanent now. Gradually such a person loses their sense of self as is tragically demonstrated by the Alzheimer’s condition.
Consciousness takes on more and more memory. Civilization is based on the social memory that is passed on from generation to generation. In the modern world, memory has expanded so much that the average youth spends up to a third of his life just acquiring memory. The store of memory has been revolutionized first by printing and much more massively by the advent of computers and now the internet. Consciousness has spread throughout the planet and is now beginning to impact at planetary level. Global warming is a direct consequence of consciousness.
The old symmetric duality of mind and matter is now replaced by the very asymmetric consciousness and cosmos. The cosmos is the vast unperceiving background on which the tiny island of consciousness floats. The causal route is essentially one way. The deterministic laws of the cosmos give rise to the genesis of indeterminate consciousness. Consciousness, in its turn, can only affect the cosmos on the very local scale. That it has arisen at all is pure chance of circumstance and that it survives relates to how it controls its impact on that locality. The locale is a blind existence unaware of its visitor. That the locale was initially favorable to consciousness evolving does not mean that it will into the future. The laws of nature can throw up obstacles to survival quite unaided by the ignorant antics of humanity. The delicate troposphere may be unstable in a chaotic sense and may behave erratically to our conceived notions of possibility. These behaviors can certainly be expected over long geological time scales. Over the shorter human scales we expect stability but through our own actions have brought forward the risk of major change into not only human scales but into the scale of the now.
Humanity may not be the hub of the cosmos but it has through its consciousness become the hub of the planet earth. Therefore philosophy must be displaced from its emphasis on the individual and transferred onto a greater consciousness, that of the earth organism. The earth is to this wider consciousness as the body is to the mind. If we do not care for our body we face ill-health and eventually die before our time. Likewise even though we know that consciousness is here on earth for a finite period, by not caring for the planet, this period may be seriously foreshortened.