Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 9
The experience of the individual must be placed within the experience of humanity as a whole from its fragile beginnings some hundreds of thousands of years ago to the present epoch of complex cultural mixing. The interaction of humanity and its environment has evolved from a benign passivity to a dangerous activity. Increasingly science molded that activity to greater and deeper extents. In the last hundred years there has been an exponential growth in impact of man’s activity on the planet that is his only home. The initial blindness of man to this impact was firstly a fault of science itself not having the systems to monitor this increasing threat. When the threat was eventually hailed to exist, based on the early scant information, both science and society chose to ignore the warnings.
It is understandable if albeit inexcusable that science failed to self-regulate. It is a given that regulation from within is impossible except in an ideal world. The world of science of the last one hundred years was far from utopian. It was populated by very clever theoreticians each grappling with a rapidly changing theoretical world. The engineers and technologists were being fed a wealth of new theory leading to massive innovation and technical complexity growth. It was enough to keep apace of the ever-increasing rate in the growth of knowledge and the advance of technology. There was no time to study or even be aware of the impact on the environment. The great dirty pollutants of the earlier part of the century, the big belching coal fired power stations that turned Europe’s forests into acid-rained devastation and blackened all the great municipal buildings, had been cleaned up or displaced by cleaner gas technology. There was seeming improvement in the swathes of environmental destruction that was the legacy of the industrial revolution. Rivers and other waterways had been cleaned. Even the old toxic dumps were dug up and the earth reconstituted. Aerosols were banned and the ozone hole problem was under control. Lurking all the while unseen behind all this real progress was the specter of the rise of carbon dioxide gas concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere. Here for the first time humanity’s activity was affecting things in the realm of the solar system. The delicate balance of heat in and heat out for the fragile earth atmosphere was being altered in a way that was almost irreversible in the shorter term.
If there were no internal regulators then regulation must come from without. Here the role of the world of philosophy missed a vital chance to make its deliberations of substance to the real world. If philosophy had been more concerned with the entity of the greater consciousness than with that of the personal and if it had been less inclined to deny external objective reality, it could have done greatest service to humanity. It could have been the external regulator. By examining and developing an understanding of humanity’s relations with its home in terms of a general consciousness, philosophy could give the guidance to all man’s activities so that they are aligned with mutual equilibrium, for humanity a sustainable growth of consciousness and for the earth a sustainable troposphere. This sounds like a utilitarian role for the noble science of philosophy that most of its adherents would scorn. Yet if something is not of use what value has it? Philosophy must have relevance to our everyday lives just as religion filled that role in the past. Religion was never going to save the planet. Its sphere was also the individual soul. The planet was there to be exploited. Religion never came to grips with technology or science. The fate of Galileo was just the tip of the iceberg. Religion was always anti-enlightenment and was suspicious of knowledge unless controlled by its own institutions. It was the legacy of religion in the sciences and philosophy that allowed the overemphasis on the individual to become the accepted paradigm.
Realizing that all life is part of a great stream of evolution of memory from that long ago random moment of initiation, bonds us as humans to all around us, our fellow humans, all living creatures and all living plants, even to the humble virus or bacteria. That consciousness, the ability to self observe, developed in humans was a chance occurrence but chance would have it emerge anyway given enough time and change. We are the conservators of consciousness. In a sense we are the chosen ones, albeit a random choice. We have the destiny of preserving this great inheritance and growing it. We are the memory of our local patch of space-time and to that extent we are outside space-time with the ability to look back over its past. In the future if consciousness survives and further grows perhaps we will develop the ability to see our futures and then we will have attained true wisdom as we will be able to avoid those futures that will be to our detriment. Already we have elements of future vision. The warnings of those scientists who claim that we are creating a greenhouse of our planet are the cries of those who have future vision. Those monitoring the paths of rogue asteroids that may someday pass close to earth are future visionists. The realm of the future will become bigger and increasingly important as a survival strategy for consciousness. Unlike the past of which there is just one, there is an infinity of futures but when we observe the future and divine it we collapse the infinitude into one. But the one that transpires is the one of our choosing to the extent that we can interfere with its path or world line. Just as the act of measurement interferes with the wave function at the level of the quantum so observing the future at the macro scale interferes with what ultimately transpires. We can shape our own future.
Science and philosophy can work hand in hand in the epic task of shaping our future, in acquiring the wisdom that knowledge of future potentials will bring. Science develops the theory and the technology to make us far-seeing beyond the primitive daily return of the sun to our skies. We can now look out on the expanse of the galaxy and deep into the cosmos. Our past extends the billions of years to the point of singularity. The laws revealed by this past and our present show themselves to be time symmetrical and allow us to stare into possible futures, indeterminate only in the complexity of interaction. The lessons learned when applied to our home, the earth, help us to navigate in the near future of our own special patch of space-time. It is at this juncture that philosophy can help divine the correct course for humanity. Philosophy can act as the mind of consciousness. It is consciousness looking at itself. Philosophy is thus also ‘emergent’ and rides on the back of the greater emergent consciousness. It must evolve and change continually just as consciousness has changed with evolving life. The starting point has to be that philosophy sits outside consciousness even though it has been spawned by it. Science and the entire knowledge endeavors are the apparatus of the experiment that philosophy, the observer, uses to interact with consciousness.
In this sense philosophy is at a very early stage of development. It has not yet even sensed its true role or being. It is still in the classical stage of development just as science for most of its history failed to recognize that the experimenter must of necessity disturb and be part of the experiment. When the experiments were on the macro scale this decidedly infinitesimal impact could be ignored and so classical science made much headway in describing our primitive sense of reality. There were big things out there that moved in ways determinate but essentially independent of us, the observer. The duality of mind and matter presented no paradoxes. The paradigm developed and took hold for hundreds of years of classical satisfaction. The philosophical paradigm that was seated deep in the ancient world of classical Greece had no problem with the scientific classicism. There were both subscribing to the same paradigm.
The events of the start of the twentieth century that caused a revolution in the world of science - general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics - signaled the end of the classical era. In the minds of a select few individuals, the consciousness of humanity made vast strides forward. Windows were opened on strange new aspects of the reality of our local world. We were able, through the power of great intellects, to see well beyond the physical limitations of our biology. Our brains have become our eyes and much more powerful eyes at that.
Despite the momentous import of these new ideas there were few who could come to terms with their seeming complexity. The
ordinary person had to rely on the accounts of those who tried to translate the worlds, which had been revealed in mathematical complexity, into a language that had no words for the concepts concerned. It was this same difficulty that hampered philosophy from keeping up with the emergent birth of a totally different paradigm. Those that did became caught up in the revealed philosophical paradoxes of the new thinking. They chewed over problems that were readily apparent. How could a particle be a wave? How could a light wave be a photon? Is Schrodinger’s cat dead or alive or both? These paradoxes were real and complex but were not what the new revolution was all about for philosophy. It was a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.
What philosophy missed was the new advance that was being forged by consciousness. The individual, the highest level of memory in all life, had succeeded in tearing away a shroud that was hiding the reality of existence. The worlds of the infinitesimal and the infinite were opened up for the first time. The laws of these worlds were not the classical laws that humanity had become accustomed to. The laws were strange anti-intuitional contortions that ranged from the determinate infinite to the indeterminate infinitesimal. The laws were not describable in our normal languages but could only be enacted on a mathematical stage. They could predict things in our language and this they successfully did on all occasions.
The newly born paradigm was by its strange complex nature restricted to the very few who were able to comprehend its theories. Spreading the word was left to scientists themselves -this some did very effectively given the limited access to the various media that pertained. But this was not their work; they were trained as theorists and experimenters not philosophers. The impact of this new emerging paradigm was for philosophy to decipher and embed in the thinking of society. The first real realization that this new paradigm was real and potent was when the world heard of the explosion of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The power had been unleashed uncontrollably.
The frightening power of that unpublicized early twentieth century scientific revolution is such that today humanity has at the push of a single button the ability to destroy all life on the planet. Consciousness has the power to commit suicide. Nothing should more excite the need for all of philosophy to be aware of this potential future. There is now a greater need to shape our future.
How has consciousness come to the sorry pass that it can self-annihilate? Is it coded into the laws of nature that consciousness cannot persist? These questions do not have apparent answers. The laws of nature are time symmetrical laws when viewed from the perspective of the overall cosmos. Space-time may be infinite giving a sense of anti-symmetry but this infinity can be like the unbounded infinity of the surface of a sphere. There is no sense of an inevitable end of time that can presage a corresponding end of consciousness either by external or internal hands. There is no law that says that consciousness must die. However, likewise, there is no law that says that it can’t die. Extinction of consciousness is just one of the infinity of potential futures. It is incumbent on humanity to discover the threats to life and forge a safer future. Humanity already has discovered the lethal power of nuclear weapons and this cannot be undone. In order to ensure survival this weapons technology must be neutered and made impotent. Relying on the disparate parts of humanity’s consciousness to exercise good citizenship is not enough to prevent the fateful day of Armageddon. Science and philosophy must play a very pro-active role. Even the individual pacific dogmas of the world’s great religions could not prevent wars in the past and in fact their dogmas are more likely to cause conflict than resolve it. So philosophy must transcend the role of religion in developing an ethics of conscious mind that takes its ground as the whole of our local space-time, particularly the patch we call the modern era on earth. This ground though local in space-time encompasses its placement in the infinite of the cosmos and its composition down to the infinitesimal world of the quark or string.
Science has revealed much of the ontology of consciousness but little of its teleology. It is for philosophy to come up with teleological solutions to the enigma of consciousness. Yet these solutions must be based in the physical rather than the metaphysical world. It is too easy to come up with metaphysical quasi-religious teleology. Neither is it enough or satisfactory to say simply that consciousness has no real ontological or teleological status because the human psyche demands such points in its existence. The human being is after all an existence between two definite points - birth and death. The metaphysical afterlife of religion may be ignored as a primitive attempt at teleological explanation.
The ontology of consciousness was a random chance event that occurred within an infinite spectrum of events. Memory was a chance occurrence amongst the complex behavior of molecules that, once it occurred, either survived or perished. Therefore survival is the result of a long sequence of unlikely events but that consciousness exists at all is proof that the string of unlikely events prevailed. What that says of the future is that survival is based on similar chance unless that future can be predicted and chance annihilation avoided. This gives a basic teleology where life exists to survive. To survive life must develop ability to predict the future to excise those futures where it succumbs to annihilation. This provides a higher level teleology of increasing knowledge so that the predictive mechanisms become more accurate and more comprehensive. Knowledge becomes a key player in survival. Yet there is the paradox that the increase in knowledge has created a greater threat to survival in the development of world-destroying nuclear weapons. The emergence of this deadly paradox shows that the key to the teleological dilemma is not contained in the sphere of scientific knowledge but rather in the highest level where consciousness observes its own consciousness - the world of philosophy. The lower teleology of knowledge acquisition by a survival seeking consciousness must be viewed from without by that same consciousness and a deeper teleology must emerge.
The first stirrings of life were embedded in the vast manifold of space-time. They occurred at least once in the outer regions of a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars, itself one of hundreds of billions of other similar sized galaxies. Yet all these galaxies and stars can be traced back in the causal chain to a singular point where all the known laws of physics break down. This first cause may not be the real first cause but one of an infinitude of first causes each creating its own cosmos. This bubbling sea of space times embedded in the vast ocean of being is the real stage on which to place the emergence of consciousness. There is no necessity for this emergence but we know it has happened - we are here. Therefore it was possible to occur. Our present state of knowledge leads us to propose that the emergence was pure chance with no pre-ordination within the laws of physics. Yet this should not rule out pre-ordination being set within the world of the singularity or infinitude of singularities. There we have not the slightest idea of what reigns and what may be the causative laws if any. So in terms of ontology we can’t rule out a teleology. There may be a very definite reason for the existence of the cosmos and the eventual emergence of consciousness.
The only sign-posts to the laws that preceded the singularity or Big Bang are the laws as revealed in our current space-time. The laws are time symmetrical and work equally well in the past as in the future. This counters our conscious experience of time which is decidedly asymmetric leading from birth to death. The consciousness that has developed in the universe is steeped in asymmetry in direct conflict with the laws of physics. Conscious time follows the second law of thermodynamics, that of ever increasing entropy or disorder because that is the phase of the space-time we are embedded in. The universe is expanding and the overall entropy is increasing with the increased volume of the phase-space. But the universe could just as well be contracting - the laws of physics would be working in reverse with time negative. We would perceive the passage of time as things coming together, as people aging less and less. For this to be possible there has to be infinite memory created at some point of turnover where the u
niverse just starts to contract. This infinite memory can begin to reconstruct the past from the detritus of the present. This memory has to be embedded in the universe both locally and globally. The emergence of consciousness may be the early signs that the universe is developing a store of memory. Over the future billions of years other islands of consciousness may emerge and they may link up into a greater common consciousness of the universe - a universal memory that will hold trillions and trillions of times more knowledge, enough to be able to reverse time to stop the future that could eventually consume it and consign it to a possible extinction.
Islands of consciousness are islands of negative entropy that stop the relentless spread of the cosmos to high entropy death. The laws of the universe force the overall level of entropy or disorder to increase but all life pulls in the opposite direction. Without consciousness or memory this struggle would be doomed to fail as each life form meets eventual death. With memory, or the conscious observance of the universe recorded by sentient beings, this death is avoided. Knowledge can survive death of the individual and can be accumulated over time. The acquired knowledge of humanity and that of any other pockets of life in the universe are the hope for the eventual increase in universal consciousness over the billions of years into the future. It represents the only hope of developing enough memory to be able at some point in the infinite future to recreate the past and avoid a future that may destroy it all.
Consciousness may be the universe’s way of re-inventing itself and setting it on a repeating cycle of expansion and contraction over tens of hundreds of billions of years. If the current growth in knowledge over the last hundred years or so were extrapolated over billions over even trillions of years then the knowledge attained defies our present levels of comprehension. If we even go back one hundred years and said to the most advanced scientist in the world that you could stand anywhere, be it on a mountain top or the middle of a park, and talk to and see your friend instantaneously somewhere in a desert in far away Australia, the venerable scientist would laugh at you and suggest you be locked up as a madman. That progress was made in the space of decades of technology advance. Imagine this extrapolated into the future billions of years hence, if we survive that long.