My grand-niece, giving an obituary at my mother’s funeral (a few years back), read out a rather clever poem she’d written, called ‘What’s in a dash?’ In the case of John Searle, it includes an academic career as a philosopher, who created a thought experiment that found its way outside of academia into popular discourse. It also included ignominy when he was stripped of his title as Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley, following accusations of sexual harassment in June 2019 (refer Wikipedia for details).
Just on that, we live in a time of cancel culture, but also changing social norms, which I think are largely for the better. Personally, I don’t necessarily condemn someone for sleeping with a student, depending on circumstances, though I know many find it shocking. But if they’re both legally adults and it’s consensual, I wouldn’t rush to judgement. Erwin Schrodinger, well known for his libertine views and habits, got at least one student pregnant when he was living in exile in Ireland during the war. I only know this because I read about her grandson living and working as a physicist in Australia. Apparently, he only learned of his esteemed ancestry relatively late in his life. As I said, social norms have changed.
And relationships in workplaces are common, including myself, though the workplace was a kitchen and not an office. Having said all that, I think being in a position of authority and coercing someone who rejected sexual advances is a sackable offence, irrespective of the environment. And according to the Wikipedia article, that was the case with Searle. Nevertheless, in the NYT obituary, they added the following:
After Professor Searle’s death, Jennifer Hudin, the former director of the Searle Center, stated publicly that she had faced related accusations, but that both she and Professor Searle were innocent of all charges.
It is worth reading her email to Colin McGinn where she disputes the outcome and how she claims that Searle was actually exonerated by the investigation, but it was subsequently overturned. Having served on a jury (for a sex-related charge, as it turns out), you literally have to work out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth; in this case, neither I nor you can do that.
Although it was over 3 months ago, I only learned about his death when I came across a one-page obituary in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 171, Dec 2025 / Jan 2026).
I won’t relate a history of his career, because others do that more comprehensively than I can, in links I’ve already provided. I read his book, MiND, a brief introduction, many years ago, probably when it was published (2004). I can still remember coming across it unexpectedly in a book shop (I hadn’t visited before or since) while I was getting work done on my car. I found it a very stimulating read. Of course, I’d heard about his famous ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment, and to quote The New York Times again:
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an internet reference source, the Searle thought experiment “has probably been the most widely discussed philosophical argument in cognitive science to appear since the Turing Test,” the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing’s 1950 procedure for determining machine intelligence.
While looking for obituaries online, I came across an interview he did for Philosophy Now in the Winter 1999/2000 Issue 25, so a millennium issue effectively. It gives a good overview of his philosophy that includes his ideas on language, where he coined the term, ‘speech-acts’ plus his ideas on The Construction of Social Reality (the title of a book I haven’t read). He effectively argues that these 2 fields, combined with his ideas on mind (therefore, 3 fields) are all related.
It was in Searle’s book, Mind, that I first came across the term, ‘intentionality’, which has a specific meaning in a philosophical context, and is related to the conscious mind’s ability to represent something externally, internally. That’s my clumsy way of explaining it, because it directly relates to my personal philosophy that we all have an internal and external world, which affects everything we do, because they are interdependent.
I saw an extended interview, not-so-recently, of Raymond Tallis by Robert Lawrence Kuhn on Closer to Truth, where he had a different take on it, which some might consider radical, yet is actually a good working definition: ‘Nothing is made explicit except by a creature who is conscious of it. And aware of it.’
In other words, there is this relationship between consciousness and reality, whereby something has no specificity (for want of a better term) until a conscious entity perceives it. I’ve made a similar point, when I’ve argued that when it comes to the question: why is there something rather than nothing? There might as well be nothing without consciousness. The Universe seems to have the inbuilt goal or destiny to be self-realisable. Paul Davies has made a similar point.
This is arguably related to Searle’s ideas on intentionality, because I think it’s what philosophical intentionality is all about – the mind’s ability to conjure up its own internal reality, which may or may not relate to the external reality we all inhabit. In fact, I’ve argued that evolution by natural selection is directly dependent on our ability to do this, simply because the external reality can kill us, in infinitely diverse ways.
Regarding Searle’s pre-occupation with intentionality, I would like to quote from another post, where I reference Searle’s book.
It’s not for nothing that Searle claims ‘the problem of intentionality is as great as the problem of consciousness’ – I would contend they are manifestations of the same underlying phenomena – as though one is passive and the other active. Searle wrote his book, Mind, in part, to offer explanations for these phenomena (although he added the caveat that he had only scratched the surface).
I argued in the same post that intentionality is really imagination, which allows us to mentally time-travel, without which, we wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the past or anticipate a future, both of which are essential for day-to-day interactions, not to mention, survival.
Searle would argue that intentionality is something that separates us from AI, and I would argue the same for imagination, which allows me to segue into his Chinese room thought experiment.
Many would argue that it’s past its use-by-date, and I even came across someone recently, calling it the ‘Chinese room fallacy’. On the other hand, with the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, I’d say it’s prescient. Basically, Searle believed very strongly – some might say to the point of arrogance – that ‘the brain is not a computer and the mind is not software’, meaning it doesn’t run on algorithms, and I would agree. It doesn’t help that we use the word ‘language’ when talking about both computers and humans.
More specifically, the whole point of his Chinese room argument is that a person could answer questions addressed in Chinese and respond in Chinese (basically, inputs and outputs) without ever understanding the Chinese language, simply by blindly following a set of rules (algorithms) and manipulating symbols accordingly. Searle argued that this is basically what all computers do. The point is that it would give the impression that the person in the room understood Chinese, similarly to the way some people believe that a computer understands something the same way a human does. And this is what we’ve found with ChatGPT.
I’ve recently been watching a podcast series by Lex Fridman where he interviews some very clever people, including a series with mathematician, logician and philosopher, Joel David Hamkins (John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Logic at the University of Notre Dame). I mention him, because in one of the podcasts he remarks how he finds AI not at all helpful in exploring mathematics; specifically, ChatGPT. Now, I’m not at all surprised, but maybe there are other AI tools that are specifically designed to help mathematicians. For example, mathematicians now use computers to run myriad scenarios to formulate proofs that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. But it still doesn’t mean that the computer understands what it’s doing.
In the Philosophy Now interview, Searle talks about language and ‘social reality’, which I’ve barely touched on, yet they are obviously related. To quote from the interview, out of context:
On the account that I give, social reality is a matter of what people think, and what they think is a matter of how they talk to each other, and relate to each other. So you can’t have a social reality without a language, not a human social reality without a language.
What he doesn’t say, at least not in this interview, is that we all think in a language, which we learn from our milieu at an extremely early age, suggesting we are ‘hardwired’ genetically to do this. Without language, our ability to grasp and manipulate abstract concepts, which is arguably a unique human capability, would not be possible. Basically, I’m arguing that language for humans goes well beyond just an ability to communicate desires and wants, though that was likely its origin.
In the same passage of the interview, he explains how we follow specific social protocols (though he doesn’t use that word), giving the interview itself as an example. They both know what social rules they need to follow in that particular environment. The thing is that I came across this idea when I studied social psychology and they are called ‘scripts’, which in turn, are based on ‘schema’, and these are culturally dependent. In other words, our actions and our responses, be they verbal, written or behavioural, are largely governed by social norms that we have delegated to our subconscious.
That maybe an oversimplification, and not doing him justice, so I recommend you read the interview for yourself.
Humans are not the only social animal, but we have created a cultural evolution that has overtaken our biological evolution, giving rise to the term, ‘meme’, coined by Richard Dawkins and elaborated on by others; most notably, Susan Blackmore, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. But integral to that cultural evolution is language, because, even without written script, it allows us to accumulate memories across generations in a way that no other species can, which is why we have civilisations.
Searle argued that he wasn’t a physicalist (or materialist), which made him clash with David Dennett, but also not a (Cartesian) dualist, which some might argue is the only alternative. Searle acknowledges that consciousness has a causal relationship with the neurons in our brain. To quote:
The brain is made up of all these neurons and the individual neurons… But what happens is that neurons, through causal interactions – causal interactions, not just formal, symbolic interactions but actual causal relationships with actual neurons firing and synapses operating – cause a higher level feature of the system, namely, consciousness and intentionality.
I find this similar to Douglas Hoffstadter’s idea of a ‘strange loop’, which is that the causal loop goes both ways, and this relates to free will, or what someone called ‘causal consciousness’, which I claim, is related to imagination. I quote Philip Ball from his tome, The Book of Minds:
When we make a choice, we aren’t selecting between various possible futures, but between various imagined futures, as represented in the mind’s internal model of the world… (emphasis in the original)
Searle spends an entire chapter on free will in his book, Mind. I leave you with his conclusion, which might be a good place to wrap this up:
Even after we have resolved the most fundamental questions addressed in this book, questions such as, What is the nature of the mind? How does it relate to the rest of the physical world? How can there be such a thing as mental causation? And how can our minds have intentionality? There is still the question of whether or not we really do have freedom.
21 January 2026
John Searle (31 July, 1932 – 17 September, 2025)
29 May 2025
The role of the arts. Why did it evolve? Will AI kill it?
As I mentioned in an earlier post this month, I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s book, Until the End of Time; Mind, Matter; and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, which covers just about everything from cosmology to evolution to consciousness, free will, mythology, religion and creativity. He spends a considerable amount of time on storytelling, compared to other art forms, partly because it allows an easy segue from language to mythology to religion.
One of his points of extended discussion was in trying to answer the question: why did our propensity for the arts evolve, when it has no obvious survival value? He cites people like Steven Pinker, Brian Boyd (whom I discuss at length in another post) and even Darwin, among others. I won’t elaborate on these, partly due to space, and partly because I want to put forward my own perspective, as someone who actually indulges in an artistic activity, and who could see clearly how I inherited artistic genes from one side of my family (my mother’s side). No one showed the slightest inclination towards artistic endeavour on my father’s side (including my sister). But they all excelled in sport (including my sister), and I was rubbish at sport. One can see how sporting prowess could be a side-benefit to physical survival skills like hunting, but also achieving success in combat, which humans have a propensity for, going back to antiquity.
Yet our artistic skills are evident going back at least 30-40,000 years, in the form of cave-art, and one can imagine that other art forms like music and storytelling have been active for a similar period. My own view is that it’s sexual selection, which Greene discusses at length, citing Darwin among others, as well as detractors, like Pinker. The thing is that other species also show sexual selection, especially among birds, which I’ve discussed before a couple of times. The best known example is the peacock’s tail, but I suspect that birdsong also plays a role, not to mention the bower bird and the lyre bird. The lyre bird is an interesting one, because they too have an extravagant tail (I’m talking about the male of the species) which surely would be a hindrance to survival, and they perform a dance and are extraordinary mimics. And the only reason one can think that this might have evolutionary value at all is because the sole purpose of those specific attributes is to attract a mate.
And one can see how this is analogous to behaviour in humans, where it is the male who tends to attract females with their talents in music, in particular. As Greene points out, along with others, artistic attributes are a by-product of our formidable brains, but I think these talents would be useless if we hadn’t evolved in unison a particular liking for the product of these endeavours (also discussed by Greene), which we see even in the modern world. I’m talking about the fact that music and stories both seem to be essential sources of entertainment, evident in the success of streaming services, not to mention a rich history in literature, theatre, ballet and more recently, cinema.
I’ve written before that there are 2 distinct forms of cognitive ability: creative and analytical; and there is neurological evidence to support this. The point is that having an analytical brain is just as important as having a creative one, otherwise scientific theories and engineering feats, for which humans seem uniquely equipped to provide, would never have happened, even going back to ancient artefacts like Stonehenge and both the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids. Note that these all happened on different continents.
But there are times when the analytical and creative seem to have a synergistic effect, and this is particularly evident when it comes to scientific breakthroughs – a point, unsurprisingly, not lost on Greene, who cites Einstein’s groundbreaking discoveries in relativity theory as a case-in-point.
One point that Greene doesn’t make is that there has been a cultural evolution that has effectively overtaken biological evolution in humans, and only in humans I would suggest. And this has been a direct consequence of our formidable brains and everything that goes along with that, but especially language.
I’ve made the point before that our special skill – our superpower, if you will – is the ability to nest concepts within concepts, which we do with everything, not just language, but it would have started with language, one would think. And this is significant because we all think in a language, including the ability to manipulate abstract concepts in our minds that don’t even exist in the real world. And no where is this more apparent than in the art of storytelling, where we create worlds that only exist in the imagination of someone’s mind.
But this cultural evolution has created civilisations and all that they entail, and survival of the fittest has nothing to do with eking out an existence in some hostile wilderness environment. These days, virtually everyone who is reading this has no idea where their food comes from. However, success is measured by different parameters than the ability to produce food, even though food production is essential. These days success is measured by one’s ability to earn money and activities that require brain-power have a higher status and higher reward than so-called low-skilled jobs. In fact, in Australia, there is a shortage of trades because, for the last 2 generations at least, the emphasis, vocationally, has been in getting kids into university courses, when it’s not necessarily the best fit for the child. This is why the professional class (including myself) are often called ‘elitist’ in the culture wars and being a tradie is sometimes seen as a stigma, even though our society is just as dependent on them as they are on professionals. I know, because I’ve spent a working lifetime in a specific environment where you need both: engineering/construction.
Like all my posts, I’ve gone off-track but it’s all relevant. Like Greene, I can’t be sure how or why evolution in humans was propelled, if not hi-jacked, by art, but art in all its forms is part of the human condition. A life without music, stories and visual art – often in combination – is unimaginable.
And this brings me to the last question in my heading. It so happens that while I was reading about this in Greene’s thought-provoking book, I was also listening to a programme on ABC Classic (an Australian radio station) called Legends, which is weekly and where the presenter, Mairi Nicolson, talks about a legend in the classical music world for an hour, providing details about their life as well as broadcasting examples of their work. In this case, she had the legend in the studio (a rare occurrence), who was Anna Goldsworthy. To quote from Wikipedia: Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons.
But the reason I bring this up is because Anna mentioned that she attended a panel discussion on the role of AI in the arts. Anna’s own position is that she sees a role for AI, but in doing the things that humans find boring, which is what we are already seeing in manufacturing. In fact, I’ve witnessed this first-hand. Someone on the panel made the point that AI would effectively democratise art (my term, based on what I gleaned from Anna’s recall) in the sense that anyone would be able to produce a work of art and it would cease to be seen as elitist as it is now. He obviously saw this as a good thing, but I suspect many in the audience, including Anna, would have been somewhat unimpressed if not alarmed. Apparently, someone on the panel challenged that perspective but Anna seemed to think the discussion had somehow veered into a particularly dissonant aberration of the culture wars.
I’m one of those who would be alarmed by such a development, because it’s the ultimate portrayal of art as a consumer product, similar to the way we now perceive food. And like food, it would mean that its consumption would be completely disconnected from its production.
What worries me is that the person on the panel making this announcement (remember, I’m reporting this second-hand) apparently had no appreciation of the creative process and its importance in a functioning human society going back tens of thousands of years.
I like to quote from one of the world’s most successful and best known artists, Paul McCartney, in a talk he gave to schoolchildren (don’t know where):
“I don't know how to do this. You would think I do, but it's not one of these things you ever know how to do.” (my emphasis)
And that’s the thing: creative people can’t explain the creative process to people who have never experienced it. It feels like we have made contact with some ethereal realm. On another post, I cite Douglas Hofstadter (from his famous Pulitzer-prize winning tome, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) quoting Escher:
"While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up."
Many people writing a story can identify with this, including myself. But one suspects that this also happens to people exploring the abstract world of mathematics. Humans have developed a sense that there is more to the world than what we see and feel and touch, which we attempt to reveal in all art forms, and this, in turn, has led to religion. Of course, Greene spends another entire chapter on that subject, and he also recognises the connection between mind, art and the seeking of meaning beyond a mortal existence.
06 May 2025
Noam Chomsky on free will
Whatever you might think about Noam Chomsky’s political views, I’ve always found his philosophical views worth listening to, whether I agree with him or not. In the opening of this video - actually an interview by someone (name not given) on a YouTube channel titled, Mind-Body Solution – he presents a dichotomy that he thinks is obvious, but, as he points out, is generally not acknowledged.
Basically, he says that everyone, including anyone who presents an argument (on any topic), behaves as if they believe in free will, even if they claim they don’t. He reiterates this a number of times throughout the video. On the other hand, science cannot tell us anything about free will and many scientists therefore claim it must be an illusion. The contradiction is obvious. He’s not telling me anything I didn’t already know, but by stating it bluntly up-front, he makes you confront it, where more often than not, people simply ignore it.
My views on this are well known to anyone who regularly reads this blog, and I’ve challenged smarter minds than mine (not in person), like Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims that ‘free will needs to go in the rubbish bin’, as if it’s an idea that’s past its use-by-date. She claims:
...how ever you want to define the word [free will], we still cannot select among several possible different futures. This idea makes absolutely no sense if you know anything about physics.
I’ve addressed this elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself. Chomsky makes the point that, while science acknowledges causal-determinism and randomness, neither of these rule out free will categorically. Chomsky makes it clear that he’s a ‘materialist’, though he discusses Descartes’ perspective in some depth. In my post where I critique Sabine, I conclude that ‘it [free will] defies a scientific explanation’, and I provide testimony from Gill Hicks following a dramatic near-death experience to make my point.
Where I most strongly agree with Chomsky is that we are not automatons, though I acknowledge that other members of the animal kingdom, like ants and bees, may be. This doesn’t mean that I think insects and arachnids don’t have consciousness, but I think a lot of their behaviours are effectively ‘programmed’ into their neural structures. It’s been demonstrated by experiments that bees must have an internal map of their local environment, otherwise the ‘dance’ they do to communicate locations to other bees in their colony would make no sense. Also, I think these creatures have feelings, like fear, attraction and hostility. Both of these aspects of their mental worlds distinguish them from AI, in my view, though others might disagree. I think these particular features of animal behaviour, even in these so-called ‘primitive’ creatures, provide the possibility of free will, if free will is the ability to act on the environment in a way that’s not determined solely by reflex actions.
Some might argue that acting on a ‘feeling’ is a ‘reflex action’, whereas I’m saying it’s a catalyst to act in a way that might be predictable but not predetermined. I think the ability to ‘feel’ is the evolutionary driver for consciousness. Surely, we could all be automatons without the requirement to be consciously aware. I’ve cited before, incidents where people have behaved like they are conscious, in situations of self-defence, but have no memory of it, because they were ‘knocked out’. It happened to my father in a boxing ring, and I know of other accounts, including a female security guard, who shot her assailant after he knocked her out. If one can defend oneself without being conscious of it, then why has evolution given us consciousness?
My contention is that consciousness and free will can’t be separated: it simply makes no sense to me to have the former without the latter. And I think it’s worth comparing this to AI, which might eventually develop to the point where it appears to have consciousness and therefore free will. I’ve made the argument before that there is a subtle difference between agency and free will, because AI certainly has agency. So, what’s the difference? The difference is what someone (Grant Bartley) called ‘conscious causality’ – the ability to turn a thought into an action. This is something we all experience all the time, and is arguably the core precept to Chomsky’s argument that we all believe in free will, because we all act on it.
Free will deniers (if I can coin that term) like Sabine Hossenfelder, argue that this is the key to the illusion we all suffer. To quote her again:
Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.
In the same video (from which this quote is extracted) she uses the term ‘software’ in describing the activity of one’s brain’s processes, and in combination with the word, ‘calculation’, she clearly sees the brain as a wetware computer. So, while Chomsky argues that we all ‘believe’ in free will because we act like we do, Sabine argues that we act like we do, because the brain is ‘calculating’ the outcome without our cognisance. In effect, she argues that once it becomes conscious, the brain has made the ‘decision’ for you, but gives you the delusion that you have. Curiously, Chomsky uses the word, ‘delusion’, to describe the belief that you don’t have free will.
If Sabine is correct and your brain has already made the ‘decision’, then I go back to my previous argument concerning unconscious self-defence. If our ‘awareness’ is an unnecessary by-product of the brain’s activity (because any decision is independent of it), then why did we evolve to have it?
Chomsky raises a point I’ve discussed before, which is that, in the same way there are things we can comprehend that no other creature can, there is the possibility that there are things in the Universe that we can’t comprehend either. And I have specifically referenced consciousness as potentially one of those things. And this takes us back to the dichotomy that started the entire discussion – we experience free will, yet it’s thus far scientifically inexplicable. This leads to another dichotomy – it’s an illusion or it’s beyond human comprehension. There is a non-stated belief among many in the scientific community that eventually all unsolved problems in the Universe will eventually be solved by science – one only has to look at the historical record.
But I’m one of those who thinks the ‘hard problem’ (coined by David Chalmers) of consciousness may never be solved. Basically, the hard problem is that the experience of consciousness may remain forever a mystery. My argument, partly taken from Raymond Tallis, is that it won’t fall to science because it can’t be measured. We can only measure neuron-activity correlates, which some argue already resolves the problem. Actually, I don’t think it does, and again I turn to AI. If that’s correct, then measuring analogous electrical activity by an AI would also supposedly measure consciousness. At this stage in AI development, I don’t think anyone believes that, though some people believe that measures of global connectivity or similar parameters in an AI neural network may prove otherwise.
Basically, I don’t think AI will ever have an inner world like we do – going back to the bees I cited – and if it does, we wouldn’t know. I don’t know what inner world you have, but I would infer you have one from your behaviour (assuming we met). On the other hand, I don’t know that anyone would infer that an AI would have one. I’ve made the comparison before of an AI-operated, autonomous drone navigating by GPS co-ordinates, which requires self-referencing algorithms. Notice that we don’t navigate that way, unless we use a computer interface (like your smart phone). AI can simulate what we do: like write sentences, play chess, drive cars; but doing them in a completely different fashion.
In response to a question from his interlocutor, Chomsky argues that our concept of justice is dependent on a belief in free will, even if it’s unstated. It’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hold anyone accountable for their actions.
As I’ve argued previously, it’s our ability to mental time-travel that underpins free will, because, without an imagined future, there is no future to actualise, which is the whole point of having free will. And I would extend this to other creatures, who may be trying to catch food or escape being eaten – either way, they imagine a future they want to actualise.
Addendum: I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s Until The End Of Time (2020), who devoted an entire chapter to consciousness and, not surprisingly, has something to say about free will. He’s a materialist, and he says in his intro to the topic:
This question has inspired more pages in the philosophical literature than just about any other conundrum.
Basically, he argues, like Sabine Hossenfelder, that it’s in conflict with the laws of physics, but given he’s writing in a book, and not presenting a time-limited YouTube video (though he does those too), he goes into more detail.
To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles.
He then provides numerous everyday examples that we can all identify with.
And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progresson of particles than we can change the value of pi.
Interesting analogy, because I agree that even God can’t change the value of pi, but that’s another argument. And I’m not convinced that consciousness can be modelled mathematically, which, if true, undermines his entire argument regarding mathematical rules.
My immediate internal response to his entire thesis was that he’s writing a book, yet effectively arguing that he has no control over it. However, as if he anticipated this response, he addresses that very point at the end of the next section, titled Rocks, Humans and Freedom.
What matters to me is… my collection of particles is enabled to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviours. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m glad they did… I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organisation has emancipated my behavioural responses.
In other words, the particles in his body and his brain, in particular, (unlike the particles in inert objects, like rocks, tables, chairs etc) possess degrees of freedom that others don’t. But here’s the thing: I and others, including you, read these words and form our own ideas and responses, which we intellectualise and even emote about. In fact, we all form an opinion that either agrees or disagrees with his point. But whether there are diverse possibilities, he’s effectively saying that we are all complex automatons, which means there is no necessity for us to be consciously aware of what we are doing. And I argue that this is what separates us from AI.
Just be aware that Albert Einstein would have agreed with him.
28 October 2024
Do we make reality?
Staring with New Scientist, there is an interview with theoretical physicist, Daniele Oriti, under the heading, “We have to embrace the fact that we make reality” (quotation marks in the original). In some respects, this continues on with themes I raised in my last post, but with different emphases.
This helps to explain the title of the post, but, even if it’s true, there are degrees of possibilities – it’s not all or nothing. Having said that, Donald Hoffman would argue that it is all or nothing, because, according to him, even ‘space and time don’t exist unperceived’. On the other hand, Oriti’s argument is closer to Paul Davies’ ‘participatory universe’ that I referenced in my last post.
Where Oriti and I possibly depart, philosophically speaking, is that he calls the idea of an independent reality to us ‘observers’, “naïve realism”. He acknowledges that this is ‘provocative’, but like many provocative ideas it provides food-for-thought. Firstly, I will delineate how his position differs from Hoffman’s, even though he never mentions Hoffman, but I think it’s important.
Both Oriti and Hoffman argue that there seems to be something even more fundamental than space and time, and there is even a recent YouTube video where Hoffman claims that he’s shown mathematically that consciousness produces the mathematical components that give rise to spacetime; he has published a paper on this (which I haven’t read). But, in both cases (by Hoffman and Oriti), the something ‘more fundamental’ is mathematical, and one needs to be careful about reifying mathematical expressions, which I once discussed with physicist, Mark John Fernee (Qld University).
The main issue I have with Hoffman’s approach is that space-time is dependent on conscious agents creating it, whereas, from my perspective and that of most scientists (although I’m not a scientist), space and time exists external to the mind. There is an exception, of course, and that is when we dream.
If I was to meet Hoffman, I would ask him if he’s heard of proprioception, which I’m sure he has. I describe it as the 6th sense we are mostly unaware of, but which we couldn’t live without. Actually, we could, but with great difficulty. Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our body extremities are in space, independently of sight and touch. Why would we need it, if space is created by us? On the other hand, Hoffman talks about a ‘H sapiens interface’, which he likens to ‘desktop icons on a computer screen’. So, somehow our proprioception relates to a ‘spacetime interface’ (his term) that doesn’t exist outside the mind.
A detour, but relevant, because space is something we inhabit, along with the rest of the Universe, and so is time. In relativity theory there is absolute space-time, as opposed to absolute space and time separately. It’s called the fabric of the universe, which is more than a metaphor. As Viktor Toth points out, even QFT seems to work ‘just fine’ with spacetime as its background.
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
[However] what we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
And this is where Oriti argues we need to find something deeper. To quote:
Modern approaches to quantum gravity say that space-time emerges from something deeper – and this could offer a new foundation for physical laws.
He elaborates: I work with quantum gravity models in which you don’t start with a space-time geometry, but from more abstract “atomic” objects described in purely mathematical language. (Quotation marks in the original.)
And this is the nub of the argument: all our theories are mathematical models and none of them are complete, in as much as they all have limitations. If one looks at the history of physics, we have uncovered new ‘laws’ and new ‘models’ when we’ve looked beyond the limitations of an existing theory. And some mathematical models even turned out to be incorrect, despite giving answers to what was ‘known’ at the time. The best example being Ptolemy’s Earth-centric model of the solar system. Whether string theory falls into the same category, only future historians will know.
In addition, different models work at different scales. As someone pointed out (Mile Gu at the University of Queensland), mathematical models of phenomena at one scale are different to mathematical models at an underlying scale. He gave the example of magnetism, demonstrating that mathematical modelling of the magnetic forces in iron could not predict the pattern of atoms in a 3D lattice as one might expect. In other words, there should be a causal link between individual atoms and the overall effect, but it could not be determined mathematically. To quote Gu: “We were able to find a number of properties that were simply decoupled from the fundamental interactions.” Furthermore, “This result shows that some of the models scientists use to simulate physical systems have properties that cannot be linked to the behaviour of their parts.”
This makes me sceptical that we will find an overriding mathematical model that will entail the Universe at all scales, which is what theories of quantum gravity attempt to do. One of the issues that some people raise is that a feature of QM is superposition, and the superposition of a gravitational field seems inherently problematic.
Personally, I think superposition only makes sense if it’s describing something that is yet to happen, which is why I agree with Freeman Dyson that QM can only describe the future, which is why it only gives us probabilities.
Also, in quantum cosmology, time disappears (according to Paul Davies, among others) and this makes sense (to me), if it’s attempting to describe the entire universe into the future. John Barrow once made a similar point, albeit more eruditely.
Getting off track, but one of the points that Oriti makes is whether the laws and the mathematics that describes them are epistemic or ontic. In other words, are they reality or just descriptions of reality. I think it gets blurred, because while they are epistemic by design, there is still an ontology that exists without them, whereas Oriti calls that ‘naïve realism’. He contends that reality doesn’t exist independently of us. This is where I always cite Kant: that we may never know the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but only our perception of it. Where I diverge from Kant is that the mathematical models are part of our perception. Where I depart from Oriti is that I argue there is a reality independently of us.
Both QM and relativity theory are observer-dependent, which means they could both be describing an underlying reality that continually eludes us. Whereas Oriti argues that ‘reality is made by our models, not just described by them’, which would make it subjective.
As I pointed out in my last post, there is an epistemological loop, whereby the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us. Whether there is also an ontological loop as both Davies and Oriti infer, is another matter: do we determine reality through our quantum mechanical observations? I will park that while I elaborate on the epistemic loop.
And this finally brings me to the article in Philosophy Now by James Miles titled, We’re as Smart as the Universe gets. He argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, there is a one-in-one-billion possibility that a species with our cognitive abilities could arise by natural selection, and there is no logical reason why we would evolve further, from an evolutionary standpoint. I have touched on this before, where I pointed out that our cultural evolution has overtaken our biological evolution and that would also happen to any other potential species in the Universe who developed cognitive abilities to the same level. Dawkins coined the term, ‘meme’, to describe cultural traits that have ‘survived’, which now, of course, has currency on social media way beyond its original intention. Basically, Dawkins saw memes as analogous to genes, which get selected; not by a natural process but by a cultural process.
I’ve argued elsewhere that mathematical theorems and scientific theories are not inherently memetic. This is because they are chosen because they are successful, whereas memes are successful because they are chosen. Nevertheless, such theorems and theories only exist because a culture has developed over millennia which explores them and builds on them.
Miles talks about ‘the high intelligence paradox’, which he associates with Darwin’s ‘highest and most interesting problem’. He then discusses the inherent selection advantage of co-operation, not to mention specialisation. He talks about the role that language has played, which is arguably what really separates us from other species. I’ve argued that it’s our inherent ability to nest concepts within concepts ad-infinitum (which is most obvious in our facility for language, like I’m doing now) that allows us to, not only tell stories, compose symphonies, explore an abstract mathematical landscape, but build motor cars, aeroplanes and fly men to the moon. Are we the only species in the Universe with this super-power? I don’t know, but it’s possible.
There are 2 quotes I keep returning to:
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. (Einstein)
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe. (Wheeler)
I haven’t elaborated, but Miles makes the point, while referencing historical antecedents, that there appears no evolutionary 'reason’ that a species should make this ‘one-in-one-billion transition’ (his nomenclature). Yet, without this transition, the Universe would have no meaning that could be comprehended. As I say, that’s the epistemic loop.
As for an ontic loop, that is harder to argue. Photons exist in zero time, which is why I contend they are always in the future of whatever they interact with, even if they were generated in the CMBR some 13.5 billion years ago. So how do we resolve that paradox? I don’t know, but maybe that’s the link that Davies and Oriti are talking about, though neither of them mention it. But here’s the thing: when you do detect such a photon (for which time is zero) you instantaneously ‘see’ back to 380,000 years after the Universe’s birth.
25 December 2021
Revisiting Donald Hoffman’s alternative theory of evolution
Back in November 2016, so 5 years ago, I wrote a post in response to an academic paper by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, where I specifically critiqued their ideas on biological evolution. Despite co-authoring the paper, I believe this particular aspect of their paper is predominantly Hoffman’s, based on an article he wrote for New Scientist, where he expressed similar views. One of his key arguments was that natural selection favours ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.
...we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment. Instead, it generally favors perceptual strategies that are tuned to fitness.
One way to use fewer calories is to see less truth, especially truth that is not informative about fitness. (My emphasis)
What made me revisit this was an interview in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022) with Samuel Grove, who recently published Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea: The Reluctant Radical. According to Grove, Darwin was reluctant to publish The Decent of Man, because applying natural selection to humans was controversial, despite the success of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (full title). The connection to Hoffman’s argument is that Darwin struggled with the idea that evolution could ‘select’ for ‘truth’. To quote Grove:
Natural selection is premised on three laws: the law of inheritance, the law of variation, and the law of superfecundity (where organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive). Together, these laws produce selection, and over the course of time, evolution. Well, Darwin’s question was, how could evolution produce a subject capable of knowing these very laws? Or, why would evolution select for fidelity to truth or laws? Selection favours survival, not truth. (My emphasis again)
Darwin turned to arguments, that as Grove points out, were ‘the common garden variety racism of the time’ – specifically, ‘group selection’ that favoured Anglo Saxon groups. Apparently, Darwin was reluctant to consider ‘group selection’ (as opposed to ‘individual selection’), but did so because it led to a resolution that would have been politically acceptable in his day. I will return to this point later.
So, even according to Darwin, Hoffman may have a point, though I’m not sure that Darwin and Hoffman are even talking about the same idea of ‘truth’. More on that later.
For those unfamiliar with Hoffman, his entire argument centres on the fundamental idea that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’. For more details, read my previous post, or read his co-authored paper with Prakash. I need to say upfront that I find it hard to take Hoffman seriously. Every time I read or listen to him, I keep expecting him to say, ‘Ah, see, I fooled the lot of you.’ His ideas only make sense to me if he believes we live in a computer simulation, which he’s never claimed. In fact, that would be my first question to him, if I ever met him. It’s an idea that has some adherents. Just on that, I would like to point out that chaos is incomputable, and the Universe is chaotic on a number of levels, including evolution, as it turns out.
In a previous life, I sometimes became involved in contractual disputes on major engineering projects (in Australia and US), preparing evidence for lawyers, and having to address opponents’ arguments. What I found in a number of cases, was that people prepared simple arguments that were nevertheless compelling. In fact, they often delivered them as if they were a fait accompli. In most of these cases, I found that by digging a little deeper, they could be challenged successfully. I have to admit that I’m reminded of this when I examine Hoffman’s argument on natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.
Partly, this is because his arguments highlight contradictions in his own premise and partly because one of his key arguments is contradicted by evidence, which, I concede, he may not be aware of.
For a start, what does Hoffman mean by ‘fitness’?
He talks about fitness in terms of predators and prey:
But in the real world where predators are on the prowl and prey must be wary, the race is often to the swift. It is the slower gazelle that becomes lunch for the swifter cheetah.
This quote is out of context, where he’s arguing that ‘swiftness’ in response, be it the gazelle or the cheetah, favours less information, therefore less time; over more information, therefore lost time. Leaving aside the fact that survival of either animal is dependent on the accuracy of their ‘modelling’ of their environment, if the animal being chased or doing the chasing ‘doesn’t exist unperceived’, then they might as well be in a dream. In fact, we often find ourselves being chased in a dream, which has no consequences to our ‘survival’ in real life. The argument contradicts the premise.
Hoffman and Prakash quote Steven Palmer from a ‘graduate-level textbook’ (1999):
Evolutionarily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate . . . Indeed, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate. By and large, what you see is what you get. When this is true, we have what is called veridical perception . . . perception that is consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment. This is almost always the case with vision . . . (Authors’ emphasis)
Hoffman and Prakash then argue that ‘using Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment’. In other words, they effectively argue that Palmer’s emphasis on ‘veridical perception’ is wrong. I can’t argue with their Monte Carlo simulations, because they don’t provide the data. However, real world evidence would suggest that Palmer is correct.
I read a story on Quora by a wildlife ranger about eagles who have had one eye damaged, usually in intra-species mid-air fights. In nearly all cases (he described one exception), an eagle who is blind in one eye needs to be euthanised because they would invariably starve to death due to an inability to catch prey. So here you have ‘fitness’ dependent on vision being accurate.
Leaving aside all this nit-picking about natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’, how does it support their fundamental thesis that reality only exists in the mind? According to them, their theory of evolution ‘proves’ that reality doesn’t exist unperceived. Can you even have evolution if reality doesn’t exist (except in the mind)?
And this brings me back to Darwin, because what he didn’t consider was that, in the case of humans, cultural evolution has overtaken biological evolution, and this is unique to humanity. I wrote another post where I argue that The search for ultimate truth is unattainable, but there are 'truths' we have found throughout the history of our cultural evolution and they are in mathematics. It’s true that evolution didn’t select for this; it’s an unexpected by-product, but it has led to the understanding of laws governing the very Universe that even Darwin would be amazed to know.
13 November 2016
When evolution is not evolution
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist with a Ph.D. in Computational Psychology and is now a full professor at University of California, Irvine. Chetan Prakash is a Professor Emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino and has a Master of Science in Physics and a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics.
I should point out at the outset, that their thesis is so out there, that I seriously wondered if it was a hoax. But given their academic credentials and the many academic citations and references in their paper, I assume that the authors really believe in what they’re arguing. And what they’re arguing, in a nutshell, is that everyone’s (and I mean every person’s) perception of the world is false, because, aside from conscious agents, everything else, including spacetime, is impermanent.
Their paper is 20 pages long (including 5-6 pages of objections and replies) most of which are densely worded interspersed with some diagrams and equations. To distil someone’s treatise into a single paragraph is always a tad unfair, so I’ll rely heavily on direct quotations and references to impart their arguments. Besides, you can always read the entire paper for yourself. Basically, they argue that ‘interacting conscious agents’ are the only reality and that nothing else exists ‘unperceived’. They formulate a mathematical model of consciousness, from which they derive a wave function that is the bedrock of quantum mechanics (which I’ll refer to as QM for brevity). In other words, they argue that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM requires consciousness to bring objects into reality (except consciousness) which are all impermanent.
It’s a well known philosophical conundrum that you can’t prove that you’re not a ‘brain-in-a-vat’, and theirs is a similar point of view in that it can’t be proved that they’re wrong, even though, as they point out themselves, we mostly all believe their view is wrong. I don’t know of anyone (other than the authors) who think that the world ceases to exist when they’re not looking. This is known as solipsism and there is a very good argument against solipsism even though it can’t be proved it’s wrong. In fact, solipsism is absolutely true when you’re in a dream, so it’s not always wrong. The point is that when we’re in a dream, despite all its inconsistencies, we actually don’t know we’re in a dream, so how can you be sure you’re not in a dream when you’re consciously awake? The argument against solipsism is that it can only be held by one person: it’s impossible to believe that everyone else is a solipsist too.
In the objections, item 6, they ‘reject solipsism’, yet ‘also reject permanence, viz., the doctrine that 3D space and physical objects exist when they are not perceived [but not conscious agents]. To claim that conscious agents exist unperceived differs from the claim that unconscious objects and space-time exist unperceived.’ In other words, consciousness is the only reality, a point they make in response to Objection 19: ‘reality consists of interacting conscious agents.’ But if one takes this seriously, then even the bodies that we take for granted don’t exist ‘unperceived’ whilst our consciousness does. It’s utter nonsense, except in a dream. What they are describing is exactly the reality one perceives in a dream, so their theory is effectively that the reality we all believe we inhabit is, in effect, a dream. Which is logically a variation on solipsism. The only difference is that we all inhabit the same dream together. So we’re all brains in a vat, only connected. The authors, I’m sure, would reject this interpretation, yet it fits exactly with what they’re arguing. Only in a dream do objects, including our own bodies, cease to exist unperceived.
Evolution comes up a lot in their paper because one of the centrepieces of their thesis is that evolution by natural selection produces perceptions that favour ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’. They claim to run 'genetic algorithms’ that show that evolution by natural selection benefits perception for ‘fitness’ over ‘accuracy’. The point is that we must take this assertion on face value, because we don’t know what algorithms they’re using or how they even define fitness, perceptions and truth. In fact, Objection 12 asks this very question. Part of the authors' response goes: ‘For the sake of brevity, we omitted our definition of truth and perception… But they are defined precisely in Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms…’
In particular, the authors use vision to make their case. It’s well known that the brain creates a facsimile of what we see in ways that we are still trying to understand, and to which, to date, we’ve failed to engineer to the same degree of accuracy in artificial intelligence (AI). But theoretical algorithms and Monte Carlo simulations aside, we have the means to compare what we subjectively see with an objective representation.
It so happens that we have invented devices that create images (both stationary and dynamic) through chemical-electronic-mechanical means independently of the human brain and they show remarkable, but unsurprising, veracity with what our brain perceives subjectively. Now, you might say that the same brain perceives this simulated vision, so one would expect it to provide the same image. I think this is a long bow to draw, because the image effectively gets ‘processed’ twice: once through the device and once through the brain, yet the result is unequivocally the same without the interim process. In fact, the interim process can show what we miss, like the famous example of a gorilla moving through a room while you are concentrating on a thrown ball. But, in the context of their thesis, the camera is not a conscious entity yet it captures an image that is supposedly nonexistent when unperceived. And cameras can be set up to capture images without the interaction of so-called ‘conscious agents’.
Now the authors are correct when they point out that colour, for example, is a completely psychological phenomenon – it only exists in some creature’s mind, and it varies from species to species – this is well known and well understood. We also know that it’s caused by reflected light which can be scientifically explained by Richard Feynman’s (I know it’s not his alone) QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) and that the subjective experience of colour is a direct consequence of the frequency of electromagnetic radiation. But the fact that colour is subjective doesn’t make the objects, from which the effect is consequential, subjective as well.
Regarding the other mathematical contribution to their thesis, the authors have created a mathematical model of consciousness, from which they derive the wave function for QM. I’m not a logician, so I can’t say one way or another how valid this is. However, it should be pointed out that Erwin Schrodinger, who originally proposed the wave function, in his famous eponymous equation, didn’t derive it from anything. So the authors claim they’ve done something that the original creator of the wave function couldn’t do himself. As Richard Feynman once said: ‘Schrodinger’s equation can’t be derived from anything we know.’ However, the authors claim it can be derived from consciousness. I’m sceptical.
You may wonder what all this has to do with the title of this post. Well, in response to objection 19, the authors propose to come up with a ‘new theory of evolution’ based on their theory of conscious agents. To quote: ‘When the new evolutionary theory is projected onto the spacetime perceptual interface of H. Sapiens we must get back the standard evolutionary theory.’ This means that the DNA, and the molecules that make the DNA, that allowed consciousness to evolve are actually dependent on said consciousness, so the ‘new theory of evolution’ must logically contradict the ‘standard theory of evolution’.
As part of their thesis, the authors make an analogy between a computer desktop and spacetime, only, the way they describe it, it appears to be more than an analogy to them.
Space and time are the desktop of our personal interface, and three-dimensional objects are icons on the desktop. Our interface gives the impression that it reveals true cause and effect… But this appearance of cause and effect is simply a useful fiction, just as it is for the icons on the computer desktop.
(The interface, to which they refer, is a ‘species-specific interface’, which means it’s a human consciousness interface. They don’t say if this interface applies to other sentient creatures, or just us.)
The issue of cause and effect being a ‘useful fiction’ was taken up by someone (authors of objections are not given) in objection 17, to which the authors of the theory responded thus:
Our views on causality are consistent with interpretations of quantum theory that abandon microphysical causality… The burden of proof is surely on one who would abandon microphysical causation but still cling to macrophysical causation.
I could respond to this challenge, but it’s not relevant to my argument. The point is that the authors obviously don’t ‘cling to macrophysical causation’, which I would contend creates a problem when discussing evolutionary theory. The point is that according to every discussion on biological evolution I’ve read, extant species are consequentially dependent on earlier species, which means there is a causal chain going back to the first eukaryota. If this causal chain is a ‘useful fiction’ then it is hard to see how any theory of evolution that excludes it could be called evolutionary. With or without this useful fiction, the authors ‘new theory’ turns evolution on its head, with conscious agents taking precedence over physical objects, including species, all of which are impermanent. In spite of this ontological difficulty, the authors believe that when they ‘project’ their ‘new theory’ onto the ‘species-specific interface’ of impermanent spacetime (which doesn’t exist unperceived), the old ‘standard theory of evolution’ will be found.
I’ve left a comment on the bottom of the web page (link given in intro above) which challenges this specific aspect of their theory (using different words). If I get a response I’ll update this post accordingly.
02 February 2016
Creation Science: a non sequitur
Creation science is an epistemological contradiction – there’s no such thing – by definition. Science does not include magic – I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree with that, but I might be wrong. Replacing a scientific theory with supernaturally enhanced magic is anti-science, yet creationists call it science – as the Americans like to say: go figure.
The magazine was enlightening in that the sole criterion for these ‘scientists’ as to the validity of any scientific knowledge was whether or not it agreed with the Bible. If this was literally true, we would still be believing that the Sun goes round the Earth, rather than the other way round. After all, the Book of Joshua tells us how God stopped the Sun moving in the sky. It doesn’t say that God stopped the Earth spinning, which is what he would have had to do.
One contributor to the magazine even allows for ‘evolution’ after ‘creation’, because God programmed ‘subroutines’ into DNA, but was quick to point out that this does ‘not contradict the Bible’. Interesting to note that DNA wouldn’t even have been discovered if all scientists were creationists (like the author).
Why do you think the ‘Dark Ages’ are called the dark ages? Because science, otherwise known as ‘natural philosophy’, was considered pagan, as the Greeks’ neo-Platonist philosophy upon which it was based was pagan. Someone once pointed out that Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob (around 400AD) signalled the start of the dark ages, which lasted until around 1200, when Fibonacci introduced the West to the Hindu-Arabic system of numbers. In fact, it is the Muslims who kept that knowledge in the interim, otherwise it may well have been lost to us forever.
So science and Christianity have a long history of contention that goes back centuries before Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. If anything, the gap has got wider, not closer; they’ve only managed to co-exist by staying out of each other’s way.
There are many religious texts in the world, a part of our collective cultural and literary legacy, but none of them are scientific or mathematical texts, which also boast diverse cultural origins. It is an intellectual conceit (even deceit) to substitute religious teaching for scientifically gained knowledge. Of course scientifically gained knowledge is always changing, advancing, being overtaken and is never over. In fact, I would contend that science will never be complete, as history has demonstrated, so there will always be arguments for supernatural intervention, otherwise known as the ‘God-of-the-Gaps’. Godel’s Incompleteness theorem infers that mathematics is a never-ending epistemological mine, and I believe that the same goes for science.
Did I hear someone say: what about Intelligent Design (ID)? Well, it’s still supernatural intervention, isn’t it? Same scenario, different description.
Religion is not an epistemology, it’s a way of life. Whichever way you look at it, it’s completely subjective. Religion is part of your inner world, and that includes God. So the idea that the God you’ve found within yourself is also the Creator of the entire Universe is a non sequitur. Because everyone’s idea of God is unique to them.
31 March 2012
How chaos drives the evolution of the universe and life
16 March 2010
Speciation: still one of nature’s great mysteries
First, I defined what I meant by ‘fact’: it’s either true or false, not something in between. So it has to be one or the other: like does the earth go round the sun or does the sun go round the earth? One of those is right and one is wrong, and the one that is right is a fact.
Well, I put evolution into that category: it makes no sense to say that evolution only worked for some species and not others; or that it occurred millions of years ago but doesn’t occur now; or the converse that it occurs now, but not in the distant past. Either it occurs or it never occurred, and all the evidence, and I mean all of the evidence, in every area of science: genetics, zoology, palaeontology, virology; suggests it does. There are so many ways that evolution could have been proven false in the last 150 years since Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of natural selection, that it’s just as unassailable as quantum mechanics. Natural selection, by the way, is not a theory, it’s a law of nature.
Now, both proponents and opponents of evolutionary theory often make the mistake of assuming that natural selection is the whole story of evolution and there’s nothing else to explain. So I can confidently say that natural selection is a natural law because we see evidence of it everywhere in the natural world, but it doesn’t explain speciation, and that is another part of the story that is rarely discussed. But it’s also why it’s one of nature’s great mysteries. To quote from this week’s New Scientist (13 March, 2010, p.31): ‘Speciation still remains one of the biggest mysteries in evolutionary biology.’
This is a rare admission in a science magazine, because many people believe, on both sides of the ideological divide (that evolution has created in some parts of the world, like the US) that it opens up a crack in the scientific edifice for creationists and intelligent design advocates to pull it down.
But again, let’s compare this to quantum mechanics. In a recent post on Quantum Entanglement (Jan.10), where I reviewed Louisa Gilder’s outstanding and very accessible book on the subject, I explain just how big a mystery it remains, even after more than a century of experimentation, verification and speculation. Yet, no one, whether a religious fundamentalist or not, wants to replace it with a religious text or any other so-called paradigm or theory. This is because quantum mechanics doesn’t challenge anything in the Bible, because the Bible, unsurprisingly, doesn’t include anything about physics or mathematics.
Now, the Bible doesn’t include anything about biology either, but the story of Genesis, which is still a story after all the analysis, has been substantially overtaken by scientific discoveries, especially in the last 2 centuries.
But it’s because of this ridiculous debate, that has taken on a political force in the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world, that no one ever mentions that we really don’t know how speciation works. People are sure to counter this with one word, mutation, but mutations and genetic drift don’t explain how genetic anomalies amongst individuals lead to new species. It is assumed that they accumulate to the point that, in combination with natural selection, a new species branches off. But the New Scientist cover story, reporting on work done by Mark Pagel (an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK) challenges this conventionally held view.
To quote Pagel: “I think the unexamined view that most people have of speciation is this gradual accumulation by natural selection of a whole lot of changes, until you get a group of individuals that can no longer mate with their old population.”
Before I’m misconstrued, I’m not saying that mutation doesn’t play a fundamental role, as it obviously does, which I elaborate on below. But mutations within individuals don’t axiomatically lead to new species. This is a point that Erwin Schrodinger attempted to address in his book, What is Life? (see my review posted Nov.09).
Years ago, I wrote a letter to science journalist, John Horgan, after reading his excellent book The End of Science (a collection of interviews and reflections by some of the world’s greatest minds in the late 20th Century). I suggested to him an analogy between genes and environment interacting to create a human personality, and the interaction between speciation and natural selection creating biological evolution. I postulated back then that we had the environment part, which was natural selection, but not the gene part of the analogy, which is speciation. In other words, I suggested that there is still more to learn, just like there is still more to learn about quantum mechanics. We always assume that we know everything that there is to know, when clearly we don’t. The mystery inherent in quantum mechanics indicates that there is something that we don’t know, and the same is true for evolution.
Mark Pagel’s research is paradigm-challenging, because he’s demonstrated statistically that genetic drift by mutation doesn’t give the right answers. I need to explain this without getting too esoteric. Pagel looked at the branches of 101 various (evolutionary) trees, including: ‘cats, bumblebees, hawks, roses and the like’. By doing a statistical analysis of the time between speciation events (the length of the branches) he expected to get a Bell curve distribution which would account for the conventional view, but instead he got an exponential curve.
To quote New Scientist: ‘The exponential is the pattern you get when you are waiting for some single, infrequent event to happen… the length of time it takes a radioactive atom to decay, and the distance between roadkills on a highway.’
In other words, as the New Scientist article expounds in some detail, new species happen purely by accident. What I found curious about the above quote is the reference to ‘radioactive decay’ which was the starting point for Erwin Schrodinger’s explanation of mutation events, which is why mutation is still a critical factor in the whole process.
Schrodinger went to great lengths, very early in his exposition, to explain that nearly all of physics is statistical, and gave examples from magnetism to thermal activity to radioactive decay. He explained how this same statistical process works in creating mutations. Schrodinger coined a term, ‘statistico-deterministic’, but in regard to quantum mechanics rather than physics in general. Nevertheless, chaos and complexity theory reinforce the view that the universe is far from deterministic at almost every level that one cares to examine it. As the New Scientist article argues, Pagel’s revelation supports Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion: ‘that if you were able to rewind history and replay the evolution on Earth, it would turn out differently every time.’
I’ve left a lot out in this brief exposition, including those who challenge Pagel’s analysis, and how his new paradigm interacts with natural selection and geographical separation, which are also part of the overall picture. Pagel describes his own epiphany when he was in Tanzinia: ‘watching two species of colobus monkeys frolic in the canopy 40 metres overhead. “Apart from the fact that one is black and white and one is red, they do all the same things... I can remember thinking that speciation was very arbitrary. And here we are – that’s what our models are telling us.”’ In other words, natural selection and niche-filling are not enough to explain diversification and speciation.
What I find interesting is that wherever we look in science, chance plays a far greater role than we credit. It’s not just the cosmos at one end of the scale, and quantum mechanics at the other end, that rides on chance, but evolution, like earthquakes and other unpredictable events, also seems to be totally dependent on the metaphorical roll of the dice.
Addendum 1 : (18 March 2010)
Comments posted on New Scientist challenge the idea that a ‘bell curve’ distribution should have been expected at all. I won’t go into that, because it doesn’t change the outcome: 78% of ‘branches’ statistically analysed (from 110) were exponential and 0% were normal distribution (bell curve). Whatever the causal factors, in which mutation plays a definitive role, speciation is as unpredictable as earthquakes, weather events and radio-active decay (for an individual isotope).
Addendum 2: (18 March 2010)
Writing this post, reminded me of Einstein’s famous quote that ‘God does not play with dice’. Well, I couldn’t disagree more. If there is a creator-God (in the Einstein mould) then first and foremost, he or she is a mathematician. Secondly, he or she is a gambler who loves to play the odds. The role of chance in the natural world is more fundamental and universally manifest than we realise. In nature, small variances can have large consequences: we see that with quantum theory, chaos theory and evolutionary theory. There appears to be little room for determinism in the overall play of the universe.