Sometimes people I disagree and argue with hold extreme positions. This frequently happens in politics and religion, and it’s currently happening globally in the Western world. A curious observation I’ve made is that people, who hold an extreme position, often assume that anyone who disagrees with them holds the extreme opposite position – there’s no room for compromise or nuance.
This is especially true when arguing about religion. People who believe that the Bible is the sole arbiter of truth, when challenged, will automatically assume that the challenger is a militant atheist in the mould of Richard Dawkins. I’ve struck this from both sides. For example, on this blog, when I once pointed out to an anonymous contributor that the Universe created the means to understand itself (a point I’ve often iterated), I was told that I must be a creationist.
The reality is that extreme positions begat extreme opposition. So, when Islamists practice extreme prejudice against non-Muslims (to the point of genocide) it creates a backlash against all Muslims.
In recent posts, I’ve argued strongly against the idea that ‘mind’ pre-originated the Universe and therefore us. This could be taken as an argument against God, but it’s not. Mind is something that we experience and it has evolved. Most scientists and most people (with a Western education) believe that there existed a time in the Universe’s history when there was no mind. In fact, in the context of the history of the Universe, it was mostly absent of any mind (that we are familiar with). God, on the other hand, must exist outside the Universe, and therefore, arguably, outside of space and time. Even Augustine made this point (according to Paul Davies, if my memory serves me right, in one of his many books, probably The Mind of God).
I mentioned Dawkins earlier, as an exemplar of someone who holds militant atheist views (by his own admission), yet he’s always referenced Davies with respect, even though they are philosophically miles apart.
In the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 122, October/November 2017), the theme (they always have a theme) is Socrates, which, of course, must include Plato. In fact, they coin the term ‘Socrato’ and boldly write it on the cover. Within there is an article by Ray Liikanen called The Reverse Solipsist, which is a fictional Socratic dialogue between a resurrected Socrates and a science philosopher (in the mould of Dawkins). I was suitably impressed by this ‘dialogue’ that I looked up a reference for Liikanen at Causalargument.com where there is a 50 page document discussing Kant’s and Hegel’s arguments for ‘first cause’ and Liikanen’s own specific argument, which ostensibly answers Leibniz’s famous question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Liikanen is not credited with any titles or academic credentials (neither am I) but is cited for his essay, Beyond Kant and Hegel, published in The Review of Metaphysics (March 2013).
You are probably wondering what my 3 introductions have in common. Well, the crux of Liikanen’s 50 page argument is that the answer to Leibniz’s question is ‘mind’, and, whilst I disagree with much of his argument and his overall thesis, it contains elements that I actually agree with.
In particular, he references a Socratic dialogue (by Plato this time) whereby he puts a compelling argument (in response to Anaxagoras) that explaining an effect does not explain its cause. Socrates argues by analogy, that explaining how his muscles and bones and sinews work to get him in a sitting position doesn’t explain the motive and mental processes that led him to decide to sit. Liikanen extends this argument to the entire cosmos, whereby cosmology explains the evolvement of the Universe in all its machinations and Evolutionary theory explains the diversity and progenitorial process for speciation, yet no scientific theory explains the cause. To quote Liikanen:
Where all empirically grounded theories naturally fail is that they are limited in their explanatory scope. It is for this same reason that present day apologists employing an empirical method fall into the same kind of fallacious reasoning pointed out by Socrates more than twenty-four centuries ago.
But where I part company with Liikanen is that he argues that ‘pure reason’ can provide answers that empirical science cannot. I argued in a post almost 3 years ago (Dec 2014) that science is a combination of theory, mathematics and evidence, but only evidence can gives us ‘truth’. Mathematics provides abstract truths and its role in formulating physical theories has become increasingly significant in the last 4 centuries (since Galileo, Kepler and Newton), yet, without evidence, mathematically based theories (like String theory) are just theories.
Liikanen takes Kant’s and Hegel’s arguments for a priori deductions over empirically derived ones to give an ‘inevitable’ answer - even a proof - that the cause for the effect we call the Universe is ‘absolute mind’, which, of course, equates to God. I readily admit I can’t do justice to Liikanen’s arguments, given the time and space, but I have a fundamental issue with the premise that pure reason can provide answers that science is unable to furnish. If there is one thing we’ve learnt from science (especially in the last century) it’s that nature’s mechanisms, at all scales, are beyond anything we can imagine. Pure reason is not going to solve a puzzle that science can’t fathom. And, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, there will always be puzzles beyond science, because science is a never-ending endeavour. But I actually agree with Liikanen that there are limits to what science can tell us.
Liikanen makes the point that we live in a finite universe (thus far) that arose from an infinite nothingness or void. And here’s the thing: infinity is something that we struggle to grasp cognitively let alone intuitively. Only mathematics provides a home for infinity in a way that we can cognise, even to the extent that we can differentiate between countable infinities and uncountable infinities.
If one looks at other intelligent species like all the primates or dolphins or some species of birds, none of them can grasp the astronomical reality that we have discovered – a discovery that started very early in human development – let alone esoteric topics like quantum mechanics or complex algebra or differential calculus. My point is that there could be concepts that are beyond us in the same way that cosmology is beyond every other species we know.
Science tells us that the Universe is fine-tuned for complex life to emerge, and as I’ve said before, we are the evidence. Whether this implies a God is completely dependent on what one believes irrespective of science. I’ve long argued that science is neutral on the question of God, and I agree with Michio Kaku that whilst there are some unanswered questions that will be answered by science (in say, 100 years time) the existence of God isn’t one of them.
I’ve always maintained that God is totally subjective. Liikanen’s ‘proof’ for the existence of God is a philosophical argument premised on the belief that there must be something instead of nothing even when there was nothing.
Liikanen makes the point, that I’ve often made, that without mind the Universe may as well not exist. But mind is a consequence – it’s an effect rather than a cause.
Liikanen argues that the Universe’s increasing complexity contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. It so happens that I’ve been re-reading Roger Penrose’s book, Fashion Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, and Penrose spends copious print on this specific topic as he does in virtually every book he writes on cosmology, because it’s a conundrum that most science writers tend to ignore. In my last post, I described entropy as being probabilistic and gave the example of perfume molecules dispersing to all corners of a room instead of congregating in one particular place. Penrose describes a similar scenario, only on the scale of the Universe. The difference is gravity, which makes the particles in the Universe clump together rather than disperse.
Entropy occurs when you have a system in equilibrium, but a system that’s far from equilibrium with an energy source (like the Sun) creates self-organising complexity. Davies makes the same point in The Cosmic Blueprint.
Addendum: My reference to Penrose's book is a bit of a gloss. His discussion is quite elaborate, even dense for some readers, including myself. Having said that, I think it provides a refreshing alternative to String Theory and is worth repeated readings if you're interested.
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Sunday 5 November 2017
Sunday 10 September 2017
The Odyssey; Homer
It’s not like me to read the classics, but this is a story that many of us grew up with, like Biblical stories, and I can’t help but feel that it has had an enormous influence on Western literature, and still has in the 21st Century. I came across a copy in one of my local bookshops, which has a huge range of classical literature, amongst all the more popular fare, both fiction and non-fiction.
The translation I have is by Samuel Butler - 1900, according to the Preface – where he discusses another relevant work he published in 1897, titled The Authoress of The Odyssey. That’s right: he argues that The Odyssey was written by a woman, whom he believes put herself into the story as Nausicaa. Following this preface there is an Introduction written by Andrew Lynn, who teaches literature at Barnard College, and who makes no reference to an ‘authoress’. At the other end of the book, there is a section titled, About the Author, by David B. Monro, who discusses at length various theories and speculations about Homer’s origins around 7th Century BC. In particular, it seems that there are many ‘beliefs’ pertaining to where he was born and/or lived. I’m not a scholar of ancient Greek literature so I won’t elaborate or partake in any debate concerning Homer’s identity or of the possibility that the author was actually a woman.
The original story would have been in verse and would have been orated, which makes its origins all the more nebulous, which is true for much of ancient literature that survives to the current day, whatever its cultural origins may be.
I have to say that Butler’s translation is very easy to read whilst capturing much of the poetic imagery, one suspects, of the original. There is not a lot of description but there is a lot of detail in terms of customs, specific objects and relationships between classes of society, like Penelope and her maidservants or Odysseus and the swineherd on his land, for example. So one is embedded into the story by being made familiar with the society and its mores. This extends to the relationship between the protagonists and the gods.
Everything that happens in this story is dependent on the will or whim of the gods, and one suspects that this is what people truly believed at the time when this story was originally told. Every storm and every natural phenomenon is an ‘act of God’ so one’s fate is completely dependent on their favour or not, which is why sacrifices are made throughout the story, and one suspects, throughout the lives of the people who originally were the audience for this story. There is contact between the mortals and the immortals (or gods) and people are genuinely ‘god-fearing’ because gods are all powerful and have complete control over one’s destiny. This is explicit in the tale, and one can see parallels in Biblical stories. Whether this tale had the religious significance that we associate with stories from the Bible, I don’t know, but if it ever did, such significance has long been detached.
This is most definitely a bloke’s story, because it is an adventure involving a male protagonist, who has close scrapes with monsters, immortals, and who must overcome a series of ordeals, culminating in a bloody fight against strong odds to win back his estranged wife. All this makes it hard to accept Butler’s claim that the author was a woman, yet there are strong pivotal female roles. Not only Penelope but the Goddess, Athene (pronounced Ath-en-a, according to my Greek friends) without whom, Odysseus would never have made it nor won the day at the end. In fact, Athene comes across as the least contrary of the gods and the most understanding of the human condition. In fact, she reminds me of a warrior version of Guan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy in Chinese Buddhism).
Nausicaa plays a very minor role in the whole story, yet Hayao Miyazaki borrowed her name and her title (Princess) for his 7 book graphic novel, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which he also made into an anime movie.
Miyazake is not mentioned in an appendix to the edition I have, called Further Reading, that refers to literary influences, but does include a reference to the Coen Brothers' movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou, starring George Clooney.
But ‘odyssey’ has become a term that transcends its origins, for it means “a long and eventful or adventurous journey” according to my computer’s dictionary. In fact, I would call ‘odyssey’ a fiction genre, and certainly every story I’ve written (not many) has involved ‘a long, eventful or adventurous journey’. But I suspect its biggest influence has been in Fantasy and superheroes, including the current highest rating television adventure story, Game of Thrones. I’ve long argued that superheroes are the 20th Century equivalent of Greek gods, though their relationship with humanity is decidedly different. They are not worshipped and they don’t need sacrifices in order to be of service to humanity’s well-being, but they are god-like in their abilities and humanlike in their character, which makes them very much akin to the Greek gods in Homer’s epic.
Whilst reading The Odyssey, I couldn’t help but think of Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman graphic novel series, which borrows from everywhere, including Shakespeare. Gaiman also wrote the award winning novel, American Gods, where he also borrows liberally from mythology (including Arabic mythology). Another example is Tolkien borrowing from Nordic mythology as does Marvel studios. Gaiman has also recently published a book called Norse Mythology, which is on my ever extending reading list.
So Homer arguably provided the template for quest fiction, which might help to explain why it remains a classic after two and a half millennia. Stories allow us to extend our imaginations in ways that other art forms can’t emulate. Creating superhuman characters, be they gods or immortal, or somehow transcendent to the physical universe, is one of the more obvious tropes one can explore.
One of the more intriguing subplots in The Odyssey is Odysseus’s capture by Calypso who wants to make him an immortal like herself, yet he resists for 7 years. I remember an episode of Tarzan (as a radio serial, when I was a pre-pubic lad) being held captive by a queen who wanted to make him immortal, and not understanding why he resisted. Curiously, I’ve addressed the issue of immortality in my own fiction. As I’ve remarked elsewhere on this blog, I don’t wish for immortality – it’s not part of the natural order – yet one only has to look at the pyramids in Egypt to realise how this has captured the imagination amongst narcissistic leaders, and currently amongst those who believe we may one day download our consciousness into a computer.
Odysseus is one of the original superheroes along with Achilles, and perhaps that is why his story has become a part of Western collective consciousness.
The translation I have is by Samuel Butler - 1900, according to the Preface – where he discusses another relevant work he published in 1897, titled The Authoress of The Odyssey. That’s right: he argues that The Odyssey was written by a woman, whom he believes put herself into the story as Nausicaa. Following this preface there is an Introduction written by Andrew Lynn, who teaches literature at Barnard College, and who makes no reference to an ‘authoress’. At the other end of the book, there is a section titled, About the Author, by David B. Monro, who discusses at length various theories and speculations about Homer’s origins around 7th Century BC. In particular, it seems that there are many ‘beliefs’ pertaining to where he was born and/or lived. I’m not a scholar of ancient Greek literature so I won’t elaborate or partake in any debate concerning Homer’s identity or of the possibility that the author was actually a woman.
The original story would have been in verse and would have been orated, which makes its origins all the more nebulous, which is true for much of ancient literature that survives to the current day, whatever its cultural origins may be.
I have to say that Butler’s translation is very easy to read whilst capturing much of the poetic imagery, one suspects, of the original. There is not a lot of description but there is a lot of detail in terms of customs, specific objects and relationships between classes of society, like Penelope and her maidservants or Odysseus and the swineherd on his land, for example. So one is embedded into the story by being made familiar with the society and its mores. This extends to the relationship between the protagonists and the gods.
Everything that happens in this story is dependent on the will or whim of the gods, and one suspects that this is what people truly believed at the time when this story was originally told. Every storm and every natural phenomenon is an ‘act of God’ so one’s fate is completely dependent on their favour or not, which is why sacrifices are made throughout the story, and one suspects, throughout the lives of the people who originally were the audience for this story. There is contact between the mortals and the immortals (or gods) and people are genuinely ‘god-fearing’ because gods are all powerful and have complete control over one’s destiny. This is explicit in the tale, and one can see parallels in Biblical stories. Whether this tale had the religious significance that we associate with stories from the Bible, I don’t know, but if it ever did, such significance has long been detached.
This is most definitely a bloke’s story, because it is an adventure involving a male protagonist, who has close scrapes with monsters, immortals, and who must overcome a series of ordeals, culminating in a bloody fight against strong odds to win back his estranged wife. All this makes it hard to accept Butler’s claim that the author was a woman, yet there are strong pivotal female roles. Not only Penelope but the Goddess, Athene (pronounced Ath-en-a, according to my Greek friends) without whom, Odysseus would never have made it nor won the day at the end. In fact, Athene comes across as the least contrary of the gods and the most understanding of the human condition. In fact, she reminds me of a warrior version of Guan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy in Chinese Buddhism).
Nausicaa plays a very minor role in the whole story, yet Hayao Miyazaki borrowed her name and her title (Princess) for his 7 book graphic novel, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which he also made into an anime movie.
Miyazake is not mentioned in an appendix to the edition I have, called Further Reading, that refers to literary influences, but does include a reference to the Coen Brothers' movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou, starring George Clooney.
But ‘odyssey’ has become a term that transcends its origins, for it means “a long and eventful or adventurous journey” according to my computer’s dictionary. In fact, I would call ‘odyssey’ a fiction genre, and certainly every story I’ve written (not many) has involved ‘a long, eventful or adventurous journey’. But I suspect its biggest influence has been in Fantasy and superheroes, including the current highest rating television adventure story, Game of Thrones. I’ve long argued that superheroes are the 20th Century equivalent of Greek gods, though their relationship with humanity is decidedly different. They are not worshipped and they don’t need sacrifices in order to be of service to humanity’s well-being, but they are god-like in their abilities and humanlike in their character, which makes them very much akin to the Greek gods in Homer’s epic.
Whilst reading The Odyssey, I couldn’t help but think of Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman graphic novel series, which borrows from everywhere, including Shakespeare. Gaiman also wrote the award winning novel, American Gods, where he also borrows liberally from mythology (including Arabic mythology). Another example is Tolkien borrowing from Nordic mythology as does Marvel studios. Gaiman has also recently published a book called Norse Mythology, which is on my ever extending reading list.
So Homer arguably provided the template for quest fiction, which might help to explain why it remains a classic after two and a half millennia. Stories allow us to extend our imaginations in ways that other art forms can’t emulate. Creating superhuman characters, be they gods or immortal, or somehow transcendent to the physical universe, is one of the more obvious tropes one can explore.
One of the more intriguing subplots in The Odyssey is Odysseus’s capture by Calypso who wants to make him an immortal like herself, yet he resists for 7 years. I remember an episode of Tarzan (as a radio serial, when I was a pre-pubic lad) being held captive by a queen who wanted to make him immortal, and not understanding why he resisted. Curiously, I’ve addressed the issue of immortality in my own fiction. As I’ve remarked elsewhere on this blog, I don’t wish for immortality – it’s not part of the natural order – yet one only has to look at the pyramids in Egypt to realise how this has captured the imagination amongst narcissistic leaders, and currently amongst those who believe we may one day download our consciousness into a computer.
Odysseus is one of the original superheroes along with Achilles, and perhaps that is why his story has become a part of Western collective consciousness.
Sunday 30 July 2017
Why and how European Western philosophy begat the scientific revolution
I’ve been reading a book, The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent, subtitled A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. At close to 450 pages, it’s a weighty philosophical tome, both literally and figuratively. According to the back fly leaf, ‘Jeremy Lent is a writer and the founder and president of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth.’ A very noble goal in itself, and the book goes some way towards describing a ‘manifesto’ to achieve it. ‘Lent also holds a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.’ In a former life, he was ‘the founder, CEO and Chairman of a publicly traded internet company.’
I acquired the book after reading a review in New Scientist. I knew from the outset that I would have disagreements with Lent, yet I believe his tome is worth reading for a number of reasons. Besides, no one ever completely agrees philosophically with someone else, which includes everyone who reads this blog.
He essentially traces the development of human civilisation in both the West and the East, using the premise that culture determines largely how we think and, by giving a brief yet not superficial history lesson, attempts to understand, if not explain, why we are historically and culturally, in the West, where we are today.
He gives particular emphasis to the Platonic Christian cultural evolution in the West and the Neo-Confucian evolution in China, which incorporated Confucianism with Taoism and Buddhism. I have a particular interest in both of these developments, though I wouldn’t call myself a scholar. I have read widely in all these areas and even studied Western philosophy along with science and mathematics without the academic qualifications to make me an expert in any specific area. It is this interest that originally led me to produce this blog.
I’ve made the point in earlier posts that we all think in a language, which both determines and limits what we can actually conceptualise, and provides the basis for much of our cultural norms. Lent makes the same point and illustrates what he means with a very good example.
Australian Aborigines in their indigenous languages don’t have words for left, right, front and back. Instead, directions and relative positions are always given by compass directions even though they don’t use a compass. It’s well known that Aborigines have an uncanny sense of direction (by Western standards), which has been essential to their survival for millennia. I once read a description of someone (a White Fella) stopping a Land Rover on a track so that he and his companions (Black Fellas) could pursue and kill a kangaroo in the scrub. When they turned to go back with their kill, he naturally went to return the way they had come, whereas they went in a straight line back to the Land Rover even though they couldn’t see it. In AFL (Aussie Rules football) Aboriginal players are known for having a strong sense of direction on the field and where everyone is. Anyone who’s seen a game of Aussie Rules would appreciate what an advantage that could be in the run of play.
The curious thing is that we don’t know if the language determines the innate ability or the other way round. One suspects it’s a combination of both. The language reinforces the specific cultural requirement that the individual needs, not only to ‘fit in’, but, in this case, to survive in an unforgiving landscape with limited visual markers, and where the terrain changes, revealing and hiding specific markers as one travels.
Lent has been influenced by George Lakoff, whom he references more than once. I’ve encountered Lakoff in my own reading and even had correspondence with him. These encounters are partly chronicled elsewhere, but essentially Lakoff explains virtually all knowledge from the perspective of metaphor, including all of philosophy, science and mathematics. Lent also talks about the significance of metaphor in its cognitive role of elevating humans above all other species. Just on that point, metaphor is a form of analogy and many of them become what Lakoff calls ‘frozen metaphors’ and what I’d call clichés. I’ve written about this elsewhere as well, but analogy is our first and most important method for explaining something new to someone else. It’s our ability to integrate new knowledge into existing knowledge which allows us to learn unfamiliar concepts; and analogies, including metaphors, are our key means of achieving this. As Lent points out, we use metaphors all the time without even thinking about them. How often do we say we ‘see’ something when we mean we ‘understand’ it, yet the context of the word allows one never to be confused.
But Lent also borrows from Lakoff, whether intentionally or not, in another way when he reinterprets a scientific discovery in a context of his own making. He talks about Neo-Confucianism as effectively foreseeing modern scientific developments because of its gestalt approach to the Universe. For example, he cites Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, as evidence that ‘The traditional Chinese notion of qi [sometimes called chi] as an all pervasive force of energy and matter could now be related to the findings of modern science.’ In other words, Einstein’s mathematical discovery apparently confirms an ancient Chinese principle. It’s very easy to reinterpret a discovery (like Einstein’s equation) in the context and language of an ancient tradition which never came close to acquiring the mathematical genius such a discovery entails. In fact, Einstein’s discovery rests on millennia of mathematical and scientific developments in the Western world that Lent is effectively arguing is inferior to Neo-Confucianism.
Now, I need to point out that I have also called myself a Neo-Confucianist, but I see its importance in a psychological context rather than as a worldview that somehow trumps modern scientific thinking. As I said in my introduction, I’ve read widely in this area without becoming a scholar because I see it as an alternative philosophy to Western monotheistic religion, which is the psychological context I refer to above. It is in this context that I can find some agreement with Lent.
In particular, Lent argues that monotheism lends itself to genocidal activity against other religions and he quotes from both the Old Testament and the New Testament to support his contention. He makes the point that such genocidal activity was not just reserved for non-Christian religions, including Judaism from whence it was derived, but also within Christianity itself. We find similar issues within Islam in the modern world. Monotheism, according to Scripture, will tolerate no other God or Gods. Historically, this has led to some of the worst atrocities, and, in Islam, still does. I have my own issues with monotheism from my upbringing, some of which was resurrected when reading Lent’s account. He makes the point, by quoting renowned Christian thinkers, like Augustine among others, that the body with its sexual and base desires represents the opposite of spiritual purity. The obsession with sex in the Church has led to its own problems that are finally being revealed in the full light of the law in many countries, including Australia. The self-loathing that Lent cites in some Christian thinkers is something I can identify with. No one taught me self-loathing; it just came with the territory. I’ve had a strong aversion to the Bible and its teachings ever since.
I’ve always been a seeker of knowledge in many forms, including religion. So it’s not surprising that I read Buddhist scholars like Daisetz Suzuki, and have read various texts on the I Ching, including the renowned Richard Willhelm translation (English translation by Cary Baynes). I’ve read the full works of Carl Jung who was arguably more religious scholar than psychologist. He was the first to make me consider that God is something internal, not external, which makes the idea totally subjective.
Many famous scientists dabbled in what we would call occult practices, which were partly a reflection of the age in which they lived and partly a consequence of their striving for ‘truth’ wherever they may find it. Johannes Kepler was an astrologer as well as an astronomer and once took the stand in court to defend charges against his mother for being a witch. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientist ever, was also a numerologist and alchemist, much of which he kept secret. Erwin Schrodinger studied the Upanishads, the classical Hindu text, which he briefly discusses in his book, What is Life? According to Lent, Niels Bohr incorporated the Taoist Yin Yang symbol into his coat of arms when he was knighted, because it represented the inherent and inexplicable complementarity (or paradox) of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. Einstein, in his own words, was not religious in the conventional sense, yet he wrote the following:
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity, and in this sense, and this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Einstein was also influenced by the philosophy of Spinoza. But perhaps the greatest walking contradiction in science was a contemporary of Einstein, Bohr and Schrodinger: Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli was notably the most critical of any theory put forward, no matter by whom, and made famous contributions to quantum theory – in particular, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which explains, among other things, why objects (including human beings) don’t simply meld into each other when everyone knows that all atoms are mostly empty space. But Pauli was also a personal friend of Carl Jung and studied the I Ching.
Getting back to Lent’s book, and his subtitle, Humanity’s Search for Meaning, one could argue that religion, in all its variants, is the consequence of this search, but only science and mathematics have provided us with real knowledge of our origins and the mysteries of the physical Universe. This leads to the next aspect of Lent’s discourse.
Before I go further, I should point out that I’m not a history buff and I would concede that Lent’s knowledge of history would almost certainly outweigh mine. However, I think his interpretations and reasoning of relative cultural evolution and comparative developments, especially in science, are speculative and therefore open to challenge.
He makes the relevant point, not lost on most history of science scholars, that there were times (not concurrent) when both the Arab world of Islam and the Chinese world of Neo-Confucianism were ahead of Western civilizations in the pursuit of science-based knowledge, like astronomy, mathematics and technology in general. Lent provides his own rationale as to why the scientific revolution occurred in Europe and not Asia. In the case of Islam, conservative religious scholars hijacked the debate, which happened in Christendom too, one could argue, but more on that later. In the case of China, Lent argues that the Neo-Confucian philosophical approach was not so much a failure to discover science, as we tend to perceive it, but that they had a different objective. He effectively argues that if we had adopted their approach the world would be a better place. I’ll return to that point at the end.
Arguably, Lent’s most contentious point is that Christianity and Science had a certain synergy that facilitated the advancement of science. For most of Western philosophy, science and religion were not dichotomized like they are today. But even today, scientists with religious beliefs will incorporate their beliefs into their science, usually in a way that only makes sense to them. But back in the day of Galileo, Kepler, and even Newton, this was the norm. Scientists of that period also had religious beliefs, and if they were European, then those religious beliefs would have been Christian. I don’t see any mystery or controversy on this point.
The major difference between the Western philosophical tradition and its Eastern counterpart is the role of the ancient Greeks, specifically Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, which Lent acknowledges. This was also the influence on the Arab world along with Hindu mathematical advances (particularly the adoption of zero) but science in Islam became a heresy under conservative religious leadership (at least according to Lent, and I suspect he’s right). Lent points out that it was the Greeks who coined the term ‘natural law’, astro-nomos (nomos is ‘law’) which, of course, gives us ‘astronomy’. Lent argues that, in the West, we adopted this as being ‘God’s law’, hence the tradition, even in the 20th Century, with Einstein and Hawking (an atheist) referring to the ‘Mind of God’, and Paul Davies, a self-confessed deist, even writing a book with that title.
What really gave us the scientific revolution is the appreciation of the role of mathematics in understanding all aspects of the natural world and its cumulative revelations from Galileo, Kepler and Newton to Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein, culminating in the so-called golden age of physics in the 20th Century. Lent acknowledges the cultural origins of this paradigm in ancient Greece, starting with the Pythagoreans, but sees it as a cultural metaphor (like Lakoff) that we have come to accept as ‘truth’, effectively replacing conventional religion. As anyone who regularly reads my blog will attest, that’s pretty well my intellectual position.
Not surprisingly, Lent challenges this paradigm, specifically the ‘truth’ part, citing the mathematical relationship between π and a circle’s area (for example) as being true, yet does not axiomatically constitute a universal ‘truth’. However, I argue that there are innumerable universal truths in mathematics – look no further than the primes. To be fair, Lent is not alone among philosophers or even mathematicians; Stephen Wolfram, who famously created Mathematica, argues that mathematics is a cultural artefact, just as Lent describes.
Lent argues that if we were jellyfish, for example, with the same intelligent and cognitive capacities as humans, living in a fluid environment then the mathematics we know may not have developed if there was nothing ‘discrete to count’. I’ve met this argument before (though different analogy). It’s the relationships between numbers rather than the numbers themselves that constitutes mathematics and it’s those relationships that have allowed us to describe, if not understand, such natural phenomena as electromagnetism, gravity, the life cycle of the sun, the chemical attributes of every element; and so it goes on. So even if there was nothing to count, it’s hard to imagine mathematics not existing in a form that allows us to comprehend the Universe on such a diverse range of scales. In fact, even the very notion of scale and its significance in determining the dominance of specific natural forces suggests that mathematics is intrinsically woven into the fabric of the Universe.
Lent, among many others, contends that we’ve imposed mathematics as a human-made structure onto the Universe, and argues that discoveries in the 20th Century in the field of chaos and complexity reveal the inadequacy of Newtonian based physics to explain the natural world.
First of all, science, of all human disciplines, appreciates that knowledge is not fixed; it’s a neverending endeavour. In fact, Lent gives examples of Einstein’s physics overturning Newton’s and Riemann’s geometry replacing Euclid’s as evidence that mathematics and the science it spawns as not representing universal truths. I find this argument disingenuous when it’s well known that Riemann’s geometry is effectively an extension of plane geometry onto curved surfaces; Euclidean geometry is flat. And Einstein’s theories of relativity reduce mathematically to Newton’s physics when the speed of light is not relevant, which is most of the time as we all know. In fact, in both cases it demonstrates that mathematical consistency is a feature of advances in physics. Euclid’s geometry is still a universal truth that can actually be used to decide a feature of the Universe. For example in flat geometry a triangle’s 3 angles will sum to 180˚ but on a positively curved surface will be greater than 180˚ and on a negatively curved surface will be less than 180˚. In principle, this should allow us to determine if the Universe is negatively or positively curved or neither.
The discovery of chaos, fractals and complexity in the 20th Century are just another set of discoveries in both mathematics and nature that open new doors onto our understanding of the world, including so-called self-organising phenomena that are prominent in biology, cosmology and mundane objects like whirlpools. Lent talks about these phenomena as if they challenge science at its core, and argues that Neo-Confucianism and indigenous cultures effectively foresaw this new brand of science with their holistic view of the world. Paul Davies gives a very good account in his excellent book, The Cosmic Blueprint, published in 1987, where he argues that this self-organising principle represents another ‘arrow of time’ alongside entropy. Whilst Lent acknowledges the contribution to this new field by Lorenz, Mandelbroit and others (he doesn’t mention Poincare’s seminal role), he fails to point out that they are all mathematicians and it’s fundamentally a mathematical field.
Lent is not the first to point out that the idea of a Platonic realm fits neatly into the Christian view of Heaven, and argues that this is what distinguishes Christendom from other cultures like Neo-Confucianism. I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s only mathematics that provides a cultural link to Platonism. I’m not aware of anyone, including mathematical Platonists (like myself), who believe that there exists a world of ‘ideal forms’ for everything on Earth and that our psyche recognises them from previous lives or some-such. This has more in common with Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ than anything else in science or religion. Arguments for mathematical Platonism rarely cite Pythagoras or Plato, but more likely Godel or Wigner or Penrose.
To address Neo-Confucianism, Lent acknowledges that there is a triumvirate of Earth, Man and Heaven, without acknowledging its obvious similarity to the Christian view. The major difference is that Christianity sees Christ as an essential link between Man and Heaven, whereas, in Neo-Confucianism, the link exists without the necessity of a monotheistic God. The point is that there is a transcendental realm (with or without God) and Man is the only connection between it and Earth. One could say the same holds true for mathematics if one was a mathematical Platonist.
The Neo-Confucianists, for whatever reason, never made the link between mathematics and the natural world and that is why the scientific revolution didn’t happen for them. For example, chi or qui is an energy source or flow, which is a concept used in traditional Chinese medicine and elsewhere. The point is that chi is never quantified as it would be in Western science. In fact, Raymond Tallis, who writes a regular column for Philosophy Now, argues that it’s only because we are able to quantify ‘stuff’ that the field of physics exists. In other words, mathematics as a tool in physics only came about because we can measure things. This is also a touch disingenuous when one looks at all the examples where mathematics predicted physical phenomena and objects rather than the other way round. Maxwell’s equations gave us the constant speed of light in a vacuum; Einstein’s special theory of relativity gave us the mathematical equivalence of energy and matter; Dirac’s equation predicted the positron; Pauli mathematically predicted the neutrino; and more recently Higgs predicted the Higgs Boson.
But Lent’s overall thesis contains ideas that I actually agree with: humans have demonstrated a capacity to be too successful for their own collective good. Naturally, I haven’t done Lent’s arguments full justice, given obvious self-imposed limitations, but basically he infers that science, being the most successful endeavour in the history of the world, also contains the seeds of our potential doom. He doesn’t make this point so dramatically, but I doubt he’d disagree with my synopsis.
It should be noted that Lent and I don’t disagree that the scientific revolution is a direct consequence of our Greek neo-Platonic heritage. We don’t even disagree, I would suggest, that science could be part of the problem or part of the solution. We disagree on whether science truly tells us something about the natural world or whether it’s fundamentally a cultural artefact that provides just one view of reality with no special significance. According to Lent, the Neo-Confucian philosophy provides another view of equal if not superior importance. There is a fundamental problem with this stance, however - throughout the book, he cites modern scientific discoveries as justification for the Neo-Confucian worldview.
The last 2 chapters are worth reading on their own. In particular, the penultimate chapter would make an excellent essay, where he discusses the trap of ‘perpetual economic growth’. The last chapter ventures into science fiction, though more dystopian than utopian. It’s worth reading just for the discussion on ‘society collapse’, with particular reference to the Roman Empire. From my perspective, these chapters are almost divorced from the rest of the book, though, obviously, the author wouldn’t think so. I found them depressingly prescient, and are probably worthy of their own post.
I don’t think Lent is anti-science, neither is he ignorant. But where he sees science as a cultural artefact, I see it as a quest for ‘truth’ that is largely successful but unbounded. It’s important to appreciate that science is never complete. Mathematics is the key; I see this as obvious, whereas Lent would see me as delusional.
Addendum: I received a very generous and gracious reply from Jeremy Lent, which you can read in the comments, along with my response.
I acquired the book after reading a review in New Scientist. I knew from the outset that I would have disagreements with Lent, yet I believe his tome is worth reading for a number of reasons. Besides, no one ever completely agrees philosophically with someone else, which includes everyone who reads this blog.
He essentially traces the development of human civilisation in both the West and the East, using the premise that culture determines largely how we think and, by giving a brief yet not superficial history lesson, attempts to understand, if not explain, why we are historically and culturally, in the West, where we are today.
He gives particular emphasis to the Platonic Christian cultural evolution in the West and the Neo-Confucian evolution in China, which incorporated Confucianism with Taoism and Buddhism. I have a particular interest in both of these developments, though I wouldn’t call myself a scholar. I have read widely in all these areas and even studied Western philosophy along with science and mathematics without the academic qualifications to make me an expert in any specific area. It is this interest that originally led me to produce this blog.
I’ve made the point in earlier posts that we all think in a language, which both determines and limits what we can actually conceptualise, and provides the basis for much of our cultural norms. Lent makes the same point and illustrates what he means with a very good example.
Australian Aborigines in their indigenous languages don’t have words for left, right, front and back. Instead, directions and relative positions are always given by compass directions even though they don’t use a compass. It’s well known that Aborigines have an uncanny sense of direction (by Western standards), which has been essential to their survival for millennia. I once read a description of someone (a White Fella) stopping a Land Rover on a track so that he and his companions (Black Fellas) could pursue and kill a kangaroo in the scrub. When they turned to go back with their kill, he naturally went to return the way they had come, whereas they went in a straight line back to the Land Rover even though they couldn’t see it. In AFL (Aussie Rules football) Aboriginal players are known for having a strong sense of direction on the field and where everyone is. Anyone who’s seen a game of Aussie Rules would appreciate what an advantage that could be in the run of play.
The curious thing is that we don’t know if the language determines the innate ability or the other way round. One suspects it’s a combination of both. The language reinforces the specific cultural requirement that the individual needs, not only to ‘fit in’, but, in this case, to survive in an unforgiving landscape with limited visual markers, and where the terrain changes, revealing and hiding specific markers as one travels.
Lent has been influenced by George Lakoff, whom he references more than once. I’ve encountered Lakoff in my own reading and even had correspondence with him. These encounters are partly chronicled elsewhere, but essentially Lakoff explains virtually all knowledge from the perspective of metaphor, including all of philosophy, science and mathematics. Lent also talks about the significance of metaphor in its cognitive role of elevating humans above all other species. Just on that point, metaphor is a form of analogy and many of them become what Lakoff calls ‘frozen metaphors’ and what I’d call clichés. I’ve written about this elsewhere as well, but analogy is our first and most important method for explaining something new to someone else. It’s our ability to integrate new knowledge into existing knowledge which allows us to learn unfamiliar concepts; and analogies, including metaphors, are our key means of achieving this. As Lent points out, we use metaphors all the time without even thinking about them. How often do we say we ‘see’ something when we mean we ‘understand’ it, yet the context of the word allows one never to be confused.
But Lent also borrows from Lakoff, whether intentionally or not, in another way when he reinterprets a scientific discovery in a context of his own making. He talks about Neo-Confucianism as effectively foreseeing modern scientific developments because of its gestalt approach to the Universe. For example, he cites Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, as evidence that ‘The traditional Chinese notion of qi [sometimes called chi] as an all pervasive force of energy and matter could now be related to the findings of modern science.’ In other words, Einstein’s mathematical discovery apparently confirms an ancient Chinese principle. It’s very easy to reinterpret a discovery (like Einstein’s equation) in the context and language of an ancient tradition which never came close to acquiring the mathematical genius such a discovery entails. In fact, Einstein’s discovery rests on millennia of mathematical and scientific developments in the Western world that Lent is effectively arguing is inferior to Neo-Confucianism.
Now, I need to point out that I have also called myself a Neo-Confucianist, but I see its importance in a psychological context rather than as a worldview that somehow trumps modern scientific thinking. As I said in my introduction, I’ve read widely in this area without becoming a scholar because I see it as an alternative philosophy to Western monotheistic religion, which is the psychological context I refer to above. It is in this context that I can find some agreement with Lent.
In particular, Lent argues that monotheism lends itself to genocidal activity against other religions and he quotes from both the Old Testament and the New Testament to support his contention. He makes the point that such genocidal activity was not just reserved for non-Christian religions, including Judaism from whence it was derived, but also within Christianity itself. We find similar issues within Islam in the modern world. Monotheism, according to Scripture, will tolerate no other God or Gods. Historically, this has led to some of the worst atrocities, and, in Islam, still does. I have my own issues with monotheism from my upbringing, some of which was resurrected when reading Lent’s account. He makes the point, by quoting renowned Christian thinkers, like Augustine among others, that the body with its sexual and base desires represents the opposite of spiritual purity. The obsession with sex in the Church has led to its own problems that are finally being revealed in the full light of the law in many countries, including Australia. The self-loathing that Lent cites in some Christian thinkers is something I can identify with. No one taught me self-loathing; it just came with the territory. I’ve had a strong aversion to the Bible and its teachings ever since.
I’ve always been a seeker of knowledge in many forms, including religion. So it’s not surprising that I read Buddhist scholars like Daisetz Suzuki, and have read various texts on the I Ching, including the renowned Richard Willhelm translation (English translation by Cary Baynes). I’ve read the full works of Carl Jung who was arguably more religious scholar than psychologist. He was the first to make me consider that God is something internal, not external, which makes the idea totally subjective.
Many famous scientists dabbled in what we would call occult practices, which were partly a reflection of the age in which they lived and partly a consequence of their striving for ‘truth’ wherever they may find it. Johannes Kepler was an astrologer as well as an astronomer and once took the stand in court to defend charges against his mother for being a witch. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientist ever, was also a numerologist and alchemist, much of which he kept secret. Erwin Schrodinger studied the Upanishads, the classical Hindu text, which he briefly discusses in his book, What is Life? According to Lent, Niels Bohr incorporated the Taoist Yin Yang symbol into his coat of arms when he was knighted, because it represented the inherent and inexplicable complementarity (or paradox) of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. Einstein, in his own words, was not religious in the conventional sense, yet he wrote the following:
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity, and in this sense, and this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Einstein was also influenced by the philosophy of Spinoza. But perhaps the greatest walking contradiction in science was a contemporary of Einstein, Bohr and Schrodinger: Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli was notably the most critical of any theory put forward, no matter by whom, and made famous contributions to quantum theory – in particular, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which explains, among other things, why objects (including human beings) don’t simply meld into each other when everyone knows that all atoms are mostly empty space. But Pauli was also a personal friend of Carl Jung and studied the I Ching.
Getting back to Lent’s book, and his subtitle, Humanity’s Search for Meaning, one could argue that religion, in all its variants, is the consequence of this search, but only science and mathematics have provided us with real knowledge of our origins and the mysteries of the physical Universe. This leads to the next aspect of Lent’s discourse.
Before I go further, I should point out that I’m not a history buff and I would concede that Lent’s knowledge of history would almost certainly outweigh mine. However, I think his interpretations and reasoning of relative cultural evolution and comparative developments, especially in science, are speculative and therefore open to challenge.
He makes the relevant point, not lost on most history of science scholars, that there were times (not concurrent) when both the Arab world of Islam and the Chinese world of Neo-Confucianism were ahead of Western civilizations in the pursuit of science-based knowledge, like astronomy, mathematics and technology in general. Lent provides his own rationale as to why the scientific revolution occurred in Europe and not Asia. In the case of Islam, conservative religious scholars hijacked the debate, which happened in Christendom too, one could argue, but more on that later. In the case of China, Lent argues that the Neo-Confucian philosophical approach was not so much a failure to discover science, as we tend to perceive it, but that they had a different objective. He effectively argues that if we had adopted their approach the world would be a better place. I’ll return to that point at the end.
Arguably, Lent’s most contentious point is that Christianity and Science had a certain synergy that facilitated the advancement of science. For most of Western philosophy, science and religion were not dichotomized like they are today. But even today, scientists with religious beliefs will incorporate their beliefs into their science, usually in a way that only makes sense to them. But back in the day of Galileo, Kepler, and even Newton, this was the norm. Scientists of that period also had religious beliefs, and if they were European, then those religious beliefs would have been Christian. I don’t see any mystery or controversy on this point.
The major difference between the Western philosophical tradition and its Eastern counterpart is the role of the ancient Greeks, specifically Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, which Lent acknowledges. This was also the influence on the Arab world along with Hindu mathematical advances (particularly the adoption of zero) but science in Islam became a heresy under conservative religious leadership (at least according to Lent, and I suspect he’s right). Lent points out that it was the Greeks who coined the term ‘natural law’, astro-nomos (nomos is ‘law’) which, of course, gives us ‘astronomy’. Lent argues that, in the West, we adopted this as being ‘God’s law’, hence the tradition, even in the 20th Century, with Einstein and Hawking (an atheist) referring to the ‘Mind of God’, and Paul Davies, a self-confessed deist, even writing a book with that title.
What really gave us the scientific revolution is the appreciation of the role of mathematics in understanding all aspects of the natural world and its cumulative revelations from Galileo, Kepler and Newton to Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein, culminating in the so-called golden age of physics in the 20th Century. Lent acknowledges the cultural origins of this paradigm in ancient Greece, starting with the Pythagoreans, but sees it as a cultural metaphor (like Lakoff) that we have come to accept as ‘truth’, effectively replacing conventional religion. As anyone who regularly reads my blog will attest, that’s pretty well my intellectual position.
Not surprisingly, Lent challenges this paradigm, specifically the ‘truth’ part, citing the mathematical relationship between π and a circle’s area (for example) as being true, yet does not axiomatically constitute a universal ‘truth’. However, I argue that there are innumerable universal truths in mathematics – look no further than the primes. To be fair, Lent is not alone among philosophers or even mathematicians; Stephen Wolfram, who famously created Mathematica, argues that mathematics is a cultural artefact, just as Lent describes.
Lent argues that if we were jellyfish, for example, with the same intelligent and cognitive capacities as humans, living in a fluid environment then the mathematics we know may not have developed if there was nothing ‘discrete to count’. I’ve met this argument before (though different analogy). It’s the relationships between numbers rather than the numbers themselves that constitutes mathematics and it’s those relationships that have allowed us to describe, if not understand, such natural phenomena as electromagnetism, gravity, the life cycle of the sun, the chemical attributes of every element; and so it goes on. So even if there was nothing to count, it’s hard to imagine mathematics not existing in a form that allows us to comprehend the Universe on such a diverse range of scales. In fact, even the very notion of scale and its significance in determining the dominance of specific natural forces suggests that mathematics is intrinsically woven into the fabric of the Universe.
Lent, among many others, contends that we’ve imposed mathematics as a human-made structure onto the Universe, and argues that discoveries in the 20th Century in the field of chaos and complexity reveal the inadequacy of Newtonian based physics to explain the natural world.
First of all, science, of all human disciplines, appreciates that knowledge is not fixed; it’s a neverending endeavour. In fact, Lent gives examples of Einstein’s physics overturning Newton’s and Riemann’s geometry replacing Euclid’s as evidence that mathematics and the science it spawns as not representing universal truths. I find this argument disingenuous when it’s well known that Riemann’s geometry is effectively an extension of plane geometry onto curved surfaces; Euclidean geometry is flat. And Einstein’s theories of relativity reduce mathematically to Newton’s physics when the speed of light is not relevant, which is most of the time as we all know. In fact, in both cases it demonstrates that mathematical consistency is a feature of advances in physics. Euclid’s geometry is still a universal truth that can actually be used to decide a feature of the Universe. For example in flat geometry a triangle’s 3 angles will sum to 180˚ but on a positively curved surface will be greater than 180˚ and on a negatively curved surface will be less than 180˚. In principle, this should allow us to determine if the Universe is negatively or positively curved or neither.
The discovery of chaos, fractals and complexity in the 20th Century are just another set of discoveries in both mathematics and nature that open new doors onto our understanding of the world, including so-called self-organising phenomena that are prominent in biology, cosmology and mundane objects like whirlpools. Lent talks about these phenomena as if they challenge science at its core, and argues that Neo-Confucianism and indigenous cultures effectively foresaw this new brand of science with their holistic view of the world. Paul Davies gives a very good account in his excellent book, The Cosmic Blueprint, published in 1987, where he argues that this self-organising principle represents another ‘arrow of time’ alongside entropy. Whilst Lent acknowledges the contribution to this new field by Lorenz, Mandelbroit and others (he doesn’t mention Poincare’s seminal role), he fails to point out that they are all mathematicians and it’s fundamentally a mathematical field.
Lent is not the first to point out that the idea of a Platonic realm fits neatly into the Christian view of Heaven, and argues that this is what distinguishes Christendom from other cultures like Neo-Confucianism. I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s only mathematics that provides a cultural link to Platonism. I’m not aware of anyone, including mathematical Platonists (like myself), who believe that there exists a world of ‘ideal forms’ for everything on Earth and that our psyche recognises them from previous lives or some-such. This has more in common with Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ than anything else in science or religion. Arguments for mathematical Platonism rarely cite Pythagoras or Plato, but more likely Godel or Wigner or Penrose.
To address Neo-Confucianism, Lent acknowledges that there is a triumvirate of Earth, Man and Heaven, without acknowledging its obvious similarity to the Christian view. The major difference is that Christianity sees Christ as an essential link between Man and Heaven, whereas, in Neo-Confucianism, the link exists without the necessity of a monotheistic God. The point is that there is a transcendental realm (with or without God) and Man is the only connection between it and Earth. One could say the same holds true for mathematics if one was a mathematical Platonist.
The Neo-Confucianists, for whatever reason, never made the link between mathematics and the natural world and that is why the scientific revolution didn’t happen for them. For example, chi or qui is an energy source or flow, which is a concept used in traditional Chinese medicine and elsewhere. The point is that chi is never quantified as it would be in Western science. In fact, Raymond Tallis, who writes a regular column for Philosophy Now, argues that it’s only because we are able to quantify ‘stuff’ that the field of physics exists. In other words, mathematics as a tool in physics only came about because we can measure things. This is also a touch disingenuous when one looks at all the examples where mathematics predicted physical phenomena and objects rather than the other way round. Maxwell’s equations gave us the constant speed of light in a vacuum; Einstein’s special theory of relativity gave us the mathematical equivalence of energy and matter; Dirac’s equation predicted the positron; Pauli mathematically predicted the neutrino; and more recently Higgs predicted the Higgs Boson.
But Lent’s overall thesis contains ideas that I actually agree with: humans have demonstrated a capacity to be too successful for their own collective good. Naturally, I haven’t done Lent’s arguments full justice, given obvious self-imposed limitations, but basically he infers that science, being the most successful endeavour in the history of the world, also contains the seeds of our potential doom. He doesn’t make this point so dramatically, but I doubt he’d disagree with my synopsis.
It should be noted that Lent and I don’t disagree that the scientific revolution is a direct consequence of our Greek neo-Platonic heritage. We don’t even disagree, I would suggest, that science could be part of the problem or part of the solution. We disagree on whether science truly tells us something about the natural world or whether it’s fundamentally a cultural artefact that provides just one view of reality with no special significance. According to Lent, the Neo-Confucian philosophy provides another view of equal if not superior importance. There is a fundamental problem with this stance, however - throughout the book, he cites modern scientific discoveries as justification for the Neo-Confucian worldview.
The last 2 chapters are worth reading on their own. In particular, the penultimate chapter would make an excellent essay, where he discusses the trap of ‘perpetual economic growth’. The last chapter ventures into science fiction, though more dystopian than utopian. It’s worth reading just for the discussion on ‘society collapse’, with particular reference to the Roman Empire. From my perspective, these chapters are almost divorced from the rest of the book, though, obviously, the author wouldn’t think so. I found them depressingly prescient, and are probably worthy of their own post.
I don’t think Lent is anti-science, neither is he ignorant. But where he sees science as a cultural artefact, I see it as a quest for ‘truth’ that is largely successful but unbounded. It’s important to appreciate that science is never complete. Mathematics is the key; I see this as obvious, whereas Lent would see me as delusional.
Addendum: I received a very generous and gracious reply from Jeremy Lent, which you can read in the comments, along with my response.
Sunday 19 March 2017
The importance of purpose
A short while ago, New Scientist (Issue: 28 January 2017) had on its cover the headline, The Meaning of Life. On reading the article, titled Why am I here? (by Teal Burrell, pp. 30-33) it was really about the importance to health in finding purpose in one’s life. I believe this is so essential that I despair when I see hope and opportunity deliberately curtailed as we do with our treatment of refugees. It’s criminal – I really believe that – because it’s so fundamental to both psychological and physical health. As someone who often struggled to find purpose, this is a subject close to my heart.
As the article points out, for many people, religion provides a ‘higher purpose’, which is really a separate topic, but not an unrelated one. The author also references Viktor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning (very early in the piece), which I’ve sometimes argued is the only book I’ve read that should be compulsory reading. The book is based on Frankl’s experience as a holocaust survivor, but ultimately led to a philosophy and a psychological method (for want of a better term) that he practiced as a psychologist.
I’ve also read another book of his, The Unconscious God, where he argues that there are 3 basic ways in which we find purpose or meaning in our lives. One, through a relationship; two through a project; and three through dealing with adversity. This last seems paradoxical, even oxymoronic, yet it is the premise of virtually every work of narrative fiction that all of us (who watch cinema or TV) imbibe with addictive enthusiasm. I’ve long argued that wisdom doesn’t come from achievements or education but dealing with adversity in our lives, which is impossible to avoid no matter who you are. It makes one think of Socrates' (attributed) famous aphorism: The unexamined life is not worth living. If we think about it, we only examine our lives when we fail. So a life without failure is not really much of a life. The corollary to this is that risk is essential to success and to gaining maturity in all things.
Humans are the most socially complex creatures on the planet – take language. I’ve recently read a book, Cosmo Sapiens; Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, by John Hands. It’s as ambitious as its title suggests and it took him 10 years to complete: very erudite and comprehensive, Hands challenges science orthodoxies without being anti-science. But his book is not the topic of this post, so I won’t distract you further. One of his many salient points is that humans are unique, not the least because of our ability for self-reflection. He contends that we are not the only species with the ability to ‘know’, but we are the only species who ‘know that we know’ (his words) or think about thinking (my words). The point is that cognitively we are distinct from every other species on the planet because we can consider and cogitate on our origins, our mortality and our place in the overall scheme of things, in ways that other species can’t possibly think about.
And language is the key attribute, because, without it, we can’t even think in the way that we all take for granted; yet it's derived from our social environment (we all had to be taught). I understand that children isolated from adults can develop their own language, but, even under these extremely rare circumstances, it requires social interaction to develop. This is a lengthy introduction to the fact that all of us require social interaction (virtually from birth) to have a meaningful life in any way, shape or form. We spend a large part of our lives interacting with others and, to a very large extent, the quality of that interaction determines the quality of our lives.
And this is a convoluted way of reaching the first of Frankl’s ‘ways of finding meaning’: through a relationship. For most of us this implies a conjugal relationship with all that entails. For many of us, in our youth, there is a tendency to put all our eggs in that particular basket. But with age, our perspective changes with lust playing a lesser role, whilst more resilient traits like friendship, reliance and trust become more important, even necessary, in long term relationships, upon which we build something meaningful for ourselves and others. For many people, I think children provide a purpose, not that I’ve ever had any, but it’s something I’ve observed.
I know from personal experience, that having a project can provide purpose, and for many people, myself included, it can seem necessary. We live in a society (in the West, anyway) where our work often defines us and gives us an identity. I think this has historical roots. Men, in particular, were defined by what they do, often following a family tradition. This idea of a hereditary role (for life) is not as prevalent as it once was, but I suspect it snuffed out the light of aspiration for many. A couple of weeks ago I saw David Stratton; a Cinematic Life, followed by a Q&A with the man himself. David, who is about a decade older than me, came to Australia and made a career as a film critic, becoming one of the most respected, not only in Australia, but in the world. However, the cost was the bitter disappointment expressed by his father for not taking over the family grocery business back in England. Women, on the other hand, were not allowed the luxury of finding their own independent identity until relatively recently in Western societies. It’s the word ‘independent’ that was their particular stumbling block, because, even in my postwar childhood, women were not meant to be independent of a man.
The movie, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, which I reviewed back in 2010, does a fair job of addressing this issue in the guise of cinematic entertainment. To illustrate my point, I’ll quote from my own post:
The movie opens with a montage of people being sacked (fired) with a voice-over of Clooney explaining his job. This cuts to the core of the movie for me: what do we live for? For many people their job defines them – it is their identity, in their own eyes and the eyes of their society. So cutting off someone’s job is like cutting off their life – it’s humiliating at the very least, suicidally depressing at worst and life-changing at best.
So purpose is something most of us pursue, either through relationships within our family or through our work or both. But many of you will be asking: is there a higher purpose? I can’t answer that, but I’ll provide my own philosophical slant on it.
Socrates (again), who was forced to take his own life (as a consequence of a democratic process, it should be noted) supposedly said, in addition to the well-worn trope quoted above: 'Whether death is a door to another world or an endless sleep, we don’t know'. And I would add: We are not meant to know. I’m agnostic about an afterlife, but, to be honest, I’m not expecting one, and I’ve provided my views elsewhere. But there is a point worth making, which is that people who believe that their next life is more important than the one they’re currently living often have a perverse, not to say destructive, view on mortality. One only has to look at suicide bombers who believe that their death is a ticket to Paradise.
Having said all that, it’s well known that people with religious beliefs can benefit psychologically in that they often live healthy and fulfilling lives (as the New Scientist article, referenced in the introduction, attests). Personally, I think that when one reaches the end of one’s life, they will judge it not by their achievements and successes but by the lives they have touched. Purpose can best be found when we help others, whether it be through work or family or sport or just normal everyday interactions with strangers.
As the article points out, for many people, religion provides a ‘higher purpose’, which is really a separate topic, but not an unrelated one. The author also references Viktor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning (very early in the piece), which I’ve sometimes argued is the only book I’ve read that should be compulsory reading. The book is based on Frankl’s experience as a holocaust survivor, but ultimately led to a philosophy and a psychological method (for want of a better term) that he practiced as a psychologist.
I’ve also read another book of his, The Unconscious God, where he argues that there are 3 basic ways in which we find purpose or meaning in our lives. One, through a relationship; two through a project; and three through dealing with adversity. This last seems paradoxical, even oxymoronic, yet it is the premise of virtually every work of narrative fiction that all of us (who watch cinema or TV) imbibe with addictive enthusiasm. I’ve long argued that wisdom doesn’t come from achievements or education but dealing with adversity in our lives, which is impossible to avoid no matter who you are. It makes one think of Socrates' (attributed) famous aphorism: The unexamined life is not worth living. If we think about it, we only examine our lives when we fail. So a life without failure is not really much of a life. The corollary to this is that risk is essential to success and to gaining maturity in all things.
Humans are the most socially complex creatures on the planet – take language. I’ve recently read a book, Cosmo Sapiens; Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, by John Hands. It’s as ambitious as its title suggests and it took him 10 years to complete: very erudite and comprehensive, Hands challenges science orthodoxies without being anti-science. But his book is not the topic of this post, so I won’t distract you further. One of his many salient points is that humans are unique, not the least because of our ability for self-reflection. He contends that we are not the only species with the ability to ‘know’, but we are the only species who ‘know that we know’ (his words) or think about thinking (my words). The point is that cognitively we are distinct from every other species on the planet because we can consider and cogitate on our origins, our mortality and our place in the overall scheme of things, in ways that other species can’t possibly think about.
And language is the key attribute, because, without it, we can’t even think in the way that we all take for granted; yet it's derived from our social environment (we all had to be taught). I understand that children isolated from adults can develop their own language, but, even under these extremely rare circumstances, it requires social interaction to develop. This is a lengthy introduction to the fact that all of us require social interaction (virtually from birth) to have a meaningful life in any way, shape or form. We spend a large part of our lives interacting with others and, to a very large extent, the quality of that interaction determines the quality of our lives.
And this is a convoluted way of reaching the first of Frankl’s ‘ways of finding meaning’: through a relationship. For most of us this implies a conjugal relationship with all that entails. For many of us, in our youth, there is a tendency to put all our eggs in that particular basket. But with age, our perspective changes with lust playing a lesser role, whilst more resilient traits like friendship, reliance and trust become more important, even necessary, in long term relationships, upon which we build something meaningful for ourselves and others. For many people, I think children provide a purpose, not that I’ve ever had any, but it’s something I’ve observed.
I know from personal experience, that having a project can provide purpose, and for many people, myself included, it can seem necessary. We live in a society (in the West, anyway) where our work often defines us and gives us an identity. I think this has historical roots. Men, in particular, were defined by what they do, often following a family tradition. This idea of a hereditary role (for life) is not as prevalent as it once was, but I suspect it snuffed out the light of aspiration for many. A couple of weeks ago I saw David Stratton; a Cinematic Life, followed by a Q&A with the man himself. David, who is about a decade older than me, came to Australia and made a career as a film critic, becoming one of the most respected, not only in Australia, but in the world. However, the cost was the bitter disappointment expressed by his father for not taking over the family grocery business back in England. Women, on the other hand, were not allowed the luxury of finding their own independent identity until relatively recently in Western societies. It’s the word ‘independent’ that was their particular stumbling block, because, even in my postwar childhood, women were not meant to be independent of a man.
The movie, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, which I reviewed back in 2010, does a fair job of addressing this issue in the guise of cinematic entertainment. To illustrate my point, I’ll quote from my own post:
The movie opens with a montage of people being sacked (fired) with a voice-over of Clooney explaining his job. This cuts to the core of the movie for me: what do we live for? For many people their job defines them – it is their identity, in their own eyes and the eyes of their society. So cutting off someone’s job is like cutting off their life – it’s humiliating at the very least, suicidally depressing at worst and life-changing at best.
So purpose is something most of us pursue, either through relationships within our family or through our work or both. But many of you will be asking: is there a higher purpose? I can’t answer that, but I’ll provide my own philosophical slant on it.
Socrates (again), who was forced to take his own life (as a consequence of a democratic process, it should be noted) supposedly said, in addition to the well-worn trope quoted above: 'Whether death is a door to another world or an endless sleep, we don’t know'. And I would add: We are not meant to know. I’m agnostic about an afterlife, but, to be honest, I’m not expecting one, and I’ve provided my views elsewhere. But there is a point worth making, which is that people who believe that their next life is more important than the one they’re currently living often have a perverse, not to say destructive, view on mortality. One only has to look at suicide bombers who believe that their death is a ticket to Paradise.
Having said all that, it’s well known that people with religious beliefs can benefit psychologically in that they often live healthy and fulfilling lives (as the New Scientist article, referenced in the introduction, attests). Personally, I think that when one reaches the end of one’s life, they will judge it not by their achievements and successes but by the lives they have touched. Purpose can best be found when we help others, whether it be through work or family or sport or just normal everyday interactions with strangers.
Sunday 6 November 2016
Dr Strange; a surprisingly philosophical movie
I have to admit I wouldn’t have gone to see this based on the trailer, as it just appeared to be a special effects spectacular, which is what you expect from superhero movies. And it seemed very formulaic - an apprentice, a mentor, a villain who wants to destroy the world - you know the script. What changed my mind was a review by Stephen Romei in the Australian Weekend Review (29-30 Oct. 2016), who gave it 3.5 stars, and re-reading it, gives a lot of the plot away. I’ll try not to do that here, but I’m not promising.
Dr Stephen Strange is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is much better cast here than in The Imitation Game, which I thought was a travesty. As an aside, The Imitation Game was an insult to the real Alan Turing, but I don’t believe that was Cumberbatch’s fault. I blame the director, writers and producers, who, knowing the audience’s ignorance, gave them the caricature of genius that they expected the audience wanted to see.
Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange is a self-obsessed, egotistical, unapologetically self-promoting brain surgeon. He’s never known failure and that’s an important psychological point in my view. The first subliminal philosophical reference in this movie is the well-worn trope: the unexamined life is not worth living. This is pretty much the theme or premise of every story ever told. The point is that no one examines their life until they experience failure, and, of course, Strange faces failure of a catastrophic kind. Otherwise, there’d be no movie.
He then goes on a mystical journey, which many of us may have done at an intellectual level, but can only be done viscerally in the world of fiction. I should point out that I went through a prolonged ‘Eastern philosophy’ phase, which more or less followed on from the ‘Christian’ phase of my childhood. I’m now going through a mathematical phase, as anyone reading this blog could not have failed to notice.
Anyway, Strange’s journey is distinctly Eastern, which is the antithesis of his medical-science background. But he is introduced to an ‘astral’ or ‘spirit’ dimension, and there is a reference to the multiverse, which is a current scientific trope, if I may re-use that term in a different context. I don’t mind that ‘comic book’ movies allude to religious ideas or even that they mix them with science, because one can do that in fiction. I’ve done it myself. The multiverse is an allusion to everything that we don’t know scientifically (even in science) and is the current bulwark against metaphysics. Employing it in a fantasy movie to enhance the fantasy element is just clever storytelling. It embodies the idea, that is still very current in the East, that science cannot tell us everything.
There are 2 mythological references in the movie, including one biblical one. At one point the villain, Kaecilius (played by Mads Mikkelsen) attempts to seduce Strange to the ‘dark side’, which is very reminiscent of Satan’s attempt to seduce Jesus in the desert. I’ve always liked that particular biblical story, because it represents the corruption of power and status over the need to serve a disenfranchised public. In other words, it is an appeal to ego over the need to subordinate one’s ego for a greater good.
One of the themes of the story is mortality and immortality; something I’ve explored in my own fiction, possibly more explicitly. We live in a time where, as Woody Allen once explained in literary terms, we ‘suspend disbelief’ that we are going to live forever. We tend to avoid, in Western culture, any reference to mortality, yet it is an intrinsic part of life. We all eventually get there but refuse to face it until forced to. This is actually addressed in this movie, quite unexpectedly, as we don’t expect lessons in philosophy in a superhero movie.
Last but not least, there is a subtle but clever allusion to Camus’ famous retelling of the Greek Sisyphus myth (look it up), not something your average cinema audience member would be expected to know. It is embedded in one of those plot devices that I love: where the hero uses an unexpected ‘twist’, both literally and figuratively, and where brain defeats overwhelming force.
Dr Stephen Strange is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is much better cast here than in The Imitation Game, which I thought was a travesty. As an aside, The Imitation Game was an insult to the real Alan Turing, but I don’t believe that was Cumberbatch’s fault. I blame the director, writers and producers, who, knowing the audience’s ignorance, gave them the caricature of genius that they expected the audience wanted to see.
Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange is a self-obsessed, egotistical, unapologetically self-promoting brain surgeon. He’s never known failure and that’s an important psychological point in my view. The first subliminal philosophical reference in this movie is the well-worn trope: the unexamined life is not worth living. This is pretty much the theme or premise of every story ever told. The point is that no one examines their life until they experience failure, and, of course, Strange faces failure of a catastrophic kind. Otherwise, there’d be no movie.
He then goes on a mystical journey, which many of us may have done at an intellectual level, but can only be done viscerally in the world of fiction. I should point out that I went through a prolonged ‘Eastern philosophy’ phase, which more or less followed on from the ‘Christian’ phase of my childhood. I’m now going through a mathematical phase, as anyone reading this blog could not have failed to notice.
Anyway, Strange’s journey is distinctly Eastern, which is the antithesis of his medical-science background. But he is introduced to an ‘astral’ or ‘spirit’ dimension, and there is a reference to the multiverse, which is a current scientific trope, if I may re-use that term in a different context. I don’t mind that ‘comic book’ movies allude to religious ideas or even that they mix them with science, because one can do that in fiction. I’ve done it myself. The multiverse is an allusion to everything that we don’t know scientifically (even in science) and is the current bulwark against metaphysics. Employing it in a fantasy movie to enhance the fantasy element is just clever storytelling. It embodies the idea, that is still very current in the East, that science cannot tell us everything.
There are 2 mythological references in the movie, including one biblical one. At one point the villain, Kaecilius (played by Mads Mikkelsen) attempts to seduce Strange to the ‘dark side’, which is very reminiscent of Satan’s attempt to seduce Jesus in the desert. I’ve always liked that particular biblical story, because it represents the corruption of power and status over the need to serve a disenfranchised public. In other words, it is an appeal to ego over the need to subordinate one’s ego for a greater good.
One of the themes of the story is mortality and immortality; something I’ve explored in my own fiction, possibly more explicitly. We live in a time where, as Woody Allen once explained in literary terms, we ‘suspend disbelief’ that we are going to live forever. We tend to avoid, in Western culture, any reference to mortality, yet it is an intrinsic part of life. We all eventually get there but refuse to face it until forced to. This is actually addressed in this movie, quite unexpectedly, as we don’t expect lessons in philosophy in a superhero movie.
Last but not least, there is a subtle but clever allusion to Camus’ famous retelling of the Greek Sisyphus myth (look it up), not something your average cinema audience member would be expected to know. It is embedded in one of those plot devices that I love: where the hero uses an unexpected ‘twist’, both literally and figuratively, and where brain defeats overwhelming force.
Friday 6 May 2016
Is morality objective?
This is another 'Question of the Month' from Philosophy Now (Issue 113, April/May 2016).
There is a constraint on length (400 words) otherwise I'd elaborate more. I have addressed this issue before regarding a specific case, which I cite in my essay below.
There are two types of morality that co-exist virtually everywhere and at all times, yet they are, for the most part, poles apart. They are morality in theory and morality in practice and they align with objective morality and subjective morality respectively. I will demonstrate what I mean by example, but first I will elaborate on morality as it is practiced. For most people morality stems from cultural norms.
Many people rely on their conscience to determine their moral compass but one’s conscience is a social construct largely determined by one’s upbringing in whatever society one was born into. For example, in some societies, one can be made to feel guilty about the most natural impulses, like masturbation. Guilt and sex have been associated over generations but it is usually one-sided. Women are often forced to carry the greater burden of guilt and homosexuals can be forced to feel criminal. Both these examples illustrate how cultural norms determine the morality one was inculcated with from childhood.
In some societies there are cultural clashes, usually generational, where the same moral issue can inflame antithetical attitudes. For example, in India in December 2012, a young woman, Jyoti Singh, a recently graduated medical student, was raped and murdered on a bus after she went and saw a movie with her boyfriend. A documentary by British filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, revealed the cultural schism that exists in India over this issue. Some believed (including the lawyers representing the gang who committed the crime) that the girl was responsible for her own fate, whereas others campaigned to have rape laws strengthened. This demonstrates most starkly how culture determines moral values that become normative and then intransigent.
In many cultures it is taught that God determines moral values, and these are often the most prescriptive, oppressive, misogynistic and sometimes brutal examples of enforced cultural mores. People who practice this often claim that theirs is the only true objective morality, but, in truth, when one invokes God to rationalise one’s morality, anything, including the most savage actions, can be justified.
On the other hand, morality in theory is very simple: it is to treat everyone the same and give everyone the same rights, be they men, women, homosexuals, people of different faith or different skin colour. One only has to look at the treatment of refugees to realise how even the most liberal societies struggle with this precept.
There is a constraint on length (400 words) otherwise I'd elaborate more. I have addressed this issue before regarding a specific case, which I cite in my essay below.
There are two types of morality that co-exist virtually everywhere and at all times, yet they are, for the most part, poles apart. They are morality in theory and morality in practice and they align with objective morality and subjective morality respectively. I will demonstrate what I mean by example, but first I will elaborate on morality as it is practiced. For most people morality stems from cultural norms.
Many people rely on their conscience to determine their moral compass but one’s conscience is a social construct largely determined by one’s upbringing in whatever society one was born into. For example, in some societies, one can be made to feel guilty about the most natural impulses, like masturbation. Guilt and sex have been associated over generations but it is usually one-sided. Women are often forced to carry the greater burden of guilt and homosexuals can be forced to feel criminal. Both these examples illustrate how cultural norms determine the morality one was inculcated with from childhood.
In some societies there are cultural clashes, usually generational, where the same moral issue can inflame antithetical attitudes. For example, in India in December 2012, a young woman, Jyoti Singh, a recently graduated medical student, was raped and murdered on a bus after she went and saw a movie with her boyfriend. A documentary by British filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, revealed the cultural schism that exists in India over this issue. Some believed (including the lawyers representing the gang who committed the crime) that the girl was responsible for her own fate, whereas others campaigned to have rape laws strengthened. This demonstrates most starkly how culture determines moral values that become normative and then intransigent.
In many cultures it is taught that God determines moral values, and these are often the most prescriptive, oppressive, misogynistic and sometimes brutal examples of enforced cultural mores. People who practice this often claim that theirs is the only true objective morality, but, in truth, when one invokes God to rationalise one’s morality, anything, including the most savage actions, can be justified.
On the other hand, morality in theory is very simple: it is to treat everyone the same and give everyone the same rights, be they men, women, homosexuals, people of different faith or different skin colour. One only has to look at the treatment of refugees to realise how even the most liberal societies struggle with this precept.
Monday 14 March 2016
Argument, reason and belief
Recently in New Scientist (5 March 2016) there was a review of a book, The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry that Wants to Change Your Mind by James Garvey (which I must read), which tackles the issue of why argument by reason often fails. I’ve experienced this first hand on this blog, which has led me to the conclusion that you can’t explain something to someone who doesn’t want it explained. The book referenced above is more about how propaganda works, apparently, but that is not what I wish to discuss.
In the same vein, I’ve recently watched a number of YouTube videos covering excerpts from debates and interviews with scientists on the apparent conflict between science and religion. I say apparent because not all scientists are atheists and not all theologians are creationists, yet that is the impression one often gets from watching these.
The scientists I’ve been watching include Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye (aka the science guy) and Michio Kaku. I think Tyson presents the best arguments (from the small sample I watched) but Michio Kaku comes closest to presenting my own philosophical point of view. In one debate (see links at bottom) he says the ‘God question’ is ‘undecidable’ and predicts that, unlike many scientific questions of today, the God question will be no further advanced in 100 years time than it is in the current debate.
The issue, from my perspective, is that science and religion deal with completely different things. Science is an epistemology – it’s a study of the natural world in all its manifestations. Religion is something deeply personal and totally subjective, and that includes God. God is something people find inside themselves which is why said God has so many different personalities and prejudices depending on who the believer is. I’ve argued this before, so I won’t repeat myself.
At least 2 of the scientists I reference above (Dawkins and Tyson) point out something I’ve said myself: once you bring God into epistemology to explain some phenomenon that science can’t currently explain, you are saying we have come to the end of science. History has revealed many times over that something that was inexplicable in the past becomes explicable in the future. As I’ve said more than once on this blog: only people from the future can tell us how ignorant we are in the present. Tyson made the point that the apposite titled God-of-the-Gaps is actually a representation of our ignorance – a point I’ve made myself.
This does not mean that God does not exist; it means that God can’t help us with our science. People who argue that science can be replaced with Scripture are effectively arguing that science should be replaced by ignorance. The Old Testament was written by people who wanted to tell a story of their origins and it evolved into a text to scare people into believing that they are born intrinsically evil. At least that’s how it was presented to me as a child.
Of all the videos I watched, the most telling was an excerpt from a debate between Bill Nye (the science guy) and Ken Ham (the architect of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky). Ham effectively argued that science can only be done in the present. So-called historical science, giving the age of the Earth or the Universe, or its origins, cannot be determined using the same methods we use for current scientific investigations. When asked if any evidence could change his beliefs, he said there was no such evidence and the Bible was the sole criterion for his beliefs.
And this segues back into my introduction: you cannot explain something to someone who doesn’t want it explained. When I argue with someone or even present an argument on this blog, I don’t expect to change people’s points of view to mine; I expect to make them think. Hence the little aphorism in the blog’s title block.
One of the points made in the New Scientist review, referenced in my opening, is that people rarely if ever change their point of view even when presented with indisputable evidence or a proof. This is true even among scientists. We all try to hang on to our pet theories for as long as possible until they are no longer tenable. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, even though I’m not a scientist.
One of the things that helps perpetuate our stubbornness is confirmation bias (mentioned by New Scientist) whereby we tend to only read or listen to people whom we agree with. We do this with politics all the time. But I have read contrary points of view, usually given to me by people who think I’m biased. I’ve even read C.S. Lewis. What I find myself doing in these instances is arguing in my head with the authors. To give another example, I once read a book by Colin McGinn (Basic Structures of Reality) that only affirmed for me that people who don’t understand science shouldn’t write books about it, yet I still read it and even wrote a review of it on Amazon UK.
There is a thing called philosophy and it’s been married to science for many centuries. Despite what some people claim (Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking to mention 2) I can’t see a divorce any time soon. To use a visual metaphor, our knowledge is like an island surrounded by a sea of unsolved mysteries. The island keeps expanding but the sea is infinite. The island is science and the shoreline is philosophy. To extend the metaphor, our pet theories reside on the beach.
Noson Yanofsky, a Professor of Computer and Information Science in New York, wrote an excellent book called The Outer Limits of Reason, whereby he explained how we will never know everything – it’s cognitively and physically impossible. History has demonstrated that every generation believes that we almost know everything that science can reveal, yet every revelation only reveals new mysteries.
This is a video of Michio Kaku and Richard Dawkins, amongst others, giving their views on science, God and religion.
This is a short video of Leonard Susskind explaining 2 types of agnosticism, one of which he seems to concur with.
In the same vein, I’ve recently watched a number of YouTube videos covering excerpts from debates and interviews with scientists on the apparent conflict between science and religion. I say apparent because not all scientists are atheists and not all theologians are creationists, yet that is the impression one often gets from watching these.
The scientists I’ve been watching include Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye (aka the science guy) and Michio Kaku. I think Tyson presents the best arguments (from the small sample I watched) but Michio Kaku comes closest to presenting my own philosophical point of view. In one debate (see links at bottom) he says the ‘God question’ is ‘undecidable’ and predicts that, unlike many scientific questions of today, the God question will be no further advanced in 100 years time than it is in the current debate.
The issue, from my perspective, is that science and religion deal with completely different things. Science is an epistemology – it’s a study of the natural world in all its manifestations. Religion is something deeply personal and totally subjective, and that includes God. God is something people find inside themselves which is why said God has so many different personalities and prejudices depending on who the believer is. I’ve argued this before, so I won’t repeat myself.
At least 2 of the scientists I reference above (Dawkins and Tyson) point out something I’ve said myself: once you bring God into epistemology to explain some phenomenon that science can’t currently explain, you are saying we have come to the end of science. History has revealed many times over that something that was inexplicable in the past becomes explicable in the future. As I’ve said more than once on this blog: only people from the future can tell us how ignorant we are in the present. Tyson made the point that the apposite titled God-of-the-Gaps is actually a representation of our ignorance – a point I’ve made myself.
This does not mean that God does not exist; it means that God can’t help us with our science. People who argue that science can be replaced with Scripture are effectively arguing that science should be replaced by ignorance. The Old Testament was written by people who wanted to tell a story of their origins and it evolved into a text to scare people into believing that they are born intrinsically evil. At least that’s how it was presented to me as a child.
Of all the videos I watched, the most telling was an excerpt from a debate between Bill Nye (the science guy) and Ken Ham (the architect of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky). Ham effectively argued that science can only be done in the present. So-called historical science, giving the age of the Earth or the Universe, or its origins, cannot be determined using the same methods we use for current scientific investigations. When asked if any evidence could change his beliefs, he said there was no such evidence and the Bible was the sole criterion for his beliefs.
And this segues back into my introduction: you cannot explain something to someone who doesn’t want it explained. When I argue with someone or even present an argument on this blog, I don’t expect to change people’s points of view to mine; I expect to make them think. Hence the little aphorism in the blog’s title block.
One of the points made in the New Scientist review, referenced in my opening, is that people rarely if ever change their point of view even when presented with indisputable evidence or a proof. This is true even among scientists. We all try to hang on to our pet theories for as long as possible until they are no longer tenable. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, even though I’m not a scientist.
One of the things that helps perpetuate our stubbornness is confirmation bias (mentioned by New Scientist) whereby we tend to only read or listen to people whom we agree with. We do this with politics all the time. But I have read contrary points of view, usually given to me by people who think I’m biased. I’ve even read C.S. Lewis. What I find myself doing in these instances is arguing in my head with the authors. To give another example, I once read a book by Colin McGinn (Basic Structures of Reality) that only affirmed for me that people who don’t understand science shouldn’t write books about it, yet I still read it and even wrote a review of it on Amazon UK.
There is a thing called philosophy and it’s been married to science for many centuries. Despite what some people claim (Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking to mention 2) I can’t see a divorce any time soon. To use a visual metaphor, our knowledge is like an island surrounded by a sea of unsolved mysteries. The island keeps expanding but the sea is infinite. The island is science and the shoreline is philosophy. To extend the metaphor, our pet theories reside on the beach.
Noson Yanofsky, a Professor of Computer and Information Science in New York, wrote an excellent book called The Outer Limits of Reason, whereby he explained how we will never know everything – it’s cognitively and physically impossible. History has demonstrated that every generation believes that we almost know everything that science can reveal, yet every revelation only reveals new mysteries.
This is a video of Michio Kaku and Richard Dawkins, amongst others, giving their views on science, God and religion.
This is a short video of Leonard Susskind explaining 2 types of agnosticism, one of which he seems to concur with.
Tuesday 2 February 2016
Creation Science: a non sequitur
A friend of mine – someone whom I’d go to for help – leant me a ‘Creation’ magazine to prove that there are creationists who are real scientists. And, I have to admit, my friend was right: the magazine was full of contributors who had degrees in science, including one who has a PhD and honours and works at a run-of-the-mill university; but who wrote the following howler: ‘Cosmology is unscientific because you can’t do an experiment in cosmology.’ I wonder if said writer would be willing to say that to Australian Nobel Prize winner, Brian Schmidt. Only humans can be living contradictions.
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.
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.
Tuesday 15 December 2015
The battle for the future of Islam
There are many works of fiction featuring battles between ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’, yet it would not be distorting the truth to say that we are witnessing one now, though I think it is largely misconstrued by those of us who are on the sidelines. We see it as a conflict between Islam and the West, when it’s actually within Islam itself. This came home to me when I recently saw the biographical movie, He Named Me Malala (pronounce Ma-la-li, by the way).
Malala is well known as the 14 year old Pakistani school girl, shot in the head on a school bus by the Taliban for her outspoken views on education for girls in Pakistan. Now 18 years old (when the film was made) she has since won the Nobel Peace Prize and spoken in the United Nations, as well as having audiences with world leaders, like Barak Obama. In a recent interview with Emma Watson (on Emma’s Facebook page) she appeared much wiser than her years. In the movie, amongst her family, she behaves like an ordinary teenager with ‘crushes’ on famous sports stars. In effect, her personal battle with the Taliban represents in microcosm a much wider battle between past and future that is occurring on the world stage within Islam. A battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims all over the world.
IS or ISIS or Daesh has arisen out of conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis in both Iraq and Syria, but the declaration of a Caliphate has led to a much more serious, even sinister, connotation, because its followers believe they are fulfilling a prophecy which will only be resolved with the biblical end of the world. I’m not an Islamic scholar, so I’m quoting from Audrey Borowski, currently doing a PhD at the University of London, who holds a MSt (Masters degree) in Islamic Studies from Oxford University. She asserts: ‘…one of the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest hadith (sayings) locates the fateful showdown between Christians and Muslims that heralds the apocalypse in the city of Dabiq in Syria.’
“The Hour will not be established until the Romans (Christians) land at Dabiq. Then an army from Medina of the best people on the earth at that time… will fight them.”
She wrote an article of some length in Philosophy Now (Issue 111, Dec. 2015/Jan. 2016) titled Al Qaeda and ISIS; From Revolution to Apocalypse.
The point is that if someone believes they are in a fight for the end of the world, then destroying entire populations and cities is not off the table. They could resort to any tactic, like contaminating water supplies of entire cities or destroying food crops on a large scale. I alluded in the introduction that this apocalyptic ideology, in a fictional context, represents a classic contest between good and evil. From where I (and most people reading this blog) stand, anyone intent on destroying civilization as we know it, would be considered the ultimate evil.
What is most difficult for us to comprehend is that the perpetrators, the people ‘on the other side’ would see the roles reversed. Earlier this year (April 2015), I wrote a post titled Morality is totally in the eye of the beholder, where I explained how two different cultures in the same country (India) could have completely opposing views concerning a crime against a young woman, who was raped and murdered on a bus returning from seeing a movie with her boyfriend. One view was that the girl was the victim of a crime and the other view was that the girl was responsible for her own fate.
Many people have trouble believing that otherwise ordinary people, who commit evil acts in the form of atrocities, would see themselves as not being evil. We have an enormous capacity to justify to ourselves the most heinous acts, and no where is this more evident, than when one believes they are performing the ‘Will of God’. This is certainly the case with IS and their followers.
Unfortunately, this has led to a backlash in the West against all Muslims. In particular, we see both in social media and mainstream media, and even amongst mainstream politicians, a sentiment that Islam is fundamentally flawed and needs to be reformed. It seems to me that they are unaware that there is already a battle happening within Islam, where militant bodies like IS and Boko Haram and the Taliban represent the worse and a young schoolgirl from Pakistan represents the best.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (whom I wrote about in March 2011), said when she was in Australia many years ago, that Islam was not compatible with a secular society, which is certainly true if Islamists wish to establish a religious-based government. There is a group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, who is banned in most Western countries, but not UK or Australia, and whose stated aim is to form a caliphate and whose political agenda, including the introduction of Sharia law, would clearly conflict with Australian law. But the truth is that there are many Muslims living an active and productive life in Australia, whilst still practising their religion. A secular society is not an atheistic society, yet is religiously nondependent by definition. In other words, there is room for variety in religious practice and that is what we see. Extremists of any religious persuasion are generally not well received in a pluralist multicultural society, yet that is the fear that is driving the debate in many secular societies.
Over a year ago (Aug 2014) I wrote a post titled Don’t judge all Muslims the same, based on another article I read in Philosophy Now (Issue 104, May/Jun 2014) by Terri Murray (Master of Theology, Heythrop College, London) who made a very salient point differentiating cultural values and ideals from individual ones. In particular, she asserted that an individual’s rights overrules the so-called rights of a culture or a community. Therefore, misogynistic issues like female genital mutilation, honour killings, child marriage, all of which are illegal in Australia, are abuses of individual rights that may be condoned, even considered normal practice, in some cultures.
Getting back to my original subject matter, like the case of the Indian girl (a medical graduate) who was murdered for going on a date, this really is a battle between past and future. IS and the Taliban and their variant Islamic ideologies represent a desire to regain a past that has no relevance in the 21st Century – it’s mediaeval, not only in concept but also in practice. One of the consequences of the Internet is that it has become a vehicle for both sides. So young women in far off countries are learning that there is another world where education can lead to a better life. And this is the key: education of women, as Malala has brought to the world’s attention, is the only true way forward. It’s curious that women are what these regimes seem to fear most, including IS, whose greatest fear is to be killed by a female Kurdish warrior, because then they won’t get to Paradise.
Malala is well known as the 14 year old Pakistani school girl, shot in the head on a school bus by the Taliban for her outspoken views on education for girls in Pakistan. Now 18 years old (when the film was made) she has since won the Nobel Peace Prize and spoken in the United Nations, as well as having audiences with world leaders, like Barak Obama. In a recent interview with Emma Watson (on Emma’s Facebook page) she appeared much wiser than her years. In the movie, amongst her family, she behaves like an ordinary teenager with ‘crushes’ on famous sports stars. In effect, her personal battle with the Taliban represents in microcosm a much wider battle between past and future that is occurring on the world stage within Islam. A battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims all over the world.
IS or ISIS or Daesh has arisen out of conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis in both Iraq and Syria, but the declaration of a Caliphate has led to a much more serious, even sinister, connotation, because its followers believe they are fulfilling a prophecy which will only be resolved with the biblical end of the world. I’m not an Islamic scholar, so I’m quoting from Audrey Borowski, currently doing a PhD at the University of London, who holds a MSt (Masters degree) in Islamic Studies from Oxford University. She asserts: ‘…one of the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest hadith (sayings) locates the fateful showdown between Christians and Muslims that heralds the apocalypse in the city of Dabiq in Syria.’
“The Hour will not be established until the Romans (Christians) land at Dabiq. Then an army from Medina of the best people on the earth at that time… will fight them.”
She wrote an article of some length in Philosophy Now (Issue 111, Dec. 2015/Jan. 2016) titled Al Qaeda and ISIS; From Revolution to Apocalypse.
The point is that if someone believes they are in a fight for the end of the world, then destroying entire populations and cities is not off the table. They could resort to any tactic, like contaminating water supplies of entire cities or destroying food crops on a large scale. I alluded in the introduction that this apocalyptic ideology, in a fictional context, represents a classic contest between good and evil. From where I (and most people reading this blog) stand, anyone intent on destroying civilization as we know it, would be considered the ultimate evil.
What is most difficult for us to comprehend is that the perpetrators, the people ‘on the other side’ would see the roles reversed. Earlier this year (April 2015), I wrote a post titled Morality is totally in the eye of the beholder, where I explained how two different cultures in the same country (India) could have completely opposing views concerning a crime against a young woman, who was raped and murdered on a bus returning from seeing a movie with her boyfriend. One view was that the girl was the victim of a crime and the other view was that the girl was responsible for her own fate.
Many people have trouble believing that otherwise ordinary people, who commit evil acts in the form of atrocities, would see themselves as not being evil. We have an enormous capacity to justify to ourselves the most heinous acts, and no where is this more evident, than when one believes they are performing the ‘Will of God’. This is certainly the case with IS and their followers.
Unfortunately, this has led to a backlash in the West against all Muslims. In particular, we see both in social media and mainstream media, and even amongst mainstream politicians, a sentiment that Islam is fundamentally flawed and needs to be reformed. It seems to me that they are unaware that there is already a battle happening within Islam, where militant bodies like IS and Boko Haram and the Taliban represent the worse and a young schoolgirl from Pakistan represents the best.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (whom I wrote about in March 2011), said when she was in Australia many years ago, that Islam was not compatible with a secular society, which is certainly true if Islamists wish to establish a religious-based government. There is a group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, who is banned in most Western countries, but not UK or Australia, and whose stated aim is to form a caliphate and whose political agenda, including the introduction of Sharia law, would clearly conflict with Australian law. But the truth is that there are many Muslims living an active and productive life in Australia, whilst still practising their religion. A secular society is not an atheistic society, yet is religiously nondependent by definition. In other words, there is room for variety in religious practice and that is what we see. Extremists of any religious persuasion are generally not well received in a pluralist multicultural society, yet that is the fear that is driving the debate in many secular societies.
Over a year ago (Aug 2014) I wrote a post titled Don’t judge all Muslims the same, based on another article I read in Philosophy Now (Issue 104, May/Jun 2014) by Terri Murray (Master of Theology, Heythrop College, London) who made a very salient point differentiating cultural values and ideals from individual ones. In particular, she asserted that an individual’s rights overrules the so-called rights of a culture or a community. Therefore, misogynistic issues like female genital mutilation, honour killings, child marriage, all of which are illegal in Australia, are abuses of individual rights that may be condoned, even considered normal practice, in some cultures.
Getting back to my original subject matter, like the case of the Indian girl (a medical graduate) who was murdered for going on a date, this really is a battle between past and future. IS and the Taliban and their variant Islamic ideologies represent a desire to regain a past that has no relevance in the 21st Century – it’s mediaeval, not only in concept but also in practice. One of the consequences of the Internet is that it has become a vehicle for both sides. So young women in far off countries are learning that there is another world where education can lead to a better life. And this is the key: education of women, as Malala has brought to the world’s attention, is the only true way forward. It’s curious that women are what these regimes seem to fear most, including IS, whose greatest fear is to be killed by a female Kurdish warrior, because then they won’t get to Paradise.
Saturday 14 November 2015
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
I originally called this post: Two miracles that are fundamental to the Universe and our place in it. The miracles I’m referring to will not be found in any scripture and God is not a necessary participant, with the emphasis on necessary. I am one of those rare dabblers in philosophy who argues that science is neutral on the subject of God. A definition of miracle is required, so for the purpose of this discussion, I call a miracle something that can’t be explained, yet has profound and far-reaching consequences. ‘Something’, in this context, could be described as a concordance of unexpected relationships in completely different realms.
This is one of those posts that will upset people on both sides of the religious divide, I’m sure, but it’s been rattling around in my head ever since I re-read Eugene P. Wigner’s seminal essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. I came across it (again) in a collection of essays under the collective title, Math Angst, contained in a volume called The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics edited by Timothy Ferris (1991). This is a collection of essays and excerpts by some of the greatest minds in physics, mathematics and cosmology in the 20th Century.
Back to Wigner, in discussing the significance of complex numbers in quantum mechanics, specifically Hilbert’s space, he remarks:
‘…complex numbers are far from natural or simple and they cannot be suggested by physical observations. Furthermore, the use of complex numbers in this case is not a calculated trick of applied mathematics but comes close to being a necessity in the formulation of the laws of quantum mechanics.’
It is well known, among physicists, that in the language of mathematics, quantum mechanics not only makes perfect sense but is one of the most successful physical theories ever. But in ordinary language it is hard to make sense of it in any way that ordinary people would comprehend it.
It is in this context that Wigner makes the following statement in the next paragraph following the quote above:
‘It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here… or the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.’
Hence the 2 miracles I refer to in my introduction. The key that links the 2 miracles is mathematics. A number of physicists: Paul Davies, Roger Penrose, John Barrow (they’re just the ones I’ve read); have commented on the inordinate correspondence we find between mathematics and regularities found in natural phenomena that have been dubbed ‘laws of nature’.
The first miracle is that mathematics seems to underpin everything we know and learn about the Universe, including ourselves. As Barrow has pointed out, mathematics allows us to predict the makeup of fundamental elements in the first 3 minutes of the Universe. It provides us with the field equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic radiation, Schrodinger’s wave function in quantum mechanics and the four digit software code for all biological life we call DNA.
The second miracle is that the human mind is uniquely evolved to access mathematics to an extraordinarily deep and meaningful degree that has nothing to do with our everyday prosaic survival but everything to do with our ability to comprehend the Universe in all the facets I listed above.
The 2 miracles combined give us the greatest mystery of the Universe, which I’ve stated many times on this blog: It created the means to understand itself, through us.
So where does God fit into this? Interestingly, I would argue that when it comes to mathematics, God has no choice. Einstein once asked the rhetorical question, in correspondence with his friend, Paul Ehrenfest (if I recall it correctly): did God have any choice in determining the laws of the Universe? This question is probably unanswerable, but when it comes to mathematics, I would answer in the negative. If one looks at prime numbers (there are other examples, but primes are fundamental) it’s self-evident that they are self-selected by their very definition – God didn’t choose them.
The interesting thing about primes is that they are the ‘atoms’ of mathematics because all the other ‘natural’ numbers can be determined from all the primes, all the way to infinity. The other interesting thing is that Riemann’s hypothesis indicates that primes have a deep and unexpected relationship with some of the most esoteric areas of mathematics. So, if one was a religious person, one might suggest that this is surely the handiwork of God, yet God can’t even affect the fundamentals upon which all this rests.
Addendum: I changed the title to reflect the title of Wigner's essay, for web-search purposes.
This is one of those posts that will upset people on both sides of the religious divide, I’m sure, but it’s been rattling around in my head ever since I re-read Eugene P. Wigner’s seminal essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. I came across it (again) in a collection of essays under the collective title, Math Angst, contained in a volume called The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics edited by Timothy Ferris (1991). This is a collection of essays and excerpts by some of the greatest minds in physics, mathematics and cosmology in the 20th Century.
Back to Wigner, in discussing the significance of complex numbers in quantum mechanics, specifically Hilbert’s space, he remarks:
‘…complex numbers are far from natural or simple and they cannot be suggested by physical observations. Furthermore, the use of complex numbers in this case is not a calculated trick of applied mathematics but comes close to being a necessity in the formulation of the laws of quantum mechanics.’
It is well known, among physicists, that in the language of mathematics, quantum mechanics not only makes perfect sense but is one of the most successful physical theories ever. But in ordinary language it is hard to make sense of it in any way that ordinary people would comprehend it.
It is in this context that Wigner makes the following statement in the next paragraph following the quote above:
‘It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here… or the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.’
Hence the 2 miracles I refer to in my introduction. The key that links the 2 miracles is mathematics. A number of physicists: Paul Davies, Roger Penrose, John Barrow (they’re just the ones I’ve read); have commented on the inordinate correspondence we find between mathematics and regularities found in natural phenomena that have been dubbed ‘laws of nature’.
The first miracle is that mathematics seems to underpin everything we know and learn about the Universe, including ourselves. As Barrow has pointed out, mathematics allows us to predict the makeup of fundamental elements in the first 3 minutes of the Universe. It provides us with the field equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic radiation, Schrodinger’s wave function in quantum mechanics and the four digit software code for all biological life we call DNA.
The second miracle is that the human mind is uniquely evolved to access mathematics to an extraordinarily deep and meaningful degree that has nothing to do with our everyday prosaic survival but everything to do with our ability to comprehend the Universe in all the facets I listed above.
The 2 miracles combined give us the greatest mystery of the Universe, which I’ve stated many times on this blog: It created the means to understand itself, through us.
So where does God fit into this? Interestingly, I would argue that when it comes to mathematics, God has no choice. Einstein once asked the rhetorical question, in correspondence with his friend, Paul Ehrenfest (if I recall it correctly): did God have any choice in determining the laws of the Universe? This question is probably unanswerable, but when it comes to mathematics, I would answer in the negative. If one looks at prime numbers (there are other examples, but primes are fundamental) it’s self-evident that they are self-selected by their very definition – God didn’t choose them.
The interesting thing about primes is that they are the ‘atoms’ of mathematics because all the other ‘natural’ numbers can be determined from all the primes, all the way to infinity. The other interesting thing is that Riemann’s hypothesis indicates that primes have a deep and unexpected relationship with some of the most esoteric areas of mathematics. So, if one was a religious person, one might suggest that this is surely the handiwork of God, yet God can’t even affect the fundamentals upon which all this rests.
Addendum: I changed the title to reflect the title of Wigner's essay, for web-search purposes.
Sunday 13 September 2015
Physics, mathematics, the Universe - is Reason its raison d'être?
I’ve just read Paul Davies’ The Mind of God: Science & The Search for Ultimate Meaning, published in 1992, so a couple of decades old now. He wrote this as a follow-up to God and the New Physics, which I read some years ago. This book is more philosophical and tends to deal with cosmology and the laws of physics – it’s as much about epistemology and the history of science as about the science itself. Despite its age, it’s still very relevant, especially in regard to the relationship between science and religion and science and mathematics, both of which he discusses in some depth.
Davies is currently at The University of Arizona (along with Lawrence Krauss, who wrote A Universe from Nothing, amongst others), but at the time he wrote The Mind of God, Davies was living and working in Australia, where he wrote a number of books over a couple of decades. He was born and educated in England, so he’s lived on 3 continents.
Davies is often quoted out of context by Christian fundamentalists, giving the impression that he supports their views, but anyone who reads his books knows that’s far from the truth. When he first arrived in America, he was sometimes criticised on blogs for ‘promoting his own version of religion’, usually by people who had heard of him but never actually read him. From my experience of reading on the internet, religion is a sensitive topic in America on both sides of the religious divide, so unless your views are black or white you can be criticised by both sides. It’s worth noting that I’ve heard or read Richard Dawkins reference Davies on more than a few occasions, always with respect, even though Davies is not atheistic.
Davies declares his philosophical position very early on, which is definitely at odds with the generally held scientific point of view regarding where we stand in the scheme of things:
I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident… I have come to the point of view that mind – i.e., conscious awareness of the world – is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an absolute fundamental facet of reality. That is not to say that we are the purpose for which the universe exists. Far from it. I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way.
In a fashion, this is a formulation of the Strong Anthropic Principle, which most scientists, I expect, would eschew, but it’s one that I find appealing, much for the same reasons given by Davies. The Universe is such a complex phenomenon, its evolvement (thus far) culminating in the emergence of an intelligence able to fathom its own secrets at extreme scales of magnitude in both space and time. I’ve alluded to this ‘mystery’ in previous posts, so Davies’ philosophy appeals to me personally, and his book, in part, attempts to tackle this very topic.
Amongst other things, he gives a potted history of science from the ancients (especially the Greeks, but other cultures as well) and how it has largely replaced religion as the means to understand natural phenomena at all levels. This has resulted in a ‘God-of-the-Gaps’, where, epistemologically, scientific investigations and discoveries have gradually pushed God out of the picture. He also discusses the implications of a God existing outside of space and time actually creating a ‘beginning’. The idea of a God setting everything in motion (via the Big Bang) and then watching his creation evolve over billions of years like a wound up watch (Davies’ analogy) is no more appealing than the idea of a God who has to make adjustments or rewind it occasionally, to extend the metaphor.
In discussing how the scientific enterprise evolved, in particular how we search for the cause of events, reminded me of my own attraction to science from a very early age. Children are forever asking ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions – we have a natural inclination to wonder how things work – and by the time I’d reached my teens, I’d realised that science was the best means to pursue this.
Davies gives an example of Newton coming up with mathematical laws to explain gravity that not only provided a method to calculate projectiles on Earth but also the orbits of planets in the solar system. Brian Cox in a documentary on Gravity, wrote the equation down on a piece of paper, borrowing a pen from his cameraman, to demonstrate how simple it is. But Newton couldn’t explain why everything didn’t simply collapse in on itself and evoked God as the explanation for keeping the clockwork universe functioning. So Newton’s explanation of gravity, albeit a work of genius, didn’t go far enough.
Einstein then came up with his theory that gravity was a consequence of the curvature of space-time caused by mass, but, as Cox points out in his documentary, Einstein’s explanation doesn’t go far enough either, and there are still aspects of gravity we don’t understand, at the quantum level and in black holes where the laws of physics as we know them break down. As an aside, it’s the centenary year of Einstein publishing his General Theory of Relativity and I’ve just finished reading a book (The Road to Relativity by Hanoch Gutfreund and Jurgen Renn) which goes through the original manuscript page by page explaining Einstein’s creative process.
But back to Newton’s theory, I remember, in high school, trying to understand why acceleration in a gravitational field was the same irrespective of the mass of the body, and I could only resort to the mathematics to give me an answer, which didn’t seem satisfactory. I can also remember watching a light plane in flight over our house and seeing it side-slipping in the wind. In other words, the direction of the nose was slightly offset to its direction of travel to counter a side wind. I remember imagining the vectors at play and realising that I could work them out with basic trigonometry. It made me wonder for the first time, why did mathematics provide an answer and an explanation – what was the link between mathematics, a product of the mind, and a mechanical event, a consequence of the physical world?
I’ve written quite a lot on the topic of mathematics and its relationship to the laws of nature; Davies goes into this in some depth. It is worth quoting him on the subject, especially in regard to the often stated scepticism that the laws of nature only exist in our minds.
Sometimes it is argued that laws of nature, which are attempts to capture [nature’s] regularities systematically, are imposed on the world by our minds in order to make sense of it… I believe any suggestion that the laws of nature are similar projections of the human mind [to seeing animals in the constellations, for example] is absurd. The existence of regularities in nature are a mathematical objective fact… Without this assumption that the regularities are real, science is reduced to a meaningless charade.
He adds the caveat that the laws as written are ‘human inventions, but inventions designed to reflect, albeit imperfectly, actually existing properties of nature.’ Every scientist knows that our rendition of nature’s laws have inherent limitations, despite their accuracy and success, but quite often they provide new insights that we didn’t expect. Well known examples are Maxwell’s equations predicting electromagnetic waves and the constant speed of light, and Dirac’s equation predicting anti-matter. Most famously, Einstein’s special theory of relativity predicted the equivalence of energy and mass, which was demonstrated with the detonation of the atomic bomb. All these predictions were an unexpected consequence of the mathematics.
Referring back to Gutfreund’s and Renn’s book on Einstein’s search for a theory of gravity that went beyond Newton but was consistent with Newton, Einstein knew he had to find a mathematical description that not only fulfilled all his criteria regarding relativistic space-time and the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, but would also provide testable predictions like the bending of light near massive stellar objects (stars) and the precession of mercury’s orbit around the sun. We all know that Riemann’s non-Euclidian geometry gave him the mathematical formulation he needed and it’s been extraordinarily successful thus far, despite the limitations I mentioned earlier.
Davies covers quite a lot in his discussion on mathematics, including a very good exposition on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Turing’s proof of infinite incomputable numbers, John Conway’s game of life with cellular automata and Von Neuman’s detailed investigation of self-replicating machines, which effectively foreshadowed the mechanics of biological life before DNA was discovered.
In the middle of all this, Davies makes an extraordinary claim, based on reasoning by Oxford mathematical physicist David Deutsch (the most vocal advocate for the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and a leader in quantum computer development). Effectively, Deutsch argues that mathematics works in the real world (including electronic calculators and computers) not because of logic but because the physical world (via the laws of physics) is amenable to basic arithmetic: addition, subtraction etc. In other words, he’s basically saying that we only have mathematics because there are objects in our world that we can count. In effect, this is exactly what Davies says.
This is not the extraordinary claim. The extraordinary claim is that there may exist universes where mathematics, as we know it, doesn’t work, because there are no discrete objects. Davies extrapolates this to say that a problem that is incomputable with our mathematics may be computable with alternative mathematics that, I assume, is not based on counting. I have to confess I have issues with this.
To start from scratch, mathematics starts with numbers, which we all become acquainted with from an early age by counting objects. It’s a small step to get addition from counting but quite a large step to then abstract it from the real world, so the numbers only exist in our heads. Multiplication is simply adding something a number of times and subtraction is simply taking away something that was added so you get back to where you started. The same is true for division where you divide something you multiplied to go backwards in your calculation. In other words, subtraction and division are just the reverse operations for addition and multiplication respectively. Then you replace some of the numbers by letters as ‘unknowns’ and you suddenly have algebra. Now you’re doing mathematics.
The point I’d make, in reference to Davies’ claim, is that mathematics without numbers is not mathematics. And numbers may be to a different base or use different symbols, but they will all produce the same mathematics. I agree with Deutsch that mathematics is intrinsic to our world – none of us would do mathematics if it wasn’t. But I find the notion that there could hypothetically exist worlds where mathematics is not relevant or is not dependent on number, absurd, to use one of Davies’ favourite utterances.
Earlier in the book, Davies expresses scepticism at the idea that the laws of nature could arise with the universe – that they didn’t exist beforehand. In other words, he’s effectively arguing that they are transcendent. Since the laws are firmly based in mathematics, it’s hard to argue that the laws are transcendent but the mathematics is not.
I have enormous respect for Davies, and I wonder if I’m misrepresenting him. But this is what he said, albeit out of context:
Imagine a world in which the laws of physics were very different, possibly so different that discreet objects did not exist. Some of the mathematical operations that are computable in our world would not be so in this world, and vice versa.
Speaking of mathematical transcendence, he devotes almost an entire chapter to the underlying mystery of mathematics’ role in explicating natural phenomena through physics, with particular reference to mathematical Platonists like Kurt Godel, Eugene Wigner and Roger Penrose. But it’s a quote from Richard Feynman, who was not a Platonist as far as I know, that sums up the theme.
When you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere… Well, in the case of physics we have double trouble. We come across these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe, so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing… Those are philosophical questions that I don’t know how to answer.
Interestingly, in his later book, The Goldilocks Enigma (2006), Davies distances himself from mathematical Platonism and seems to espouse John Wheeler’s view that both the mathematics and the laws of nature emerged ‘higgledy-piggledy’ and are not transcendent. He also tackles the inherent conflict between the Strong Anthropic Principle, which he seems to support, and a non-teleological universe, which science virtually demands, but I’ll address that later.
Back to The Mind of God, he discusses in depth one of the paradigms of our age that the Universe can be totally understood by algorithms leading to the possibility that the Universe we live in is a Matrix-like computer simulation. Again, referring to The Goldilocks Enigma, he discounts this view as a variation on Intelligent Design. Towards the end of Mind of God, he discusses metaphysical, even mystical possibilities, but not as a replacement for science.
But one interesting point he makes, that I’ve never heard of before, was proposed by James Hartle and Murray Gellmann, who claim:
…that the existence of an approximately classical world, in which well-defined material objects exist in space, and in which there is a well-defined concept of time, requires special cosmic initial conditions.
In other words, they’re saying that the Universe would be a purely quantum world with everything in superpositional states (nothing would be fixed in space and time) were it not for ‘the special quantum state in which the universe originated.’ James Hartle developed with Stephen Hawking the Hawking-Hartle model of the Universe where time evolved out of a 4th dimension in a quantum big bang. It may be that Hartle’s and Gellmann’s conjecture is dependent on the veracity of that particular model. The link between the two ideas is only alluded to by Davies.
Apropos to the book’s title, Davies spends an entire chapter on ‘God’ arguments, in particular cosmological and ontological arguments that require a level of philosophical nous that, frankly, I don’t possess. Having said that, it became obvious to me that arguments for God are more dependent on subjective ‘feelings’ than rational requirements. After lengthy discussions on ‘necessary being’ and a ‘contingent universe’, and the tension if not outright contradiction the two ideas pose, Davies pretty well sums up the situation with this:
What seems to come through such analyses loud and clear is the fundamental incompatibility of a completely timeless, unchanging, necessary God with the notion of creativity in nature, with a universe that can change and evolve and bring forth the genuinely new…
In light of this, the only ‘God’ that makes sense to me is one that evolves like ‘Its’ creation and, in effect, is a consequence of it rather than its progenitor.
One of the points that Davies makes is how the Universe is not strictly deterministic or teleological, yet it allows for self-organisation and the evolvement of complexity; in essence, a freedom of evolvement without dictating it. I would call this pseudo-teleological and is completely consistent with both quantum and chaotic events, which dominate all natural phenomena from cosmological origins to the biological evolution of life.
This brings one back to the quote from Davies at the beginning of this discussion that the universe is not a meaningless accident. Inherent in the idea of meaningfulness is the necessary emergence of consciousness and its role as the prime source of reason. If not for reason the Universe would have no cognisance of its own existence and it would be truly ‘purposeless’ in every way. It is for this reason that people believe in God, in whatever guise they find him (or her, as the case may be). Because we can find reason in living our lives and use reason to understand the Universe, the idea that the Universe itself has no reason is difficult to reconcile.
Davies is currently at The University of Arizona (along with Lawrence Krauss, who wrote A Universe from Nothing, amongst others), but at the time he wrote The Mind of God, Davies was living and working in Australia, where he wrote a number of books over a couple of decades. He was born and educated in England, so he’s lived on 3 continents.
Davies is often quoted out of context by Christian fundamentalists, giving the impression that he supports their views, but anyone who reads his books knows that’s far from the truth. When he first arrived in America, he was sometimes criticised on blogs for ‘promoting his own version of religion’, usually by people who had heard of him but never actually read him. From my experience of reading on the internet, religion is a sensitive topic in America on both sides of the religious divide, so unless your views are black or white you can be criticised by both sides. It’s worth noting that I’ve heard or read Richard Dawkins reference Davies on more than a few occasions, always with respect, even though Davies is not atheistic.
Davies declares his philosophical position very early on, which is definitely at odds with the generally held scientific point of view regarding where we stand in the scheme of things:
I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident… I have come to the point of view that mind – i.e., conscious awareness of the world – is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an absolute fundamental facet of reality. That is not to say that we are the purpose for which the universe exists. Far from it. I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way.
In a fashion, this is a formulation of the Strong Anthropic Principle, which most scientists, I expect, would eschew, but it’s one that I find appealing, much for the same reasons given by Davies. The Universe is such a complex phenomenon, its evolvement (thus far) culminating in the emergence of an intelligence able to fathom its own secrets at extreme scales of magnitude in both space and time. I’ve alluded to this ‘mystery’ in previous posts, so Davies’ philosophy appeals to me personally, and his book, in part, attempts to tackle this very topic.
Amongst other things, he gives a potted history of science from the ancients (especially the Greeks, but other cultures as well) and how it has largely replaced religion as the means to understand natural phenomena at all levels. This has resulted in a ‘God-of-the-Gaps’, where, epistemologically, scientific investigations and discoveries have gradually pushed God out of the picture. He also discusses the implications of a God existing outside of space and time actually creating a ‘beginning’. The idea of a God setting everything in motion (via the Big Bang) and then watching his creation evolve over billions of years like a wound up watch (Davies’ analogy) is no more appealing than the idea of a God who has to make adjustments or rewind it occasionally, to extend the metaphor.
In discussing how the scientific enterprise evolved, in particular how we search for the cause of events, reminded me of my own attraction to science from a very early age. Children are forever asking ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions – we have a natural inclination to wonder how things work – and by the time I’d reached my teens, I’d realised that science was the best means to pursue this.
Davies gives an example of Newton coming up with mathematical laws to explain gravity that not only provided a method to calculate projectiles on Earth but also the orbits of planets in the solar system. Brian Cox in a documentary on Gravity, wrote the equation down on a piece of paper, borrowing a pen from his cameraman, to demonstrate how simple it is. But Newton couldn’t explain why everything didn’t simply collapse in on itself and evoked God as the explanation for keeping the clockwork universe functioning. So Newton’s explanation of gravity, albeit a work of genius, didn’t go far enough.
Einstein then came up with his theory that gravity was a consequence of the curvature of space-time caused by mass, but, as Cox points out in his documentary, Einstein’s explanation doesn’t go far enough either, and there are still aspects of gravity we don’t understand, at the quantum level and in black holes where the laws of physics as we know them break down. As an aside, it’s the centenary year of Einstein publishing his General Theory of Relativity and I’ve just finished reading a book (The Road to Relativity by Hanoch Gutfreund and Jurgen Renn) which goes through the original manuscript page by page explaining Einstein’s creative process.
But back to Newton’s theory, I remember, in high school, trying to understand why acceleration in a gravitational field was the same irrespective of the mass of the body, and I could only resort to the mathematics to give me an answer, which didn’t seem satisfactory. I can also remember watching a light plane in flight over our house and seeing it side-slipping in the wind. In other words, the direction of the nose was slightly offset to its direction of travel to counter a side wind. I remember imagining the vectors at play and realising that I could work them out with basic trigonometry. It made me wonder for the first time, why did mathematics provide an answer and an explanation – what was the link between mathematics, a product of the mind, and a mechanical event, a consequence of the physical world?
I’ve written quite a lot on the topic of mathematics and its relationship to the laws of nature; Davies goes into this in some depth. It is worth quoting him on the subject, especially in regard to the often stated scepticism that the laws of nature only exist in our minds.
Sometimes it is argued that laws of nature, which are attempts to capture [nature’s] regularities systematically, are imposed on the world by our minds in order to make sense of it… I believe any suggestion that the laws of nature are similar projections of the human mind [to seeing animals in the constellations, for example] is absurd. The existence of regularities in nature are a mathematical objective fact… Without this assumption that the regularities are real, science is reduced to a meaningless charade.
He adds the caveat that the laws as written are ‘human inventions, but inventions designed to reflect, albeit imperfectly, actually existing properties of nature.’ Every scientist knows that our rendition of nature’s laws have inherent limitations, despite their accuracy and success, but quite often they provide new insights that we didn’t expect. Well known examples are Maxwell’s equations predicting electromagnetic waves and the constant speed of light, and Dirac’s equation predicting anti-matter. Most famously, Einstein’s special theory of relativity predicted the equivalence of energy and mass, which was demonstrated with the detonation of the atomic bomb. All these predictions were an unexpected consequence of the mathematics.
Referring back to Gutfreund’s and Renn’s book on Einstein’s search for a theory of gravity that went beyond Newton but was consistent with Newton, Einstein knew he had to find a mathematical description that not only fulfilled all his criteria regarding relativistic space-time and the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, but would also provide testable predictions like the bending of light near massive stellar objects (stars) and the precession of mercury’s orbit around the sun. We all know that Riemann’s non-Euclidian geometry gave him the mathematical formulation he needed and it’s been extraordinarily successful thus far, despite the limitations I mentioned earlier.
Davies covers quite a lot in his discussion on mathematics, including a very good exposition on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Turing’s proof of infinite incomputable numbers, John Conway’s game of life with cellular automata and Von Neuman’s detailed investigation of self-replicating machines, which effectively foreshadowed the mechanics of biological life before DNA was discovered.
In the middle of all this, Davies makes an extraordinary claim, based on reasoning by Oxford mathematical physicist David Deutsch (the most vocal advocate for the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and a leader in quantum computer development). Effectively, Deutsch argues that mathematics works in the real world (including electronic calculators and computers) not because of logic but because the physical world (via the laws of physics) is amenable to basic arithmetic: addition, subtraction etc. In other words, he’s basically saying that we only have mathematics because there are objects in our world that we can count. In effect, this is exactly what Davies says.
This is not the extraordinary claim. The extraordinary claim is that there may exist universes where mathematics, as we know it, doesn’t work, because there are no discrete objects. Davies extrapolates this to say that a problem that is incomputable with our mathematics may be computable with alternative mathematics that, I assume, is not based on counting. I have to confess I have issues with this.
To start from scratch, mathematics starts with numbers, which we all become acquainted with from an early age by counting objects. It’s a small step to get addition from counting but quite a large step to then abstract it from the real world, so the numbers only exist in our heads. Multiplication is simply adding something a number of times and subtraction is simply taking away something that was added so you get back to where you started. The same is true for division where you divide something you multiplied to go backwards in your calculation. In other words, subtraction and division are just the reverse operations for addition and multiplication respectively. Then you replace some of the numbers by letters as ‘unknowns’ and you suddenly have algebra. Now you’re doing mathematics.
The point I’d make, in reference to Davies’ claim, is that mathematics without numbers is not mathematics. And numbers may be to a different base or use different symbols, but they will all produce the same mathematics. I agree with Deutsch that mathematics is intrinsic to our world – none of us would do mathematics if it wasn’t. But I find the notion that there could hypothetically exist worlds where mathematics is not relevant or is not dependent on number, absurd, to use one of Davies’ favourite utterances.
Earlier in the book, Davies expresses scepticism at the idea that the laws of nature could arise with the universe – that they didn’t exist beforehand. In other words, he’s effectively arguing that they are transcendent. Since the laws are firmly based in mathematics, it’s hard to argue that the laws are transcendent but the mathematics is not.
I have enormous respect for Davies, and I wonder if I’m misrepresenting him. But this is what he said, albeit out of context:
Imagine a world in which the laws of physics were very different, possibly so different that discreet objects did not exist. Some of the mathematical operations that are computable in our world would not be so in this world, and vice versa.
Speaking of mathematical transcendence, he devotes almost an entire chapter to the underlying mystery of mathematics’ role in explicating natural phenomena through physics, with particular reference to mathematical Platonists like Kurt Godel, Eugene Wigner and Roger Penrose. But it’s a quote from Richard Feynman, who was not a Platonist as far as I know, that sums up the theme.
When you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere… Well, in the case of physics we have double trouble. We come across these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe, so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing… Those are philosophical questions that I don’t know how to answer.
Interestingly, in his later book, The Goldilocks Enigma (2006), Davies distances himself from mathematical Platonism and seems to espouse John Wheeler’s view that both the mathematics and the laws of nature emerged ‘higgledy-piggledy’ and are not transcendent. He also tackles the inherent conflict between the Strong Anthropic Principle, which he seems to support, and a non-teleological universe, which science virtually demands, but I’ll address that later.
Back to The Mind of God, he discusses in depth one of the paradigms of our age that the Universe can be totally understood by algorithms leading to the possibility that the Universe we live in is a Matrix-like computer simulation. Again, referring to The Goldilocks Enigma, he discounts this view as a variation on Intelligent Design. Towards the end of Mind of God, he discusses metaphysical, even mystical possibilities, but not as a replacement for science.
But one interesting point he makes, that I’ve never heard of before, was proposed by James Hartle and Murray Gellmann, who claim:
…that the existence of an approximately classical world, in which well-defined material objects exist in space, and in which there is a well-defined concept of time, requires special cosmic initial conditions.
In other words, they’re saying that the Universe would be a purely quantum world with everything in superpositional states (nothing would be fixed in space and time) were it not for ‘the special quantum state in which the universe originated.’ James Hartle developed with Stephen Hawking the Hawking-Hartle model of the Universe where time evolved out of a 4th dimension in a quantum big bang. It may be that Hartle’s and Gellmann’s conjecture is dependent on the veracity of that particular model. The link between the two ideas is only alluded to by Davies.
Apropos to the book’s title, Davies spends an entire chapter on ‘God’ arguments, in particular cosmological and ontological arguments that require a level of philosophical nous that, frankly, I don’t possess. Having said that, it became obvious to me that arguments for God are more dependent on subjective ‘feelings’ than rational requirements. After lengthy discussions on ‘necessary being’ and a ‘contingent universe’, and the tension if not outright contradiction the two ideas pose, Davies pretty well sums up the situation with this:
What seems to come through such analyses loud and clear is the fundamental incompatibility of a completely timeless, unchanging, necessary God with the notion of creativity in nature, with a universe that can change and evolve and bring forth the genuinely new…
In light of this, the only ‘God’ that makes sense to me is one that evolves like ‘Its’ creation and, in effect, is a consequence of it rather than its progenitor.
One of the points that Davies makes is how the Universe is not strictly deterministic or teleological, yet it allows for self-organisation and the evolvement of complexity; in essence, a freedom of evolvement without dictating it. I would call this pseudo-teleological and is completely consistent with both quantum and chaotic events, which dominate all natural phenomena from cosmological origins to the biological evolution of life.
This brings one back to the quote from Davies at the beginning of this discussion that the universe is not a meaningless accident. Inherent in the idea of meaningfulness is the necessary emergence of consciousness and its role as the prime source of reason. If not for reason the Universe would have no cognisance of its own existence and it would be truly ‘purposeless’ in every way. It is for this reason that people believe in God, in whatever guise they find him (or her, as the case may be). Because we can find reason in living our lives and use reason to understand the Universe, the idea that the Universe itself has no reason is difficult to reconcile.
Thursday 3 September 2015
Ruminations on The Sparrow (SF novel by Mary Doria Russell, 1996)
Russell is a paleoanthropologist and so is one of the characters in her book (Anne) whom one thinks may represent the author’s world view, especially concerning religion and God. Anne is basically a good natured and tolerant sceptic.
Whether Anne is representative of the author’s point of view or not, I found Russell’s ideas of God, as expressed explicitly by the main character, Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit (but also implicitly by others) to be old-fashioned, even anachronistic. The idea of God as a father figure and we being ‘His’ children is one I rejected in my teens, especially after reading Camus’ The Plague (La Peste). So, in some ways, I think Russell is applying the same literary devices as Camus (pointless and undeserved human suffering) to challenge this particular version of God that many of us grew up with.
At one point the character, Anne, asks Emilio if it’s alright for her to ‘hate God’. Towards the end of the novel, another Jesuit priest proposes the idea (not original, I suspect) that God had to make room for the existence of the Universe by removing Himself, which is really a Deistic version of God that one sometimes finds appealing to scientists, because such a God would be non-interventionist. If one takes this to its logical conclusion, there is no reason for this God to have empathy or be the anthropomorphic version we are familiar with from the Bible.
The interesting point is that people sometimes ‘find God’ in the midst of their own suffering. I think of Viktor Frankl (an Auschwitz survivor) who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning and The Unconscious God, who argued that a person can find meaning through adversity. But this supports my own view that God is something that people find within themselves and is not dependent on making God responsible for whatever happens in the world.
As Russell’s novel makes clear, if one makes God responsible for everything that happens, then He’s responsible for the suffering as well as the triumphs of the human spirit. At the start of the story’s journey, the protagonists believe that everything they’re doing is part of God’s plan – it’s meant to be – but at the end, this premise is effectively negated.
One of the attractions of Sci-Fi for me, even when I was quite young, is that it allows what-if scenarios, alternative societies. I would suggest that Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin were particularly adept at rendering alternative social structures. Russell’s alien society is particularly well thought through and makes one consider how it may have evolved on Earth had other hominids (like Neanderthals) survived into an agricultural world. As it is, we were (and still are) very good at exploiting economically weaker sectors of our societies, at all levels, from global to local.
There is no clear resolution, at least for me, to the ‘God question’, which is a central theme of her book. One can end up ‘hating’ God, if one follows the logical conclusion from the book’s premise to its confounding end, but I believe that the characters in the story are simply following an antiquated version of God.
P.S. I should point out that this book won the 1998 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Whether Anne is representative of the author’s point of view or not, I found Russell’s ideas of God, as expressed explicitly by the main character, Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit (but also implicitly by others) to be old-fashioned, even anachronistic. The idea of God as a father figure and we being ‘His’ children is one I rejected in my teens, especially after reading Camus’ The Plague (La Peste). So, in some ways, I think Russell is applying the same literary devices as Camus (pointless and undeserved human suffering) to challenge this particular version of God that many of us grew up with.
At one point the character, Anne, asks Emilio if it’s alright for her to ‘hate God’. Towards the end of the novel, another Jesuit priest proposes the idea (not original, I suspect) that God had to make room for the existence of the Universe by removing Himself, which is really a Deistic version of God that one sometimes finds appealing to scientists, because such a God would be non-interventionist. If one takes this to its logical conclusion, there is no reason for this God to have empathy or be the anthropomorphic version we are familiar with from the Bible.
The interesting point is that people sometimes ‘find God’ in the midst of their own suffering. I think of Viktor Frankl (an Auschwitz survivor) who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning and The Unconscious God, who argued that a person can find meaning through adversity. But this supports my own view that God is something that people find within themselves and is not dependent on making God responsible for whatever happens in the world.
As Russell’s novel makes clear, if one makes God responsible for everything that happens, then He’s responsible for the suffering as well as the triumphs of the human spirit. At the start of the story’s journey, the protagonists believe that everything they’re doing is part of God’s plan – it’s meant to be – but at the end, this premise is effectively negated.
One of the attractions of Sci-Fi for me, even when I was quite young, is that it allows what-if scenarios, alternative societies. I would suggest that Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin were particularly adept at rendering alternative social structures. Russell’s alien society is particularly well thought through and makes one consider how it may have evolved on Earth had other hominids (like Neanderthals) survived into an agricultural world. As it is, we were (and still are) very good at exploiting economically weaker sectors of our societies, at all levels, from global to local.
There is no clear resolution, at least for me, to the ‘God question’, which is a central theme of her book. One can end up ‘hating’ God, if one follows the logical conclusion from the book’s premise to its confounding end, but I believe that the characters in the story are simply following an antiquated version of God.
P.S. I should point out that this book won the 1998 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
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