Our recent thoughts about Thomas Nagel's (failed, I think) pronouncement against materialistic reductionism have led me down the path of musing on the connections among nature "in itself"--whatever that may be--scientific models, and comprehensibility.

To return to Nagel for a moment, much of his disdain for the schema of materialism rides on the purported strength of his assertion that Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the emergence of mind is radically implausible, and therefore our quest for a purely physical description of the cosmos as a whole misguided. The heart of his dense, often eloquently stated broadside against GUT comes down to noting that minds and reason and values exist (true enough; though the first two have been debated, and it takes a philosopher to regard "value" as being a relevant entity in a discussion of cosmological models), and such things wouldn't be possible in a reductive material cosmos. Something is missing in science, Nagel feels--"feels" being the element that catches my attention--and that something undergirds everything:

"My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics--a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification."

Fully reductive materialism; the random nature of evolutionary change; minds as epiphenomenal to complexifying brains; a mathematical-materialist GUT--and all of it, rather than the teleological cosmos in which humanity plays some central role. For Nagel, as for many, it all just seems impossible to swallow.

A good question, though, might be: Should we expect it to seem otherwise?



Evolution, safe to say, is not easily understood. It's not that, at this point in the intellectual growth of our species, we don't get the basic idea--genetic drift, changing environment, chemical replicators--it's that we don't, and perhaps can't, really get our minds around what "a million years" means . . . to say nothing of ten million, or seventy five million, or one point one billion. The 10,000 year age of earth asserted by some fundamentalists is scientifically illiterate, but certainly *feels* more likely. Without education in modern geology, radiometric dating, and the like, some type of flat-earther position on foundational questions is to be expected. Of course the sun is in motion. Of course human beings are special. Of course our minds aren’t part of the material world. Do you *feel* material?

But a scant few centuries of science have shown us how wrong this “right in front of you” thinking can be. Who would have thought a drop of water was full of animals, before Van Leeuwenhoek? (No one; this is why, as Richard Dawkins notes in his wonderful book “The Magic of Reality,” there are no myths about dust mites.) Who could believe that some rocks fall out of the sky? (Jefferson couldn’t.) Or that everything that exists was once compressed into a volume smaller than a pencil tip? Nature is radically counterintuitive. Anyone who feels the facts will seem sensible to humanity has not taken in the lesson of Copenhagen.

Which is exactly as it should be. We *are* evolved organisms, and there is no evolutionary pressure to turn us into Surveyors of the Universe, intuiting its grand activities at a glance. That we can discern as much as we can has struck some as a marvel (more on that in another blog). But the fact that we don’t *feel* psychophysical reductionism can possibly be right is both irrelevant to its truth or falsity and . . . in a way . . . in keeping with a Darwinian view. You wouldn’t expect a brain evolved like ours to have an immediate grasp of “a very long time ago, our ancestors were a kind of slime mold.” Such claims, in human terms, are nonsense. Yet evidence, not intuition, gets the final word.



Einstein, of course, was famously turned away from Quantum Mechanics because it was so non-sensical. He spent the latter years of his life fruitlessly (unless the Cosmological Constant turns out to have been prescient) trying to discover the key to a universe that behaved in a more respectable way. How frustrating, how maddening for us if the GUT is something less like GR and more like QM: workable, fascinating, but never really sensible, never satisfying to the kind of minds which are ours.

It may well be. We humans think mythologically, and symbolically: if the GUT revealed a Tree of Life or the mind of God or a tremendous cosmic egg, all of which have been imagined by various cultures, it would make sense more than what may be awaiting us at the end of the physics road.

I admit to a bit of a chill at the thought: I would prefer an infinite and beautiful Tree of Life to a sterile knot of mathematics (String Theory, I would submit, is decidedly unbeautiful). I won’t, of course, twist my reason out of shape in order to convince myself a Tree of Life is somehow “really” there, if it is not. I know how prone humans are to confabulating in order to arrive at conclusions that feel good.

And yet as far as Einstein was from Nagel, and as far as I am from either man, we do share a certain longing for satisfaction at the ways of nature. I can’t help hoping the deepest answers will be, in some sense, human answers.



this post has been edited by the author since its original submission

report post as inappropriate

As we push the frontiers of physical knowledge the fundamental principles we come to frame as axioms or physical postulates will implicate things that are further removed from our immediate intuition. This will happen with physics in particular, where our concepts of space, time and the continuity of events and ordering of objects consistently becomes abstract in a way that is removed from our sensory perception of the immediate word. Quantum mechanics does this particularly, though relativity has some counter intuitive concepts as well. Nonlocality and the entanglement of states is outside the standard perception of things. Two spinning charged particles separated by any distance with one particle in a region of a magnetic field that precesses means the other will precess as well. This is something that defies our intuitive sense of things.

Biological evolution defies a cultural sense of things. People living on a tribal subsistence level have little trouble with evolution when it is explained to them. Many such cultures have nature religions, sometimes called pagans, which have an idea of the interrelatedness of life. Evolution is troubling to monotheism, which proposes an exceptional origin for humans based on a special creation. Biological evolution has consistently put these beliefs outside the domain of empirical understanding and has shown these beliefs to be pure mythic narratives. This of course is rather upsetting to some people.

LC

report post as inappropriate

William,

"I can't help hoping the deepest answers will be, in some sense, human answers."

Indeed, not even the "deepest" but simply the fundamental answers will be "human".

What is missing from your (and to some extent Nagel's) description of the present scientific picture is the realization that we might be in the midst of the yet unrecognized but unprecedented scientific 'crisis' and are at the threshold of an unparalleled transitional period in science. And for example, Lee Smolin in his last book, basically, also agrees with that assessment.

The main reason why this estimation of the present state of scientific affairs has not been adequately perceived has to do with the fact that this is the first crisis of such proportions in the entire history of science. It is related to the pressing need (also mentioned by Nagel) to integrate the 'mental', or the 'informational', into the scientific picture, which was based on the *spatial* considerations, while the mind--as already the fathers of the Scientific Revolution agreed--is of non-spatial nature. For more on this issue see my last essay.

this post has been edited by the author since its original submission

report post as inappropriate

"Who would have thought a drop of water was full of animals, before Van Leeuwenhoek? (No one; this is why, as Richard Dawkins notes in his wonderful book “The Magic of Reality,” there are no myths about dust mites.) "

As anyone who doesn't live in a sterile environments knows all too well, life comes on all scales and there is a very famous fable of dust mites, that of counting angels on the head of a pin.

report post as inappropriate

Is there an informational reality independent of the physical reality as the latter is presently understood in science?

I want to focus your attention on the considerations that suggested to me the "yes" answer to this question.

How do I recognize a previously unseen cat as a "cat"?

I have been working in the field of pattern recognition all my professional life, and want to caution you against any simplistic answers to this question. Actually, no one knows even a general answer to this question. However, it gradually became clear to me that if my mind would not have access to a *generative* representation of the class of cats--i.e. the class representation capable of 'producing'/constructing the representations of new cats--I would not be able to recognize a new cat as such. This also explains why in our dreams may appear cats we have never seen before.

(The same considerations apply to all organisms and not just our minds.)

Moreover, educated as a mathematician, I gradually came to the conclusion that no present formal structures are capable of supporting such forms of class representation, mainly because all our formal "spaces" are formed by points or entities derived on their basis, while what seems to be needed here are not point-based but structural forms of data representation, which are of a fundamentally non-spatial origin.

Thus, we are led to a non-spatial, informational reality, because the underlying informational mechanism *behind* such class representations has nothing to do with the evolutionary processes.

this post has been edited by the author since its original submission

report post as inappropriate

report post as inappropriate

"(String Theory, I would submit, is decidedly unbeautiful)."

If you possibly consider "String Theory," and the information halography generated from the implications ADS/CFT (with known Duel informations relations), as the most physically accurate modeled description of a living entity you may change your position. From the word "unbeautiful" it is evident that your context of what String Theory describes has confused you ..... What if bosonic strings represent information gained from vision ..... etc., etc., right down to the physical sense of taste -> information strings that physically feed our concious thoughts... For me ... that a rather beautiful context!

Best regards,

Tony

report post as inappropriate

Prompted by the exchange between James and Tom, I am starting a new thread related to the idea of scientific "meaning". The topic is important but widely misunderstood, especially outside science.

The main reason for various misconceptions is related to the important difference between the "meaning" as we tend to perceive it outside (science) and in physics. I would suggest that the usual "meaning" is best understood by our relation to the corresponding *class* of objects, e.g. cats, since our memory, cognition, and perception are organized around such classes.

However, in physics, the "meaning" comes mainly from the corresponding formal machinery, but partly (and inevitably) from the usual "meaning". Here lies the main difficulty.

Of course, in the ETS formalism, this opposition is supposed to be overcome.

this post has been edited by the author since its original submission

report post as inappropriate

I would draw everyone's attention to a new essay by Alexei Grinbaum. I think he lays the problem out in a fascinating way. He and I start at opposite ends of the spectrum, and come to the same conclusion (see my comment to him). Without spoiling the punch line, I highly recommend reading his essay.

Best

Edwin Eugene Klingman

report post as inappropriate

Nagel: "My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics--a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification."

Orem: "Fully reductive materialism; the random nature of evolutionary change; minds as epiphenomenal to complexifying brains; a mathematical-materialist GUT--and all of it, rather than the teleological cosmos in which humanity plays some central role. For Nagel, as for many, it all just seems impossible to swallow.

A good question, though, might be: Should we expect it to seem otherwise?"

The answer is an easy yes. That 'lost in the fog of complexity' stand is very attractive to those who hate the idea of God so much that they will turn far away from anything that suggests the universe has properties that pertain to intelligence. The present situation in science is completely untenable except for those who will not look at anything other than theories of dumbness all the way through the evolution of the universe. The reign of dumbness leaves no chance for the universe to give birth to intelligent life. But, why worry, the important achievement is that nothing that admits to a role for intelligence is left unassailed. Looking down scornfully on the authors and their works that try to open any other door, is an indispensible need for materialists in general.

James Putnam

report post as inappropriate

report post as inappropriate