an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Fall 2017, ISSN 1552-5112
God’s Casino, or Faith in Physics at the Chelsea Hotel II[1]
“There is no universe.”
David Bowie (1947 –2016)
A philosopher and
philosopher/artist get together for a fireside chat about astrobiology, quantum
entanglement, spirituality and faith in physics, art and philosophy. (Part II)
KCS: Hello Kritikosians! Since I am stepping into this
conversation in the middle, I won't try to cover all possible bases. Instead,
I'll just begin as philosophers are wont to do: confrontationally.
So here are some things I suspect will be interestingly
controversial concerning what I found interestingly wrong about
the previous discussion:
1) I am
not really all that convinced that there is nothing universal to aesthetic
experience. Now, I am no aesthetician, but the basic facts seem to be
a) that we all have an aesthetic sense (which alone is suggestive), b)
this sense is triggered in very similar ways under most circumstances - who
thinks flowers are ugly?, for example (even more suggestive), but c) there is
significant variation about what some find beautiful, and this is more true the
more detailed one is about the possible aesthetic triggers. I don't see
anything here to suggest there is no universal sense of aesthetics, just that
it's not naively universal - that is, determined in every facet. But
nobody with any sense has ever claimed that it was and this kind of
universality with variation in the details is quite common. My guess is
it comes down to the level at which you want to describe the phenomena and thus
what aspects of the triggers you focus on. It may well be, not only that
an aesthetic sense is universal to humans, but also to other rational beings
out there in the universe (a possibility I think about a lot since I do
work in astrobiology).
2) There
is nothing "arrogant" about saying we should accept the gravitational
evidence for dark matter, even though we are not sure whether it's
ultimately misleading. This is how science works: just as in
evolution, what scientists do is choose between available explanations on the
basis of fit with data. No careful scientist would deny, about ANY
scientific claim, that it could always be wrong. As I put it to my students,
"I could be wrong but will reassess in light of new evidence." - a
universal footnote applicable to any scientific claim. But until someone
comes up with an alternate explanation for the data which works better, no
scientist will abandon what they have. Nor should they. So you can
say we should be looking for better explanations (not news), or you could say
we should not lose sight of the fact that we might be wrong (also not news).
3) I
don’t like comparing quantum weirdness to mysticism. For one thing, it’s
a very imprecise comparison – I’m not sure exactly what is being said or how to
evaluate it, which is unsurprising given the nature of mysticism. What
quantum mechanics (QM) and mysticism share is an inability to articulate in
an intuitive way the insights involved. However, one huge
difference is that QM actually has insights and, at least to some
extent, they can be conveyed mathematically even if they are highly
counterintuitive. Mysticism, on the other hand,
is indistinguishable from nonsense. Note that I do not say it is nonsense, just that I have no
idea how to tell whether the vague sentences uttered by a mystic are true.
Any analysis of a mystic's pronouncements for its logical content
will be blocked by the claim that language is just not a good way to
convey the truths he sees. While he could be 100% right for all I know, I
can't know much if I can't use logic or evidence, so this comes down to an
appeal to ignorance - he could be right because I can't prove he's wrong.
4) To
say “often we cannot understand much of what we observe” is seriously
misleading. First of all, it’s not that often - scientists can
now explain the vast majority of what we observe, but these are not
interesting cases to talk about because, well, they are easily explicable.
It's a bit like in an ethics class where students talk about how ethical
questions have no answers. Actually, we can easily get consensus on most
ethical questions, but these are boring so we gravitate to discussions of
complex questions without ready consensus. That's fine, but it's kinda’
perverse then to turn around and say, "Gosh, look at how hard it
is to reach consensus on all of these ethical issues - there must be no ethical
truth." Second, there is nothing weird about this at all – science
is about, a) asking questions to which we do NOT know the answer,
b) assuming there is a naturalistic one if we look hard enough, -
and then, c) looking really hard for the answer. Once we answer the
question, it’s no longer science really, but technology, which most people
confuse at a deep level. Science is about questions, not answers.
NRIII: You bring many interesting ideas to the table! Let’s begin
with your ideas about aesthetics and astrobiology. Maybe you could tell us a
bit more about astrobiology for a moment, as you see it? If we take a
preliminary source as our initial starting point, say from a scientific
authority like the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
we see that such authorities are concerned with a very rudimentary basic
science approach with regard to any epistemological basis that may exist for
the concept of astrobiology. For example, NASA’s Astrobiology:
Life in the Universe
website shows a concern with simple ideas like the measurement of free oxygen
on exoplanets, or planet Earth-based studies in ancient biology, as well as
concerns regarding the origin of life here on Earth, vis-à-vis microbial
organisms like LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), etc. and their
relationship with geothermal vents that exist deep in the seas, on our planet
and purportedly on other planets.
How do
you see concerns like these interacting with subjects like philosophy and
aesthetics?
KCS: Astrobiology is clearly a scientific discipline in
formation. The basic concepts and
approaches are still being worked out, which makes it very fertile ground for
philosophers of science. So, for example,
the exact nature of “life” is something we have had the luxury of being unclear
about for the last 2 thousand years, but once we are formally challenged with
finding life on other worlds very different from our own, we can’t be so
complacent. And there are really
interesting epistemic problems as well – is life on Earth an example of a
single datum or a complex data set and to what extent does it allow us to make
generalizations about the way biology would work elsewhere? So the science alone offers interesting
places for philosophers to contribute.
It’s true
that most of the literature on astrobiology is focused on basic science –
partly because of a sensitivity to charges that it’s not a “real science,”
since it has no study organism yet.
Nevertheless, it is pretty obvious that if NASA does discover evidence
of life within the next 20 years (as they predict), this will immediately count
as one of the greatest discoveries in human history, with massive implications
for human society and our conception of our place in the universe. And this opens the door to all kinds of
questions which quickly exhaust the training of the average scientist. If we discover microbes on Mars, for example,
what are our ethical responsibilities to them?
Should we “leave Mars to the Martians” as Carl Sagan famously claimed or
can we use the planet for our own purposes?
What if the only way to do science on extraterrestrial life involves a
significant risk to the indigenous life there (as is almost certainly the case
on ocean worlds like Europa)? What does
it say about the value of human life (and terrestrial life in general) if life
turns out to be common in the universe (as we predict)? What if we are wrong and life is very
rare? What if, to take the extreme
option, we are in fact alone in the universe?
A colleague got me to admit once that, if we truly are alone in the
universe, this would be one of the very few situations where I would be forced
to seriously consider a supernatural explanation for our existence.
As for
aesthetics, there is no direct link (that I have thought of yet anyway). But in both ethics and aesthetics, one
encounters the temptation to talk about universal standards, which are
typically considered old fashioned and unwarranted in modern debates (though
they were commonly accepted for many hundreds of years). One of my projects is to investigate whether
it makes sense to argue for a universal kind of ethics based on evolutionary
convergence. If we restrict ourselves to
considering aliens with whom we could debate the nature of ethics, then we
actually have a lot in common with them, I argue. First, we are both rational beings with a
technological civilization (otherwise, they would not have radio telescopes to
hear us, etc.). We both will have
evolved from other forms of life via a process that combines competition with
cooperation and it seems likely, given the nature of culture and science in
particular, that we will both be social beings.
It seems a good bet that such creatures would share certain basic
prosocial emotions and the ethical principles associated with them. For example, they will almost certainly have
strong moral rules against killing conspecifics, because no social system would
be stable if its members were free to kill each other whenever they
please. To be sure, there will be a lot
of variation over details – Earthly ethics allows killing under certain
“special circumstances” and it’s much less clear how much convergence we will
get at this level, but aliens will almost certainly sympathize with a general
injunction like “Thou shalt not kill.”
They will also almost certainly view rational, social creatures like
themselves (and us) as being ethically “special.” In other words, I argue that we have good
grounds to expect aliens will be more like us in their mores than is generally
supposed (though of course this does not mean they might not be hostile, etc.,
since humans routinely kill each other despite sharing 100% of their basic
dispositions).
NRIII: It seems to me that we are very alone in
the universe. If techno-savvy intelligent life existed relatively near Earth,
we probably would have already detected its technology; if extraterrestrial
(ET) life is far, far away – well then, their technological footprint may be less
robust than ours, because it is not perceptible in our neck of the woods, at
least by our technological measures. Microbes would certainly fall into that
category. Neither scenario seems likely, however, given the lack of empirical
evidence. Now there may be more advanced life utilizing stealth technology, but
why would they do that? Such a thought conjures ideas of extraterrestrial
conspiracy, intergalactic warfare and political strife, which would seem like a
reasonable possibility, if the species in question were of a hominid variety;
nevertheless, reliable evidence of abiogenesis outside of Earth simply does not
exist. And films like Arrival (2016),
where Earth is visited by benevolent ET life, only to face ignorant, defensive,
hostile and even paranoid Earthly governments and leaders, or in another
example, Life (2017), where an ET
life form is extracted from Mars via a soil sample, only to quickly grow much
larger, and become aggressive and threatening towards the crew of astronauts
that retrieved it, however intriguing, do not seem to portray what the science
has to say about the possibility of ET life.
Spiegel
and Turner’s statistical study of abiogenetic probability is philosophically
compelling and indicates that our inherent bias for the somewhat optimistic
‘idea’ of life’s emergence elsewhere belies the certifiable probability of ET
abiogenesis, which is, given the available evidence, quite low.[2]
Utilizing
Earth, as an abiogenetic example and assumption, figuratively speaking, may be
akin to frivolous crime drama and murder scenarios, where evidence of murder
does not exist, and yet investigations proceed, and false probabilities are
determined. For example, given Homo
sapiens, and any cultural milieu a
priori, murder cannot simply be assumed, even if one posits that
sociopolitical conditions are ‘ripe’ for murder. However, given time, and an
accumulation of murders, it’s only then, a
posteriori, that relevant scenarios are amassed, sometimes repeated, and
then probabilities and speculations of reasonable import begin to show merit.
Since
Earth has no reference point of comparison, Spiegel and Turner show that it’s
the assumptions being made about Earth’s purportedly ‘easy’ abiogenetic
history, that make it seem likely
that ET abiogenesis may occur, say for example, on a ‘ripe’ exoplanet. Given
Spiegel and Turner’s work, it seems such events are mathematically, and
empirically, rare. And such work serves to verify the current reality which is:
life has not been found elsewhere. Yet.
However,
I wonder where our imaginations, and the evidence of strange brew in the stars,
might take us? There is evidence of quantum entanglement. What do you make of
quantum entanglement, philosophically speaking?
KCS: It seems to me (and
many others who study this question) that we really don’t know about the
prevalence of life beyond Earth in general, and not much more about the
prevalence of intelligent life. But this
is not, by itself, an argument against extraterrestrial life. There’s an enormous cottage industry of work
on the Fermi paradox, which asks basically, “If life is so prevalent, why
haven’t we found it?” – the Wikipedia article on the Fermi paradox does a
decent job of surveying some of this literature for anyone interested. What we know is that we have not found
evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth, but it’s unclear what to make of
that. People tend to make a lot of the
fact that SETI has yet to find anything, but they typically don’t appreciate
how difficult a task the creation of a comprehensive survey is: the universe is
a very, very big place and we are not trying very hard to look for life
elsewhere (the current budget for SETI is on the order of only $2.5 million
annually). There are also all kinds of
assumptions built into SETI that are debatable: aliens want to communicate with
us, they are using EM transmissions similar to what we currently use, etc.,
etc. We don’t exactly know, but we have
good reasons to believe, that life should be pretty common. It’s a bit more controversial, but not hard
to argue based on general evolutionary considerations that where there is life
for a very long period of time, you will likely also get intelligence. Since the universe is a very old place, this
means we should expect there to be other intelligent life out there (though as
I note above, we could well be wrong about this).
Of
course, these discussions are necessarily a bit speculative until we have real
data – but this applies to those who argue against extraterrestrial life just
as much as to those who argue for it.
What Spiegel and Turner don’t really account for, to my mind, is
projections from evolutionary biology.
They simply ask how likely it is that there is life, given that it
evolved on Earth. But we know that the
conditions for life’s evolution are far more common than previously believed –
you can’t swing a good-sized stick in our universe without hitting sources rich
in organic molecules, for example – they have been found pretty much everywhere
we look, including on comets and other bodies in the “dead” of space. If we think the evolution of life from these
beginnings was not a miraculous occurrence (which almost all biologists would
allow), the question is really, “How likely is it, given the right conditions,
would we get life?” And we can estimate
how unlikely life would have to be for us to be truly alone. A recent study by Frank and Woodruff found
that, “The
probability of a civilization developing on a potentially habitable alien
planet would have to be less than one in 10 billion trillion — or one part
in 10 to the 22nd power — for humanity to be the first technologically advanced
species the cosmos has ever known, according to the study.” [3] That’s pretty long odds,
to put it mildly – so long, in fact, that humans have no intuitive grasp of the
sheer unlikeliness of this possibility, which biases how we assess our current
data. It also means that portrayals of
aliens in popular culture are not terribly accurate, which in turn makes their
use as a critique of scientific investigations of extraterrestrial life rather
unfair.
Now
of course, life could be spectacularly unlikely, but to assume that is
to venture into the realm of miraculous thinking, which science shuns. It’s at least an excellent working hypothesis
that, when you first see a natural phenomenon, it’s the result of prosaic
natural circumstances which are not stupendously unlikely (e.g., the mediocrity
principle). As Spiegel and Turner allow,
if we find life beyond Earth (intelligent or not), the probability of finding
intelligent life would go up by many orders of magnitude.
I
don’t know enough about quantum entanglement to make intelligible comments on
that specifically, but I can offer some potentially interesting thoughts on
quantum indeterminacy in general. The
Copenhagen interpretation posits that the probabilities we see in quantum
phenomena cannot, in principle, be interpreted as a result of our ignorance (of
unobserved, but entirely deterministic factors, for example). In other words, the universe is just, at its
most basic level, random. I think it’s
important to point out that the Copenhagen interpretation is just that – an interpretation
of the evidence. Granted, it’s a spectacularly successful interpretation that
the vast majority of physicists accept, but it could well be wrong. And it’s not the only interpretation either –
there is also the de Broglie–Bohm or pilot wave theory, which offers a purely deterministic account of
the exact same phenomena. My
philosophical suspicion here (I can’t honestly say it’s more than that) aligns
with Einstein – it’s philosophically suspect to believe that the universe is
inherently indeterministic. It could be,
but this is a conclusion we should fight as hard as we can, particularly as
scientists. Why? Because if this is the case, then we simply
can’t explain many events in the universe, at least on most accounts of what
scientific explanation means. Science,
at its most basic, makes the ineliminable assumption (and it is an assumption,
despite all the success of science) that the universe is intelligible.
NRIII: Why
would it be “philosophically suspect” to fathom the universe as non-
deterministic? Einstein may turn out to be the Isaac Newton of the 21st
century, so goes the cliché! When we head in the other direction, away from a
non-deterministic reality and toward absolute certainty – we do find
relationships that may point to a deterministic reality, as in experiments that
attempt to dispute the linkage of particles via quantum entanglement by
questioning the assumptions of Bell’s theorem (the theorem which validates that
entanglement is ‘real’ given its current assumptions). But recent work in that
regard apparently ends in aporia via ‘superdeterminism’.[4]
If
science purveys truth regarding one subject or another, becoming useful, too,
because of it (e.g. medical science, etc.) – unfortunately, that does not prove
the philosophical validity of science as applied to all potential cases of
study, I imagine. The fundamental ‘faith’ principle, if you will, of science as
philosophy is the idea that one can ascertain everything one sets out to
discover, and that there is a method to do so. The science as faith principle
also holds that if no such method currently exists, then it too, only remains
to be discovered as well. It’s a faith-based epistemological claim, and as such
is essentially unverifiable, since it has no empirical basis, and therefore
will never have a valid experimental control or reference point (i.e. another
planet Earth where science has been proven to answer every question without
exception until the end of time).
Some
philosophers of religion may use such criticism to cast off science in favor of
alternative faith-based answers to interesting human questions, although such a
turn, often provides answers as unverifiable as the example of
superdeterminism. Like a computer, science (and religion) are just tools, and
neither is the best tool for every purpose.
I
think here is where we enter the arena of ‘comparative human thought’, as a
sort of metadiscipline, which might construe human thought as necessarily
creative in its variety of practices. Though the representation of science to
the world at large is that it is entirely factual, and that of art being
somewhere in the neighborhood of its polar opposite, these two different
enterprises are arguably philosophical as much as pragmatic, and they probably
share some creative dispositions and liberties. Of course, their objectives may
be somewhat different, so the illusion persists that they are diametrically
opposed. Moreover, once and where ‘scientists’ start dispensing with
appropriate controls, fudging assumptions, and ignoring contradictory and
inconvenient variables, etc., even where expedient or necessary to proceed; or
when ‘artists’ start producing fascist (or anti-fascist) graphic art, biotech
art and software war game simulators, etc., however meritoriously high-brow and
‘artistic’ the work may be (rather than banally political, scientific or
meticulously engineered work) – some serious and provincial lines are being
blurred.
What
can we think? Should we trust science can reveal everything we’d like to know? Can
we trust art to show only how and why we really feel, and nothing at all that
could be understood as ‘factual’? May we trust religion to define, schedule and
historicize, and even politicize, the ineffable?
TO BE CONTINUED…
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Fall 2017,
ISSN 1552-5112