an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Spring 2019, ISSN 1552-5112
God’s Casino, or Faith in Physics at the Chelsea Hotel III[1]
“There is no universe.”
David Bowie (1947 –2016)
An ongoing conversation in Kritikos between a guest philosopher and
philosopher/artist, Nick Ruiz, Ph.D. The spring 2019 issue hosts Jason
Josephson-Storm for the proverbial fireside chat, picking up where the last conversation
left off regarding astrobiology, quantum entanglement, spirituality and
faith in physics, art and philosophy. (Part III)
JJS: Thanks for inviting me to weigh in on
this fascinating conversation!
In a later response, I want to return to your broader issue of
“comparative human thought” and the relationship between science, art, and
religion. I imagine that is why you brought me on board. But I want to begin by
discussing the issue of the limits of scientific knowledge and its relationship
to contemporary physics/determinism.
It seems to me that since the first dialogue, a key question has
been the limits of science. From my perspective, there seem to be two aspects
to this debate: first the broader issue of empiricism, and second the
relationship between our current scientific ontology and the limits of
knowledge.
1—In terms of empiricism. I don’t want to assume your
readers have much of a background in philosophy (those that do should bear with
me). But in a way it seems that the question about science is retreading some
standard philosophical terrain about the challenge of empirical knowledge.
David
Hume, for instance, famously argued that the senses in themselves can never
prove that sensory appearances reliably depict external reality, because to
prove this would require access to something beyond appearances. (To simplify,
Kant had this issue in mind, when he articulated his famous division between
the phenomena and the noumena, or the appearance and thing-in-itself).
In
his critique of inductive reasoning, Hume also argued that we necessarily take
evidence of the senses to justify theories about things we haven’t observed and
that this is equally problematic. When teaching this to students, I often tell
a joke about a man who jumps from a 101-story building and after falling 100
floors he generalizes that 100% of the fall thus far has been fine and without
injury and therefore concludes that he will land just fine. You could make
basically the same joke about the 100-year-old woman who concludes she is
immortal based on the same kind of reasoning. Scientific theories are generally
formulated as inductive generalizations in exactly this kind of way and are
vulnerable to their own potential failure.
This
is a deeper issue with the nature of empirical knowledge. But my sense is that
all it means is that we have to admit a)
that knowledge based on our senses is necessarily limited; and b) that therefore all empirical
knowledge is necessarily fallible.
It
is also worth adding here that I find Larry Laudan’s
argument for a pessimistic meta-induction to be fairly convincing. He argues
that given a sufficient timeframe all previous scientific theories have been
overturned, so we should not feel too confident about the status of our current
scientific theories. Most of what contemporary scientists now thinks is true,
later scientists will probably regard as false, or perhaps, at best only
approximately true.
For
this reason, I liked your reference to Einstein as perhaps the Newton of the 21st
century. From my perspective what we do as scholars, scientists, and
philosophers is produce provisional knowledge that is useful to our current
moment/intellectual context, but it would be a mistake to cling to notions of
absolute or eternal truths.
This
doesn’t mean that “science is just a faith,” but it does mean that all
scientific findings are merely provisional and we need to take any scientific
claim with a greater degree of humility than most folks I talk to are used to.
I don’t think science requires I assume that the universe is intelligible as
your previous interlocutor suggested. All that science requires is a kind of
local and provisional intelligibility or instrumental efficacy at the human
scale.
We could add as a corollary contra-Dawkins and his naïve atheism that the
theological conception of God is precisely not the kind of thing we would have
scientific access to. God is not a hypothesis that can be falsified empirically
because God would be beyond space, time, and causation.
But
this shouldn’t give theologians too much comfort because like the noumena about
which nothing can be said, the same argument could be used to argue that the
only possible approach to the divine would be a “via negativa”
that can only be approached by negating things or remarking on what cannot be
said. So while this may be controversial with your readers, I don’t think we
can regard positively-formulated “religious truths” as any more eternal than
scientific ones. (But I tend not to see “faith” as a universal aspect of
“religion,” although perhaps we can talk about that later).
2—The second issue is the relationship between contemporary
scientific ontology, determinism, and the limits of knowledge. I want to argue
here that our current physics suggests either a) objective probability and therefore no determinism, or b) ontological determinism but nevertheless subjective probability.
I’ve only recently begun thinking significantly about the ontology
of quantum physics and its philosophical implications. So the following is a
bit provisional.
That said, what has stood out in my reading thus far is that
quantum entanglement is deeply weird and what most popular commentators miss is
that its implications scale. Basically, by all rights quantum entanglement
should extend all the way up from the basic particles to the things measuring
them, in other words, to macro objects. So quantum indeterminacy should be seen as something that affects the whole
of the cosmos.
But there are two main influential strands in understanding quantum indeterminacy. One camp sees quantum
indeterminacy as demonstrating that objective probability is central to the
universe. Basically, the universe itself is random. But this isn’t the only or
necessarily the main way to read quantum phenomena.
Influential alternatives suggest that
quantum indeterminacy does not mean objective probability but actually describes
limitations in the way we measure the phenomena (e.g. David Bohm’s ontological
theory and others), or a newer group of philosophers who describe themselves as
Wave Function Realists seem to embrace the notion that superposition is
ontological and that quantum physics is evidence for emerging multiple worlds.
Quantum determinists differ in their explanation of indeterminacy but generally
agree that quantum events are not random. The important thing for us is that
the world is both determined in principle and, from the standpoint of a given
observer, behaves probabilistically (with subjective probability).
But you don’t need quantum physics to
get a deterministic but also unpredictable world.
Even based on the laws of thermodynamics,
if there is anything like chaos or extreme sensitivity to minute differences in
initial conditions, the cosmos could both be fully deterministic (lacking
objective probability) and also necessarily fundamentally unpredictable (thus
exhibiting subjective probability). Think of Edward Lorenz’s famous example of
the butterfly’s wing beats launching a causal cascade that would alter the
course of a tornado. There is a lot of evidence that deterministic nonlinear
systems are so sensitive that they are almost necessarily unpredictable unless
you know the starting state to a very fine degree.
Moreover, if space and time are
continuous (rather than discrete), then the location of a given particle would
occur on a scale that was irreducible to rational numbers and this would mean
that for all intents and purposes the world would still be unpredictable even
if the universe was fundamentally deterministic.
To take this all together, 1) scientific
knowledge is necessarily limited and provisional, but I don’t think that should
get us down too much; and 2) if we take it at its word, the contemporary
ontology of physics either gives us a universe which at its core is random or
it gives us a world which is deterministic but which nevertheless necessarily
appears probabilistic to any being with merely finite knowledge.
NRIII: Welcome! Thanks so much for participating in the discussion! I
think the spirit of God’s Casino, or
Faith in Physics at the Chelsea Hotel (an ongoing literary discussion of
philosophers, artists, scientists, etc. regarding a variety of philosophical
themes engaged here on Kritikos),
which is emerging at this point, is that of an unsolved mystery, fixed in time
within a hurricanic cone of uncertainty. Cultural practices, academic and
otherwise (e.g. philosophy, art, mathematics, science, religion, politics,
agriculture, economics, etc.) portend to do many things, perhaps all things for their respective and most
staunchly orthodox adherents, but the problem is that they don’t in all
actuality do many things very well.
Worse, such practices may not even do the one or two specific things they are
most intent on doing all that well either.
Our era is truly epochal in that sense. We, the toolmakers, unlike
our primitive, ancient and modern forebears, appear to have run out of ideas
that have great Enlightenment-style significance (e.g. the wheel, agriculture,
the printing press, genetics, space travel, internet, etc.), all while our species’
future does not seem very secure as human populations swell. Have we lost our
way in terms of a meaningfully collective narrative to share, and more
importantly, to help us understand our ideas and inventions, useful and
otherwise? Is such a narrative even necessary? Every culture seems to have at
least one predominant tale, that is, an explanation of ‘things’, as it were.
Some point to the new social media and the like, but social media is probably
the weakest attempt we’ve seen at social cohesion in the last century. It
simulates social cohesion, but it offers more separation and alienation in the
form of technosocial popularity envy and an odd preoccupation with ethereal
attributes (e.g. ‘likes’, ‘shares’, etc.). It’s all empty calories.
For example, take cellphones. Arguably, a ‘significant’ invention
that ‘defines’ our era in some purportedly meaningful way. But who really needs
a cell phone? What does it mean to have one? Is it just a simple and innocuous
tool of communication? Or, has it truly changed everything and everyone? Or,
has nothing changed? With the narrative of advertising, we receive only one
widely circulating collective narrative with respect to humanity and cell
phones, that of solicitation. In that story, cell phones are awesome! Humans
should each own at least three of them, always the newest, and enjoy every app
we can before it’s too late!
Interdisciplinarity as an academic discipline (e.g. critical
theory, cultural studies, etc.) sought to remedy such a human cognitive void, with
regard to the analysis of such kinds of embedded social narratives or cultural
engineering, though it seems largely ineffectual as a widespread adaptation to
life today. How come? I would say that most people do not really think that
way, nor care to do so. Interdisciplinarity appears far too complex and
requires too much effort. It’s easier to remain stuck in a one-track mindset.
Everything is philosophy. Everything is biology, etc. That sort of
stubbornness. Obviously, disciplinary essentialism is mythological, but try
convincing Richard Dawkins otherwise. I adore The Selfish Gene (1976), but surely there are other ghosts in the
machine, no?
The wonders of quantum entanglement and dark matter I imagine will
continue to escape much of humanity for some time. The scientists don’t really
care too much about exploratory questions of ontology, because there’s no
funding in it. And in no time, we’ve been reduced to a world culture of phallic
empiricism and world seduction in the form of financial summits, cultural
militarism and advertising. It’s not that globalization doesn’t have its
benefits. Or STEM (i.e. science, technology, engineering and math). Of course,
they do. Perhaps, it’s that something is missing. Something other than the all
too common and specifically hominid race to the basest common denominators of
late capitalism and STEM as faith (albeit a quite reliable faith, depending
upon the objective, point taken). Too bad magic is not as effective, no?! Or,
maybe it is! Please share some insight with regard to your experience in Japan
and the invention of religion in that space, or perhaps your exploration of the
myths of disenchantment may have some bearing here?
JJS: In general, I share your broad sense of
the weakness of the contemporary academy under Neo-Liberalism. The central mission of many educational
institutions seems to be preparing students for a job market that no longer
exists. Plus, while academic administration inflates, adjunctification
has transformed most of higher education into a precariat class with
insufficient stability for real intellectual innovation or cultural critique.
As I’m sure you know, this is part of a broader
assault on education in America. This attack is often presented as new, but as
Richard Hofstadter observed in Anti-intellectualism
in American Life (1963) it has deep roots in a persistent
disdain for expertise and suspicion of academic knowledge. The difference is
that education has become increasingly politically polarized, so while
conservatives used to support various forms of learning - they don’t anymore.
Meanwhile, much of the Left abandoned any form of education that wasn’t yoked
to militarism or the market (hence the conceptual poverty of
the embrace of STEM). Sadly, the humanities seem almost vestigial.
All
this conspires to make the academy increasingly irrelevant to intellectual and
cultural life. Practically the only public intellectuals remaining in America
are pro-capitalist economists and a small number of natural scientists with
little background in or capacity for philosophy or broader issues.
The
pull toward hyper-specialization has made that worse insofar as scholars are
under strong pressure to publish works targeted toward a narrower and narrower
audience of other specialists. In theory circles, we got sucked into
fetishizing jargon and obscurantism. Mainstream disciplines exhibit strong
pushes toward territorialism and arbitrary disciplinary gate keeping. There is
a tendency to attack other scholars who get too popular or write too
accessibly. Across the board, scholars seemingly equate rigor with being
unreadable. I try to push back against this trend in my work, but in many ways,
scientists/scholars are writing themselves into irrelevance.
I
think capitalism can be very corrosive and I think you are completely right
about the myths that get circulated in advertising.
The
striking thing from my vantage is that advertising actively recycles the tropes
of enchantment. Commercials regularly depict speaking animals, objects with
magical powers, mythological beasts, and the like. They even recount narratives
of redemption. But all of this is of course yoked to amplifying consumption and
encouraging further desire.
But
all that said, I’d like to push back against the sense that scientific
empiricism is hollow or actively renders the world meaningless.
We
tend to get this narrative from the German sociologist Max Weber (who I discuss
in The Myth of Disenchantment). Weber
was pessimistic about the capacity of natural science to produce ethical
meaning. In particular, he saw “rational, empirical knowledge” and “empirical
scientific rationalism” as transforming the cosmos “into a causal mechanism”
and as a resulting displacing religion and ethics into “the irrational realm.”
Basically, Weber assumed that science could not provide ethics and hence he saw
scientific rationalization as stripping away older layers of religious meaning
and value from the world.
But
Weber was wrong in this regard.
On
the philosophical level, Weber’s argument ultimately rested on the Humean (or Kantian) idea that to extrapolate ethics from
existence is a naturalistic fallacy.
But since Weber’s day a number of philosophers have shown that there are
various legitimate ways of going from an “is” to an “ought.” If
you are interested I can say a lot more about this.
On
a sociological or anthropological level, I’ve demonstrated in works like The Invention of Religion in Japan and The Myth of Disenchantment, that the
advancement of science and technology are NOT correlated with a loss of belief
in a meaningful world. The classic version of the secularization thesis is
false. Moreover, there are plenty of different ways to combine science and
enchantment. There are reasons to think that science might actually terminate
in panpsychism.
Moreover,
people have ways to formulate meaningful communities without reference to older
institutional religions (e.g. Trekkies). This kind of things gets written off
quickly but I’m actually optimistic about various new forms of community
formation.
There
tend to be less grand forms of meaning that unite societies as a whole. But I’m
actually optimistic about meaning pluralism. Old fashioned secularization
theorists tended to attack pluralism in some kind of nostalgia for a
centralized church, but I actually think pluralizing ontologies are valuable
and basically a good thing, even if they terminate in societies that have to be
more agonistic (or at least engage in more debate) in order to find common
ground.
NRIII: Is that an evolutionary ethics I see on your plate? (laughter) -
I’d love to hear more about what sounds to me like evolutionary ethics, which
is obviously a somewhat novel, naturalistic evolutionary turn in ethical
philosophy from our some of our modern forebears. Its implications could be
far-reaching. Contemporary analytic metaphysics might not withstand a
metaphysics of evolution. Darwinians have long held that there can be little
understanding of the human condition, while remaining ignorant of the fleshy
genetic code, even if it is culturally modulated. Might the evidence for such a
reality be in their favor?
Eastern philosophy holds a similarly naturalistic account in high
regard as well, with texts like the Tao, perhaps culminating in a sort of
naturalist panpsychism. And it’s interesting in light of a purportedly wu wei world, to
see which ideas regarding governance co-evolve with it, no?
I’m not sure that science per se gets us there (to panpsychism) as
a cultural practice, but I’d love to hear more about that as well.
Do any of the aforementioned ideas have worthwhile effects upon
humanity’s future? What can we speculate the future will hold for us?
Totalitarian open markets? Totalitarian open citizens? Totalitarian analytic philosophy
Shrinking administrative support for the humanities? And perhaps, hence
declining enrollment in the humanities? Government-issued birth permits and
social media pluralism? Engaged #trekkies and #kpop fandom for the brave new world?
Regarding physics, should humanity continue to wonder if we are
more than physical matter? And, if we contain or interact with something more
than identified physical matter (e.g. dark matter), wouldn’t that scale up or
down somehow? How might our social organizations actually reflect that reality?
Humanity appears to revolve around a metaphysics of capital, and
little else, even when under the guise of something else (e.g. religion).
Should we instead have faith in capital? Faith in physics? Faith in utility,
rather than otherworldliness? Perhaps it’s not so binary, and we may reasonably
engage in a bit of both? John Stuart Mill and
Jean Baudrillard? Leonard Cohen and
The Cars? Emile Cioran and Jesus Christ? Have our cake and
eat it, too?!
JJS: Wow. Great questions! I feel like we could keep discussing these
things forever. Sorry that our conversation will have to draw to close soon. To
reply, the ethical project I’m working on is less Darwin than Aristotle. It
emerges from reading two different bodies of theory together—namely Critical
Theory and Virtue Ethics. I’ve been calling the project “Critical Virtue
Ethics” and its goal “Revolutionary Happiness.”
I argue that we should embrace human flourishing as an ultimate
telos or goal. I write “Happiness” with a capital “H” to note that I am not
talking about a particular transitory emotion, but a state of becoming that is
multi-realizable and has a series of features I go on to specify (a kind of
scientifically updated and pluralized Eudaimonia).
Drawing on thinkers like Shantideva, I argue that
compassion is the main virtue. I also argue that if I can convince someone to
embrace a goal of this sort than it permits formulating both logical and
objectively normative entailments.
“Revolutionary Happiness” is also a political demand rooted in
societal critique. This is where I am bringing in the Critical Theory. Here is
also where it breaks from the happiness studies that was rightly criticized by
thinkers like Sara Ahmed for being pacifying. Revolutionary Happiness is
instead a call to action or a philosophy of praxis.
But its positive project departs from much of conventional
continental or critical political theory. Because while critical theory (and
its sister disciplines) have gotten really good at criticizing ideology or
formulating various hermeneutics of suspicion, they have largely tended to omit
positive projects in favor of relentlessly and endlessly rehashing critique.
Critical Virtue Ethics therefore brings together both the societal
critique of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School, while
adding in a utopian or positive project drawn from East Asian and Greco-Roman
philosophers as well as Sci-fi (for that see below).
But the challenge—and this is where I am picking up your last
paragraph—is how to avoid having the whole thing hijacked by capitalism and
transformed into a cheap commodity. As I think you rightly observe capitalism
has the capacity to absorb contradictions, even rebellion (e.g., you can order
anti-capitalist “Got Marxism?” t-shirts from Walmart). So while I depart from
the stated goal of most Marxist politics, I think we still have to figure out
how to break “faith in capitalism” or at least remind people that there are
alternatives. Let me explain.
The contemporary political moment is downright dystopian. I often
feel like we are living in under a Biff Tannen presidency. But we’ve also seen
that postmodern cynicism and pessimism has generally failed to motivate
positive political action. Moreover, the centrist political technocracy that
has dominated the Left for a generation has found itself incapable of
responding to increasing economic inequality, the prison-industrial complex,
and the collapse of labor resulting from the weakening of the nation state and
the transition to late stage, virtual, capitalism.
For all these reasons, I think we need visions of utopia now even
more than ever…This is where things like Star
Trek come in for me. Although it is not my favorite franchise (I prefer
Iain M. Banks’ The Culture), I think
Science Fiction is one of the last places to preserve some sparks of
emancipatory or utopian energy. So that—in addition to being a geek—is why I
turn to Science Fiction for inspirations for the philosophical and political
theory I’m working on.
I’ve probably gone on too long, but to answer one last question.
You asked “should humanity continue to wonder if we are more than physical
matter”?
I’d say few things have changed as radically as the notion of “matter.” I came
across a quote by John Dewey the other day that put this well. In a 1944 essay
he said, “It would be difficult to find a greater distance between any two
terms than that which separates ‘matter’ in the Greek-medieval tradition and
the technical signification […] that the word bears in science today.” I agree
insofar as the combined impact of relativity and quantum physics has radically
transformed our notion of “matter.”
But I’d add that I don’t think the process is over. To circle back
to something I said at the start of this conversation, I think Laudan was right that given enough time scientific theories
generally turn out to be false or at best only approximately true. Even now
research in quantum physics is demolishing most of our standing notions of
matter and something else will come along to challenge those in turn.
Also, consciousness remains one of the great unsolved problems.
Indeed, contemporary research on the subject is very very
much in its infancy. Philosophers and scientists totally disagree about what
consciousness might be and how to study it. The mind-matter dualism associated
with Descartes is widely repudiated, but my sense is that most purely
physicalist accounts of consciousness have either been not very convincing or
have tried to explain consciousness away as epiphenomenal (which I find
basically unpersuasive). Meanwhile, quantum anomalies continue to suggest that
observation and cosmos have a messier relationship than we have fully grasped
thus far.
These suggest to me a bigger role for consciousness than many
natural scientists have been willing to account for in the past. Recently,
however, a number of scientists and philosophers seem to be turning toward
different versions of panpsychism—that every bit of matter contains some kind
proto-consciousness. If they are right, then current notions of purely physical
matter will have to go.
All that is to say, I think natural science is only in its
infancy. Plus, some significant percentage of what we think we know now will
likely be overturned. I think science is the best thing we’ve got to answer
certain questions, but it is inherently limited—by its philosophical
presuppositions, the fundamental limitations of the human mind, and the
conditions of empirical research as such.
NRIII: Yes, I agree that nothing is truer than the idea that
intellectual currencies do not persist; like language, what is en vogue today is not tomorrow, and often
seems silly in retrospect. Ain’t it ‘swell’.
(laughter)
Nine Inch Nails wrote a song called ‘Happiness in Slavery’, from
the EP ‘Broken’ released in 1992. Click the image below to see the band perform
the song, 20+ years later on their recent North American tour. A fitting exit
while we await more on Revolutionary Happiness and the future to come?
TO BE CONTINUED…
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Spring
2019, ISSN 1552-5112