– By Byron Jennings, Theorist and Project Coordinator
Many minds, great, mediocre, and small, have pondered from time immemorial the ultimate nature of the universe. They were all searching for the same thing: the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Naturally, being people, and having no real criteria to decide on the correct answer, they came up with a collection of contradictory answers, including:
- Materialism: The idea is that what you see is what you get. There is no man behind the curtain manipulating things. In this view, the mind and consciousness arises from the material brain.
- Idealism: Largely the converse of materialism. Here the mind is fundamental and the material objects only exist in the mind.
- Solipsism: An extreme form of idealism that says that all that exists is my mind. You are out of luck. Or vise versa. This one appeals to me since it makes me the center of the universe.
- Deism: Materialism with an Omphalic twist. God or gods created the universe and then took an extended coffee break. This tended to be the default view of intellectuals in the age of enlightenment, most notably Thomas Paine (see The Age of Reason).
- Theism: God or gods created the universe and stayed around to interact with their creation. This is typical of western religions – Greek, Roman, Germanic, and the Mosaic religions.
- Orwellianism: Reality is what the Party says it is. The idea that there is reality apart from what the Party says is a pernicious superstition. This is the extreme case of ideology trumping everything else.
- 42: If you do not understand this answer you do not know what the question really is (Deep Thought from the Hitch Hikers Gide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams).
Number 7 we can ignore (sorry Douglas Adams fans), although the real problem probably is that we do not understand the question. Number 6 is a chilling reminder of what can happen when ideology rules. For all the rest, the scientific method, as a method, is agnostic.
Contrary to popular opinion, the scientific method does not assume materialism, realism, or any other -ism. All one needs to carry out science are observations that can be used to construct and test models. Whether the observations are the result of a material world impinging on the mind through the senses, or purely illusions of the mind as in solipsism, does not really matter. The relation between the models and reality is different for each of the options one through five, but observation cannot discriminate between them. At best, all observations can do is force ever more creative uses of the Duhem-Quine thesis. No matter how materialistic the universe may appear, there is always a place for God to hide; even if a being with vast knowledge and power showed up, there would be no way to prove he was God and not just a being from some highly advanced civilization.
Scientific models depend not just on observation, but also on simplicity—which is the only antidote to Duhem-Quine. Combining observation and simplicity, the current models of science tend strongly towards materialism. But this could change the next time science lurches in a new direction. Indeed, some claim that this has already happened with quantum mechanics. The measurement process in quantum mechanics is taken by some, possibly misguided souls, to indicate that consciousness has a vital role to play, hence tilting science towards idealism. Quantum mechanics and idealism may be no farther apart then classical mechanics and materialism.
While simplicity is an essential ingredient in constructing our scientific models, can we actually use it as a guide to reality, itself? Perhaps reality is not as simple as our models assume (note the word assume) and the world is only 6,000 thousand years old as Gosse suggested. The lack of God or gods in our scientific models may be only a symptom of the failure of the simplicity assumption. The mind of God, if he exists, is unfathomable, so there is no guarantee that he would respect simplicity.
How do the models of science relate to the ultimate reality? That is unknown and unknowable. In classical mechanics, the particle trajectories and three-dimensional Euclidean geometry were assumed to be real. The first was destroyed by quantum mechanics, the second by relativity. There is no reason to assume the underpinnings and constructs of any current model will not be similarly undermined by future paradigm shifts. Independent of all that, our models stand, giving us the only useful knowledge available for how the universe works. Niels Bohr stated, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” As for the ultimate nature of reality, we find that in a song by Iris DeMent, Let the Mystery Be:
but no one knows for certain
and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
Good Post. science is not perfect, but at list it has proof to work.
“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.”
The Evolution of Physics (1938) Einstein
Whether you have noticed, what these models (SUSY, Higgs, etc.) any more don’t work? Logic time has come.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4507
This is a very nice post – thanks very much for writing it.
As a physicist, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics does not bother me and does not seem to me to contradict or undermine the principle of simplicity (Occam’s Razor, right?) or materialism. Recent speculations coming from string theory about “The Landscape” and the “Anthropic Explanation of the Fundamental Constants” bother me much more in this regard, since they seem to postulate truths which cannot be tested even in principle. There is no god(s) involved, yet the entities and principles that come up in these speculations are inaccessible to experiment – even a gedankenexperiment. I’m not sure to which of your seven categories these extensions of string theory belong…
The article seems to suggest that while science does not assume any of the five points of view a priori, its results can tend towards one or the other. Taken to the extreme, the article seems to say that if we accept Occam’s razor, then science can prove there is no God. I think this is incorrect because the concept “God” is not a scientific concept. Using God or intelligent beings in a scientific theory does not in itself improve its predictiveness and its falsifiability. It would only do so if the theory were accompanied by a scientific model of the behavior of the being, at which point there is no point in calling the phenomenon a God or a being. Similarly, one can only scientifically prove there is no God if one reduces God to some scientific model of its behavior. I would suggest that the proper place for God is in discussions of the meaning of life, and the meaning of the universe, which is something science has nothing to say about. Science cannot prove that life has meaning; it also cannot prove that life has no meaning.
See NYT article for related musings…http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/reasons-for-reason/?hp. How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles?
Of course the “answers” in that list at the start of your post are not necessarily all mutually contradictory. In mathematics a theorem may end with the words “and conversely”, and in a similar vein items 1 and 2 on your list may be just alternative points of view on the same reality (a bit like wave-particle duality and/or Fourier transform views of QM and/or the surface vs interior information content of spacetime). These and all of the others in your list all seem to posit a unitary view of reality (where the “non-material” interacts with the material and so really becomes just another part of it). But that is not the only way of looking at things. From what little I understand of it, Stephen J Gould’s view of “non-overlapping magisteria” seems to me like a (stricter ?) version of Cartesian dualism in which the only point of interaction between the spiritual/moral magisterium and the scientific/physical one is at the point of exercise of human free will. Not that I agree with him though, for I suspect that the spiritual/moral (and artistic/aesthetic) magisteria are just alternative representations of projections of parts of the physical one. I do agree with you that the present practice of science is compatible with any if these “-isms” but suspect that it will eventually provide a more compact and compelling “explanation” of everything that is presently claimed by other “magisteria”.
Wrong. No amount of progress of science can “explain” what ought to be, i.e. assign value and meaning. It can eventually explain the processes that cause a certain person to accept a certain morale, but that’s not the same thing. To a person deciding whether to defend science against Orwellianism or not (ultimately a value assignment), explaining how his brain works will be of little help to him.
Bart, Your apparent inability to decide whether science cannot (in sentence 1) or can (in sentence 2) explain values can be resolved by noting that (contrary to your identification in sentence1),to explain values is *not* the same as to assign them.
Thanks, Good post..
This -isms are helpful in giving explanation to the explainable, we just accept some things as it is, like a watch that we don’t have the tech to open, we all know its working, 25 years ago, i dream up about looking at matter as a tube, the harder you look the smaller it becomes, but as I reach the enthropy things gets bigger again. Its like a twisted circular tube that was viewed like the IAEA logo of the ATOM.
Great article – I saw your article on Bing! Thanks!