Words&Dirt

“‘I don’t figure Bill meant to kill her,’ he said sadly.  ‘He could choke a girl to death without meaning to at all.  He has mighty strong hands.  Once done he has to use what brains God gave him to cover up what he done.  I feel real bad about it, but that don’t alter the facts and the probabilities.  It’s simple and natural and the simple and natural things usually turn out to be right.’

I said: ‘I should think he would have run away.  I don’t see how he could stand it to stay here.’

Patton spat into the black velvet shadow of a manzanita bush.  He said slowly: ‘He had a government pension and he would have to run away from that too.  And most men can stand what they’ve got to stand, when it steps up and looks them straight in the eye.  Like they’re doing all over the world right now.  Well, goodnight to you.  I’m going to walk down to that little pier again and stand there awhile in the moonlight and feel bad.  A night like this, and we got to think about murders.'”

––The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler, pg. 85

“Where is the universe heading?  We must rely on discernible historical patterns to predict the future.  Yet in order to have any confidence that past patterns will persist, we need to identify the source of those patterns.  In other words, if there are regularities, structures, and emergent complexity, what is driving the whole thing?

The search for the final unifying theory or the ultimate ‘source code’ that runs the universe goes on.  Computer scientist Ed Fredkin made a bold speculation that the universe is a giant computer with a purpose of reaching some final state.  But he also believed the final state is not specified in advance.  The zoologist Charles Birch maintained that evolutionary history resembles a vast, unfinished experiment without an omnipotent designer or a preconceived plan.  The universe can also be viewed as a ‘probability field’ with an infinite continuum of possibilities ahead of us.  It may simply be viewed as a great idea, a playground for us to play in.

These metaphors and models can be useful, but they are products of our limited minds and technologies.  Anybody who declares the final answer is showing his ignorance.  What we observe is only a tiny portion of the universe.  Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tells us that we can get close to answering all questions, but never answer every question about a system as long as we are part of the system.  Thus, even in theory, we can never know why the universe exists and why it is the way it is without jumping out of it, which is impossible.  In Einstein’s famous words, ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’  The material cosmos, life, and mind would not evolve if there were no stable patterns, but why there are repeatable patterns is beyond the understanding of anyone inside the universe.

Still, within these limits, the secret of success has always been that one must act based on what information one can obtain.  In other words, without much hope of obtaining the ‘source code’ or a complete record of history, we must make our calls on the most interesting observable pattern of all––the teleological direction of the universe.  The history since the Big Bang hints at a purposeful tendency of evolution toward ever-higher levels of complexity and awareness, as if under the guidance of mind.  With our current state of knowledge, the universe seems to unfold, or germinate, much like the work of mathematicians: more and more theorems are being derived from a handful of axioms with the aid of a large amount of computational work.

Life is essentially the accumulation of information and the realization of potential embedded in the fabric of existence.  According to David Deutsch, ‘Life achieves its effects not by being larger, more massive, or more energetic than other physical processes, but by being more knowledgeable.’  The same tendency is even more fascinating for cultural evolution.  Stuart Kauffman noted that at least the first three levels of Dennett’s ‘intelligence tower’ have molecular parallels in cellular, neural, and immune systems.  It is self-evident that intelligence provides an edge, ceteris paribus (‘all things being equal’).  It is natural that moral sentiments in primates and perhaps other highly intelligent animals evolved to facilitate learning, and humanity boasts the strongest and most sophisticated moral sentiments.

As the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, while we must admit that there seems to be a pattern (or plot) in history, we also need to note the implausibility and fragility of the plot.  We have learned that there can be no fixed Newtonian laws concerning complex phenomena.  And we recognize that the most interesting evolutionary junctures––the beginning of the universe, life, human species, and higher consciousness––are still poorly understood, if at all.

In addition, although the general trend seems unmistakable, nothing specific is inevitable.  The natural laws of the universe only provided the potential for a long series of seemingly miraculous events that led to the appearance of humanity and civilization.  In Steven Jay Gould’s vivid metaphor, ‘Replay the tape a million times from a [pre-Cambrian] Burgess beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.  It is, indeed, a wonderful life.’  The same is probably true for the emergence of life on Earth.  This understanding is emotionally ‘cold’ and fundamentally incompatible with the idea that the cosmic destiny is human.  But it gives us a profound sense of how precious our existence is.

All our efforts, in a sense, are ‘hitching a ride’ onto the process of cosmic evolution.  While life may depend on the stability of the solar system, knowledge depends on something even more fragile: the survival of the human species.  Furthermore, as we shall discuss in the next chapter, this view of the universe gives our existence its deepest meaning.

While the Cosmic View is very likely a better representation of reality than other competing beliefs, the only thing certain is that our views will continue to evolve.  The Cosmic View of the universe is accumulated wisdom, genetically and culturally.  It is certainly not the best guide imaginable, just the best we have.  We must be humble and audacious at the same time.  Mistakes will be inevitable, but out of all that, progress will be stumbled upon.  J. P. Morgan once said, ‘Go far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.’

What is truly exciting is that this scientific and spiritual exploration and accumulation of new knowledge may be only the beginning.  Indeed, much of the profound new ‘knowledge’ that we possess today is likely to become utterly trivial for our descendants.  The most valuable piece of knowledge we possess today may be what Nicholas of Cusa called learned ignorance––we have learned enough and thought hard enough to know what is unknowable to us.  In one of his most famous remarks, Isaac Newton summed up his life shortly before his death in 1727, which I believe is also a precise picture for the state of humanity today: ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world but to myself I seem to have been merely a child playing on the seashore, diverting myself now and then finding a pebble more smooth or a shell more beautiful than others, whilst before me the great ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered.'”

––Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution, by Ted Chu, pg. 105-8