Does The Universe Need Explaining?
Why is there something, rather than nothing? Why does the universe go to all the trouble of actually existing? Wouldn’t it be easier, and somehow more elegant, for there just to be nothing at all? Sort of an existential “principle of least action”…
Questions like these make it seem as if the universe is crying out for an explanation. But is it? The universe, by sheer definition, is everything that is. Thus, if there is an explanation for the universe, that explanation is already part of the universe itself. If anything explains the universe, it must be the universe itself.
There is another possibility. Reality simply is. “Explanations” are techniques that beings such as ourselves have evolved to map reality. They are fairly adequate for mapping those features of reality that are directly related to our survival. However, there is no reason to expect that human beings would have evolved the mechanisms necessary to “explain” everything. Evolution is notoriously parsimonious. Why should we expect our evolved minds to come equipped so as to be able to understand absolutely everything?
lon wrote:
“Wouldn’t it be easier, and somehow more elegant, for there just to be nothing at all?”
This concept is pretty central to Buddhist philosophy; you’re descrbing Nirvana if I recall correctly, and the elegance of Buddhist teachings reflect the elegance of the concept. While I don’t think it’s an ideal conceptualization of any ultimate reality, I do find the visualization of incredible importance as a mental excercise.
“Questions like these make it seem as if the universe is crying out for an explanation. But is it?”
The ocean doesn’t ask for my understanding. Yet, I realize that I can draw sustenance from it, and I also realize that it can kill me if I don’t study its nature and work within its constraints.
“The universe, by sheer definition, is everything that is.”
If you’re going to use that definition, we need to refine it slightly, but incredibly signifantly. There’s little doubt you mean to include everything we can actually physically observe, but do you include consiousness or thought itself? What about the contents of the thoughts? As a related question to a mathematician, does this definition include any transfinite entities in the universe?
We also need to firm up the definition of “explain”. There’s two types of explanations going on here, those that explain “how” and those that explain “why”. How I drive a car to the cinema doesn’t explain why I want to see a movie. Sure, the distinction is meaningless if one removes “I”, my consiousness, from the statement, but then one is removing significant observable fact from the picture. My consiousness exists. It decided to go to the movies, setting off a chain reaction of events. This demonstrates that for at least some events, a full understanding of that event requres the explanation of both how and why. While you may be certain that the creation of the universe is an event that isn’t characterized by a why, and granted it may not be, I’m not so sure. I do believe, however, that IF there’s a why, it is necessary to try to investigate and understand it. And it’s not futile, either. By observing the car travelling down the road, if I can figure out that the car is headed to the cinema, I would be ableto rationally surmise that the consiousness therein had business there and state confidently that it is probable that the consiousness decided to see a mov. And in the end, the understanding I gain is the only thing that’s truly important; the knowlege of how a car works, however detailed, is revealed to be wholly irrevelant when you consider that had the guy’s car been broken, he would have used another form of transportation to carry out his decision.
“Why should we expect our evolved minds to come equipped so as to be able to understand absolutely everything?”
Once upon a time, people had no understanding of numbers. Later, they developed the ability to comprehend “1″, “2″, and “many”. After they refined the meaning of “many”, they concieved of infinity. Many centuries pass before they refined the meaning of infinity, concieving transfinite and absolute infinite. Each of these steps marked a great expansion of understanding. Historical evidence shows that once something is concieved, it is only a matter of time before it is understood. And we have concieved of an absolute infinite, the current-day stand-in for “absolutely everything”. Whether our current evolved brain has sufficient capacity for actually understanding it or not is yet to be seen, but evidence also suggests that if more capacity is ultimately needed, evolution via natural selection will serve to provide it.
Posted 27 Jul 2007 at 9:06 am ¶
Marcus wrote:
Regarding the concept that the universe is “everything that is”, you said:
“If you’re going to use that definition, we need to refine it slightly, but incredibly signifantly. There’s little doubt you mean to include everything we can actually physically observe, but do you include consiousness or thought itself? What about the contents of the thoughts? As a related question to a mathematician, does this definition include any transfinite entities in the universe?”
The one-bit answers to your first two questions are: yes of course, and yes of course. My friends with a “faith-based” worldview often seem to think that, if you’re an atheist, then you must believe that nothing but atoms and energy exists. Not so. When I became an atheist, “love” didn’t cease to exist, nor “consciousness”, not “thought” nor “joy”, etc. Nor did they become less. Those things exist as much for a person like me with a naturalistic world view, as they do to a person like you, with a faith-based world view. To use an even simpler example - but not too simple - “arrangements of physical objects” exist just as surely as “physical objects” exist. But an “arrangement” is a relation among material things, and not a material thing itself. So clearly non-material things exist. And this brings me to your third question above. If all this is true, then it’s quite possible that logical or mathematical objects - finite, infinite, and transfinite - have an existence that is more fundamental, more “real”, than physical objects. One way to think about this is as follows: it’s easy to imagine an alternate universe with different physical laws (for instance, just imagine that speed of light is 60 miles per hour, instead of 186,000 miles per second). But try imagining a universe with different logical or mathematical laws. Is it even possible? Logic trumps physics.
One more comment on your comments: towards the end of your post, you say:
“Whether our current evolved brain has sufficient capacity for actually understanding it or not is yet to be seen, but evidence also suggests that if more capacity is ultimately needed, evolution via natural selection will serve to provide it.”
Evolution via natural selection can only produce capabilities that confer a survival advantage. While a brain capable of understanding absolutely everything would be nice, there’s no reason to think that evolution is predestined to produce such a brain. Quite the contrary, in fact. Stephen Jay Gould makes the point in one of his books that, if we could “rewind the tape” of the history of life by say 100 million years, and then set the whole process in motion again from that point, not only would human beings probably never appear, but it’s quite possible that no species capable of abstract thought at anything approaching our level (which I’m not saying is that high) would ever appear. Evolution is a combination of random variation, which broadens the tree of life, combined with natural selection, which narrows it. It’s not predestined to produce intelligence, any more than it’s predestined to produce Howie Mandel.
Posted 28 Jul 2007 at 11:26 pm ¶
lon wrote:
“The one-bit answers to your first two questions are: yes of course, and yes of course. My friends with a “faith-based” worldview often seem to think that, if you’re an atheist, then you must believe that nothing but atoms and energy exists.”
I sense that you thought I was setting you up or challenging the statement here. I can understand the mistake, both of us make a habit of challenging each other’s assertions.
But, honestly, that was just a question to make sure we were talking about the same thing. Many people, both now and throughout history, toss around terms like “universe”, but I see so many unnecessary arguments occurring because it’s obvious that each side is ascribing different meanings to terms they’re using. Like my recurring “belief is not synonymous with faith” rant, which annoys me even more when I see theologists misusing the terms (best example: the church itself trying to grapple with the “faith vs. works” argument).
But yeah, I was just trying to find out if you were speaking about a physical universe only, a universe which includes mind (ability to think), or going as far as including the actual content of a thought. I can roll with any particular definition, but do need to know which one is in force. Of course I wasn’t questioning whether you lost the ability to love in your worldview, that’d be absurd. You just assign that evidence to the wrong theory. *grin*
I am unsure if my posited God literally exists outside of the universe definition which includes content of thought. Much more work and thought is needed here, and I’m rather annoyed at the Church for not working this problem long ago instead of doing their best to stagnate and strangulate these important investigations. I’m inclined to wonder if there has been someone who actually did figure out the linkages between the spiritual and mental “levels” but they woke up one night just in time to see Church’s henchmen burning their work right before killing them. Heck, they did worse to people who dared promulgate the teachings of some of the other Apostles that the counsel of Nicea decided were heretics. Let’s see. They claim there was this guy who was the most important guy who ever lived. During his life, a handful of people hung out with this guy. After he died, the people who hung out with him went around telling everyone about their experiences. Then some mercinary priests, cashing their paychecks from the Roman government, decided by fiat that some of the people who hung out with him were right and the others were wrong. Then they went and burned any copies of teachings they didn’t like, teachings of people who hung out with their guy as much as anyone else, then they burned the people caught possessing or speaking these teachings. Total bullshit. Is it just me, or if you thought some guy was the most important guy who ever lived, wouldn’t it be of utmost importance to preserve the knowlege held by every single person you can find who ever had a first hand account of him? Okay, now I’m ranting. Sorry. This particular rant is certain to be a foundational post on my blog.
My point is if a spiritual “level” exists, if an afterlife exists, it has properties which will be succeptable to the use of logic and mathematics in the analysis thereof. We should be able to, using what we can observe and concieve, at least take a stab at it, even if it amounts to something similar to alchemy. Alchemy was way off base, but it was a necessary precursor to chemistry and the rest of natural science. To me, if there’s an afterlife, when you wake up there, you’ll find that all, or at least most, of the mathematics and logic you learned are still applicable, and more importantly, useful. This relates to what you were saying about logic trumping physics and imagining a universe with different physical laws. This is indeed very similar to what I’m doing; I posit a “level” or dimension or something, a spiritual level, in which the things we hold as spiritual values are quantifiable and submit themselves to logic. I frequently visualize this place as somewhere where you could stub your toe on a clump of justice (for suitable values of “toe” and “clump”). I think you’ll like the afterlife, as there will still be awesome math puzzles to solve. And we’ll still get to argue about the existance of God too, because I seriously doubt proof will be immediately forthcoming (in hindsight, we’ll see our “salvation” as being a mechanistic process).
“Evolution via natural selection can only produce capabilities that confer a survival advantage. While a brain capable of understanding absolutely everything would be nice, there’s no reason to think that evolution is predestined to produce such a brain.”
I’m inclined to totally agree with Gould in the idea that if we “rewound the tape”, things would look totally different. The observed randomness in mutations is way more than sufficent to infer that, especially given the timeframes we’re talking about. That’s why I was careful to say that if the mental capacity was “needed”, it would be delivered. As for NS only conferring things with survival advantage, I tend to agree with that too. This point is important to me as well, as I believe that the definition of “things with survival advantage” gets pushed too far. I note that as the conflict with my theories increase, the wider that definition tends to be. That is, I’m in general agreement with NS; the only conflict I have is when “things with survival advantage” is pushed to include the things I call spiritual values. The ability to concieve the statement “I think, therefore I am” wasn’t necessary. If the world is mechanistic, then only mechanisms are necessary to survive in it. Sure, it could be a improbable random mutation accident in the endlist list of improbable random accidents I’m being asked to swallow, but as that both the improbabilities and cardinality of that list approaches infinity, I find Occam’s razor of use in deciding between that and a theory that it appears that life of any kind always seems to strive to “better” itself, and some of those mutations aren’t quite as random as they appear. Evolving minds that have the capability to exhibit consiousness was the entire point of the entire shooting match, and it really doesn’t matter what kind of body or brain it is housed in. We can rewind the tape, and we will look totally different, but we’ll still be having this argument. The only difference, other than our arrangement of our physical bodies, is how long it’d take.
Posted 29 Jul 2007 at 6:17 am ¶
lon wrote:
Despite the length of that, I left out a point on the last bit. The point being, that if NS has observably produced mind capable of consiousness, that has at least as much survival value as greater mental power in general. I think that consiousness doesn’t have enough survival value to be explained by NS, but if I even if I did accept that, it doesn’t seem logical to then reject that NS would continue selecting for constantly greater intellect.
Posted 29 Jul 2007 at 6:48 am ¶