Turtles All The Way Down: ways in which the abyss smiles back

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd go away.

 ― Hugh Mearns

The last post on the prime mover – the entity or thing that got the universal ball rolling - left me thinking. In it, I was concerned with the ways in which – leaving aside the validity of the argument itself -  it is sometimes misused to sneak in other preconceived notions about the attributes we think a Ultimate Cause should have. Here, I’d like to pick apart the issue of validity as a springboard for some musing on why that validity goes largely unquestioned. In essence, the argument takes something we think we know about ‘normal phenomena’ – effects have causes, ‘motion’  is imparted rather than self-generated, contingent events rely on necessary precursors – and makes the same claim of the whole shebang: the overarching System itself. Is this valid? What it it that makes us so sure that reality itself is constrained by the same apparent rules as the things it contains? 

The Big Bang is touted as the ‘scientific’ view of the origin of the universe, but it's important to note that the claim is quite specifically constrained within the system. The claim is that, in the words of Wikipedia (my emphasis, and minus citations):

Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This singularity signals the breakdown of general relativity. How closely we can extrapolate towards the singularity is debated—certainly no closer than the end of the Planck epoch.

That is - using the rules that are derived from the regularities of phenomena - we have an model of how to run the tape backward, but we can’t get back at time zero. The rules evident within don’t make it through the bottleneck at the start of things to explain the system’s very existence. I’m not knocking the theory – I’m barely equipped to understand the thinking behind it in anything other than crude terms – I just wanted to make clear at the outset that the following isn’t an attack on certain peoples’ ideas of ultimate origins, but an exploration why we feel the need have them in the first place. 

There's a story that has some great scientist, lecturing on modern ideas on cosmology, who is accosted by an old lady who insists the world is flat and carried about on the back of a giant turtle. The scientist, scoffing at this, demands to know: what is supporting the turtle? Quite clearly - the woman tells hims – it's turtles all the way down. Deliciously, the story itself appears to exist unsupported: there's a string of attributions for the source of the story or the identity of the scientist including – apparently inaccurately – Bertrand Russel and William James and individuals before them. What it brings out nicely is the way in which humanity, when faced with an abyss it can’t seem to fill, populates that void with things it can relate to. It’s as if, given the capacity to ask the great questions, we can’t bear the possibility that they’re unanswerable. I wonder how much of our certainty in our metaphysical systems – religious or otherwise – is compensation for our own awareness of the existential abyss we find when we delve for Complete explanations.    

  

“There was a young man who said "God

I find it exceedingly odd

To think that this tree

Should continue to be

When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by,

Yours faithfully, God.”

― Ronald A. Knox

This notion of god as the guarantor of reality and the wellspring of everything is certainly comforting, and perhaps that’s the best we can do: faced with a troubling, impenetrable lack we have to negate it with something big enough, but human enough for us to comprehend. Personally though, I can’t help but ask the next question: from whence does it come? This tension - between needing some active creative principle that is comprehensible enough to be accessible in its motivation, and the recognition that anything sufficiently up to the task of being the ground for that creation must be so beyond our ken so as to render it equally disquieting – is evident in both western and eastern traditions. Gnosticism distinguishes between God – the ground or totality of reality – and the ‘evil’ Demiurge who created the material universe, variously identified as both Satan and Yahweh among other contenders. Hindu writings, in the form of the Rig Veda, nicely encapsulate the dilemma: 

But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.

- Nasadiya Sukta, a.k.a. Hymn of Creation, The Rigveda (10:129).

Maybe it’s us – not nature – that abhors a vacuum.

PHOTO BY DAVID DREXLER

   

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‘I’m a scientist, but I believe in love’ – What’s wrong with this sentence?

“My uncle was a scientist, but he believed that love is real. A kind of natural phenomenon.”

– Cloud Atlas, Megan Sixsmith (Zhu Zhu)

I’ve recently been reading a book – Consilience: The unity of knowledge – by the biologist E.O. Wilson, which I’d like to tell you about. The book is an analysis and re-statement of the enlightenment ideal of the unity, convergence or – in Wilson’s terms – consilience of scientific understanding. The dream was that we might trace the threads of causality across every possible level – from biology, through chemistry to physics. Wilson’s addendum is that we might also extend the methods and insights of the of the ‘hard’ sciences – particularly evolutionary psychology and populations genetics – to inform a cross-pollination between ‘the two cultures’, the natural sciences and the humanities. I don’t agree in all particulars, but contrary to some reviews I’ve read, this isn’t just materialistic triumphalism. I promise this is less a manifesto on how economics, anthropology, political science and philosophy have got it all wrong, and more a extended plea that the entrenched positions of the culture wars and their false dichotomies be put aside, so that a new and unfamiliar intellectual territory might be fruitfully explored by both traditions. I’m a neuroscientist by vocation, and only a philosopher by avocation, but I’ve noticed that people from the other culture tend to view such promises with suspicion. So, just go read the book – if nothing else the prose ain’t half bad.

Purity, by xkcd (http://xkcd.com/435/)

A good book is a good book, sure – but why blog about it here? Firstly, there’s Wilsons southern american christian background and the revelatory impact of being exposed at college to the neo-darwinian synthesis, as well as his frustration with the inability of people he’d known from childhood to see the merit of such a heathen perspective. Secondly, there’s the familiar way he appears to view the similarities between religion and science – both are seen as arising out of the wellspring of the human need for meaning – as well as their differences. While I can see religion as a valid approach to how people might choose to relate to the world and their place in it, for me science trumps religion for certain kinds of questions when you are interested in the world in and of itself – and for very specific reasons. Forgive the long extract, but I couldn’t put it better myself:      

                “There is nothing in science more provocative than a cleanly defined and surprising prediction, and nothing held in higher regard than such a prediction confirmed in detail. To this end, scientists look for four qualities in theory generally and mathematical models in particular.

The first is parsimony: the fewer the units and processes used to account for the phenomenon, the better. Because of the success of parsimony in the physical sciences, we do not today need an imaginary substance called phlogiston to explain the combustion of firewood, or nonexistent ether to fill the void of space.

The second quality is generality: the greater the range of phenomena covered by the model, the more likely it is to be true. In reagent chemistry the periodic table precludes a separate theory for each element and compound. One theory works exactly for all.

Next is consilience. Units and processes of a discipline that conform with solidly verified knowledge in other disciplines have proven consistently superior in theory and practice to units and processes that do not conform. That is why, in every scrap of data from every level of biology, from the chemistry of DNA to the dating of fossils, it has been the case that organic evolution by natural selection beats Creationism. God may exist, He may be delighted with what we are up to on this minor planet, but His fine hand is not needed to explain the biosphere.

And finally, drawing from all of the above virtues, the definitive quality of good theory is predictiveness. Those theories endure that are precise in the predictions they make across many phenomena and whose predictions are easiest to test by observation and experiment.”

- EO Wilson – Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Page 222

Another reason is Wilson’s consilience program – if materialistic science might inform and be informed by contact with the social sciences, might religion as a natural phenomenon then be within the rubric of science? Quite aside from any theoretical or empirical critiques of such a program, I’ve noticed when talking with religiously inclined people from the other other culture, that there’s a general view that some things are precious and better left unexplained or unexamined too closely.  Oddly enough, I don’t think any scientist sees themselves as in the job of removing wonder and magic from the world – or engaged in a war against irreducible complexity.  Rather - for me and at least the scientists I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this with - if anything, they feel like they are in the job of increasing it exponentially. I spoke before about how I like the image of all the things that are, have been, will be or might be in the world as facets of a great, gorgeous four-dimensional  crystal. The beauty of a worldview informed by the scientific method lies in how an increase in quantitative knowledge of the many, many facets of my world-crystal provides new levels and unexpected vistas of beauty, elegance, magic and complexity. They are all the more brilliant precisely because they do not necessarily conform to what the human mind might invent for itself.  Indeed, if the perspectives generated by human beings or gods, or both, are so special, why do their own adherents consider them so fragile that a closer look might irrevocably undermine them? 

“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.”

 - EO Wilson - Consilience The Unity of Knowledge, Page 67

Martin Rees’ cosmological ouroborus. Another pretty metaphor combining the mythical snake that eternally eats its own tale, and (to my mind) the cross-fertilization of knowledge at one scale of magnitiude that feeds back and informs that at other levels. Somewhere in the middle of the scale, you find humans. 

  

NOTE: please don’t be derailed by my use of ‘materialistic’ a couple of times in this post – I mean something philosophically specific, not the favouring of material things or a niave belief in the actual, material, really real existence of the world as we conceive it. I didn’t get into it here because its grist for the blogging mill – watch this space for a post on this subject in the hopefully not-to-distant future.

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Abiding in Space-time

        I’ve been thinking about stability and belonging this week, because it’s something that has come up in discussion and in my reading at the moment. An image that’s a little haunting, for me, comes from a nurse friend of mine. She described residents of an old people’s home she worked in who wouldn’t be able to remember their families due to dementia, but would treasure a picture of Jesus and would still makes their daily observances. Another image that comes from a book suggested to me by my new vicar where the author relates the following about his time spent in Johannesburg: 

“In the townships, I found myself giving sick communion regularly to a woman who was 100 years old, and lay all day on a bed in the corner of a tiny sitting room with her family running in and out around her. One day, she described her memories of being a girl of about 10 and taking food to British soldiers who were hanging out in caves. I suddenly realised she was remembering the Boer War. Her Eucharistic communion in the Church had been the accompaniment to a life of – to me – unimaginable length in which the world had undergone two World Wars, the splitting of the atom, the moon landings, not to mention the beginning and now the end of apartheid. A sort of ‘Eucharistic heartbeat’ had been the accompaniment to this long life. It was the fruit of a stability that the Church had maintained for her, as it does for many others.” 

-          Pp 37 – 38, Abiding by Ben Quash    

To me, these images speak of the power of belonging and the sense of stability that comes of placing oneself squarely in thrall to something larger, bigger than oneself. They got me thinking if I had something equivalent – something to measure out the moments of my life and to bracket my whole contribution to existence. If I’m something of scientist-in-training, I don’t see much of myself in the poor caricature of the scientist who is in LOVE with SCIENCE and is kind of a withered, autistic version of Spock. I think the scientific method is the best tool we have for evaluating answers to certain kinds of questions, but a canon of facts accepted at a given time is not something to have allegiance to or to align oneself with on principle.

   

         There are, however,  a couple of ideas that are a-religious - if not non-religious -  that do, for me, provide a sense of place in a larger phenomenon and go some way toward undoing that painful existential knot in my upper back that goes unnoticed until something has abated it. Once upon a time, I made my way once a week to talk to someone supposedly in the know about Buddhism. We were discussing antidotes to ‘conditional thinking’, the sense of concrete, black-and-white reality we give to distinction and divisions that we make in relation to our experience of the world. I was asked to contemplate a leaf outside the window, not as the simple ‘leaf’ construct I instinctively perceived, but to try and see, simultaneously, all the previous temporary associations that its materials had taken part in previously. All the streams and clouds and bladders, and winds and lungs and words that the water and the air sustaining the foliage had been part of. From my lowly plane of existence, I can only experience a cross-section of the wider phenomena. 

         I imagine a higher perspective, where the fleeting construct before my eyes is but a cross-section of a larger pattern, and I find this reassuring for some reason. I’m aware this a way of imagining His point of view used by some writers (I want to say C.S. Lewis in Miracles but I don’t have a chapter and page to point to). I don’t believe that the comfort is necessarily tied to the question of whether there is or is not a being to which this perspective belongs, or to it being a true or actual description of the way the universe is. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathanheeney/8161412920/

      The image, where my time and my doings in the world form but a facet in a great 4D crystal made up of space and time, that has - and will - always exist, is enough. For me. How about you? 

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