Filling The Gaps

Crammed into this past week I was lucky enough to be in several situations that had me contemplating the greatest fragility and complexity of life from a variety of viewpoints. The first was a debate at Intelligence Squared with the topic being “Science Refutes God” (see it here). Truthfully after the greatest debater of our time Christopher Hitchens passed away, this topic is one that I have stopped watching, as no one could do it better. Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer being on the pro-side though did convince me that it would be an entertaining evening, which it was. And from the polling the atheists won, which wasn't very surprising to me. Sitting next to me a friend said in regards to the religious side arguing for supernatural interference, and the holy word of the ancient Hebrews, “is this really 2012?”, to which I shrugged. It did seem like a debate that David Hume or Spinoza would have had with some religious leaders in another century. Still the main point remains, and was brought home through a very astute question to both sides: “What would make you change your position on this topic?” The Christians said basically nothing could. It was a matter of faith. Krauss on the other hand made the point that science follows the evidence, and our views as scientists are always changing. If, he said, he walked out of the debate and the stars spelled “you are wrong” in Aramaic, he would indeed be moved by this. The religious side used a very old tactic of explaining that many, in fact most, people have spiritual experiences, as a sort of proof that a consensus makes a truth. This is a bizarre assertion in light of our understanding of science, as people have illusions, old genetic predispositions, hallucinations and many other misleading feelings. Shermer points all of this out nicely. The argument is also intertwined in people’s minds with a moral one, where God is needed for ethics. I find this absurd, as my morals and ethics are strong I think, and those of most of my friends are, and those of secular societies (eg Sweden) are as well. So God really isn't needed to keep us from being bad. Even if the concept of God did make us more moral, it becomes immoral to lie about scientific evidence in order to achieve this. Deception in the name of civility neither works for long, nor is intellectually or ethically acceptable.

Something I think may be newer came up recently as well. It is newer to me at least, as I am only a casual observer of the very disciplined and complicated field of philosophy. In October a group of scientists and philosophers all got together to discuss the topic of “Moving Naturalism Forward.” I was not invited, as the group was especially esteemed, and I am not especially esteemed and would have not contributed anything useful.  Physicist Sean Carroll organized it, and wasn't the only scientist present. Janna Levin, Richard Dawkins, Simon DeDeo, Jerry Coyne, Noble laureate Steven Weinberg and others were there as well. Though the entire thing is 15 hours long, and I haven’t watched all that much of it yet, the sections I did watch seemed especially philosophy focused. This is not surprising as the topics were big ones in the history and present work of philosophy including free-will, morality and meaning. While there were many brilliant philosophical arguments made (I am a big fan of some in the room, especially Rebecca Goldstein), two things surprised me. First was that it seemed decided that scientists need philosophers for some big questions. That may be true, but in a way it is a shame, as scientists should be able to ask their own philosophical questions. This was true of Einstein, Newton, Darwin and just about every other famous scientist we can think of. The philosophers even invoked those names as examples of scientists doing good philosophy, but pointed out that many scientists do not, which is fair enough. Sean Carroll said that he would like philosophers to help understand the implications of Quantum Mechanics, and wishes that they would have done so earlier. That was generous of him I thought, and while I get his point that a new paradigm needs some deep probing, there is no topic more misunderstood by philosophers (at least many) than Quantum Mechanics, so I would in a way prefer that Sean, Janna and the rest of us who use QM, also seek meaning rather than waiting for the philosophical community to weigh in. Actually I think we do, even if that meaning is confined within a specific area of research.

The more upsetting point of these conversations was regarding scientific and philosophical ethical responsibility. Even many of the scientists were swayed by the arguments of Daniel Dennett and others about Free-Will.  I have exhausted the topic in this blog before, so I won’t again, other than to say that as a pure materialist I find that since the rules of everything in the universe are governed by physical reality, so too should humans, including the issue of free-will.  Actually most of the attendees agreed to some extent, though the philosophical argument is nuanced and confusing to a layman of philosophy such as me. The troubling thing was not the ideas of determinism or choice, but that it seemed to me that the agreement was that society could not handle the absence of free –will, whether it was scientifically accurate or not. Dennett and others sited some experiments where people lose a sense of right and wrong when they feel that they have no choice. Coyne disputed these studies, saying that over the long term he would imagine that there is not this effect. Still, there was near consensus that because we do at least feel we have choice, it is better to ignore, or at least put off the scientific possibility that we don’t. This sounds to me a lot like the God argument regarding morals. The suggestion is that morals don’t fall away when we abandon God for a scientific view of the universe based on reason, logic and experiment, but they do if we abandon free-will.  I find this insulting to humanity, and an underestimation in the power of knowledge.

The debate and watching this summit were the bookends of my week- long journey into the understanding of life. In the middle was something very different, and actually had nothing to do with materialism and logic, but rather just about the joy of being alive. It was a Poets House and American Museum of Natural History event which was a conversation between one of my favorite naturalists E.O. Wilson (see a blog I wrote about him here) and the poet Robert Hass, who I had the pleasure of getting to hear and read for the first time, despite his many years of literary fame and success. I immediately wanted to write a blog about the night, but I thought better of it, and instead wrote poetry (some of my poems here. The are admittedly not Hass quality). It seemed that abstraction and metaphor expressed my thoughts better than I could with normal description.

There is one idea that brings this all together for me. It is the title of one of the poems I wrote, and the title of this blog. It is “filling the gaps”. The God of The Gaps is an old expression which is still relevant in many ways. Humans invoke god to fill in the gaps in our scientific knowledge. For some these are also filled by philosophy. For others of us we look to science to fill as many as it possibly can with the understanding that it will certainly fail to fill them all. Rather than creating myths, or even from formalized speculation in the way of logical deductions made by philosophy, I fill these gaps by observing and creating art. Poetry, music, painting and sculpture don’t give concrete answers, but they provide a way to inspire contemplation, learn about ourselves, and visualize aspects of the universe that is still incomprehensible.  I will still read philosophy because it is so challenging and can be enlightening, and I will still do science. What I can’t forget though is what fills those gaps, which is humanities ability to create pictures of truth that we cannot explain any other way.

Naturally Building our Destiny

There is a need to define yourself, but that definition cannot be allowed to be unchangeable.That is unless you pick a definition that allows for change.  I was religious in my youth, a left wing liberal/artist in my twenties, an atheist/scientist in my thirties (now). Who knows what I will be in my forties, but a combination and a push back from them will all occur. I also don’t think that I am either to be blamed or praised for anything I do, rather it merely is as I was to do. This may be a convenient way of justifying mistakes, but I don’t mean it to be. I suffer hugely from remorse, guilt, anger and the rest, it is just that given everything in my life, and in the universe there is no other emotions, good or bad, or actions, good or bad, that I could have taken. I have not known of this possibility as I have gone through the process of what some would call indecision, waffling (as they did with Clinton, and are saying something similar of Romney), having no backbone or simply vulnerable to manipulation due to whoever I am currently influenced by. While all of these may be true, the fact that they happen is something beyond human control.

This is not just an American thing of course, but it is especially apparent in America during political season, where most everyone I am with would not actually identify themselves with either political party, but the necessity to do so, often lands otherwise like minded people in different groups, which is a shame. So I choose generally to define myself philosophically by the belief that I indeed am who I am and circumstances are what they are going to be. That is, they can be viewed from the past, present or future with the same contours and forms. I have learned therefore to call myself a Naturalist, which seems so benign that at first blush I can be welcomed at nearly any party. Of course once people get to know me I may not be invited back. I first started calling myself a Naturalist after hearing a “Point of Inquiry” interview of Tom Clark, by the excellent, and thoughtful Skeptic and Magician D.J. Grothe. In this podcast Clark talked about his own group, which I have now followed, which is the Center for Naturalism. Before that time I thought of naturalist viewpoints from two angles. The first was the John Muir, or even Charles Darwin type of Naturalist. Though I identify with both, I am not a field biologist at all, and know absolutely nothing about beetles. The second was that as a former theatre director I think of naturalism as a 19th century literary movement, which in terms of the theatre was dominated by Chekhov in Russia and Ibsen in Norway. Though I loved this type of theatre in college, I spent my early 20’s trying to do anything but Naturalist plays, instead, thinking that experimentation involved a breaking from this tradition. It wasn’t until last night when I re-read my favorite Ibsen play “The Master Builder” that I realized that I had come full circle to my modern theatre literature days, when that play, and Naturalism had moved me so much. This is so true that I don’t mind the identification as a Naturalist to extend beyond what Tom Clark was describing on “Point of Inquiry”.

Clark, and now Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and others have described naturalism in a way that makes sense to a person like myself who is delving deeper into nanoscience, and becoming more interested in cosmology. It doesn’t take long for that perspective to make you suspicious of human exceptionalism, as humans certainly make up such a tiny part of the universe. In fact just this morning I heard a traditional naturalist E.O. Wilson speaking of societal altruism in ant colonies. So even if we look below our feet, we seem less exceptional by the moment. In other words it fits the title, we are just a part of the natural universe. Already we are touching on something that might be uncomfortable to many, whether they are religious or not. Even many Atheists subscribe to a rationalist view of Emergence, which puts humans in a special place in the universe. While Emergence happens with flowers and butterflies, and certainly humans some would argue, including Jon Haidt in his latest book, that human emergence involves the property of free will. This explains how we are both natural and special, but unfortunately while not violating the laws of psychology it does violate the laws of physics, where cause and effect are clear tenants of everything, and thermodynamics paramount to the desire to be special.

So what about “The Master Builder”? I bring it up in case you haven’t seen or read the play or most Ibsen plays for that matter. It is full of tortured humans doing the only thing they can which is being human. The story is of course about an architect, or a builder as Halvard Solness likes to call himself, of enormous fame and talent. Tormented by guilt and paranoia, he is led to both acceptance and his fateful death. The Master Builder was not truly capable of building his own destiny, as we are not either. We just feel the joy and pain of that which has already been built. So perhaps we should take a while in these recent debates about free-will to stop reading editorials, blogs (well read this one), and books about it, and read an old play, where humanity so blatantly hits us over the head. The Master Builder may be dead, but we are not....

The art and science of introductions..

An extremely useful talent in the world of of going to parties in New York, or anywhere else for that matter, is the art of the introduction. I am amazed by the real greats of this, some of whom are my friends. These friends somehow  seem to know my personal bio better than I do, and be able to distill, and recite it to a new acquaintance in less than 10 seconds. These introductions at there most basic are “Matthew is an entrepreneur, a professor and a musician”, and then the equivalent for the other person. More complex introductions lead to more interesting conversations though, and also leave me thinking about how I would define myself in 10 seconds. In France it is rude to talk about career first, which I have always found silly, yet on the other hand does make you think of a person based on other deeper philosophical traits.

The other night at a Gala for the New York Academy of Science, where smart and interesting people filled the room, I was introduced in ways by different people that made me feel that I had split personalities. For instance I was introduced as a Naturalist. I liked that, as it is true. I believe that humans are a determined part of the natural world just  like other creatures and even objects. This informs my views on the absence of Free-will, and therefore also my scientific ideas. So that one word in it’s modern sense does define me. At the same party I was introduced by another person as a Transhumanist. This was certainly due to the fact that I wrote a piece for the Singularity Institute about downloading the human brain. This is also true I guess. I am philosophically conflicted about being a Transhumanist, but the fact is that I am one. I work some on regenerative medicine, and some on artificial intelligence. I write blogs to extend the reach of my thoughts and ideas. These are all Transhumanist traits. So is it a contradiction to be a Naturalist and a Transhumanist? It may, or may not be, but the introduction as one of those is provocative. It may also leave people thinking I am nuts. After thinking about this, I came up with other descriptions of myself that seem contradictory  but would also be true. Hunter and gatherer and Urban Farming supporter. Well not the hunting, but the gathering. I love to forage, as I was taught by my mushroom seeking wife. i think it also environmentally friendly. I also don’t like organic farms, but like factory farms even less. I do believe in genetically engineered foods, and that they are most useful when they are hyper close to a population, such as vertical farming. II can think of hundreds of others.

So why write about this, as many readers don’t care about how I am introduced or defined in 10 seconds at a party? I guess it is that it has nothing to do with me. Perhaps if we all started to see each other as complex definable creatures, then we can fill in some truths about existence through observation and friendships that we wouldn’t be able to do by simply knowing what job someone did.

The Jellyfish, The Frog and The Man

Normally when I think of why it is better to be a human than a jellyfish, I think of the uniquely human ability of abstraction, and how that abstraction can lead to creativity. When I think of what would be better about being a jellyfish than human, I think about the naivety of jellyfish. It is likely that he doesn’t experience the same existential crisis of acknowledging his own mortality. For a person it is very hard to live in the present, as the past and future always intrude, with the future ending with us in ashes. There were two science stories last week that put into question the whole idea of mortality. The first was actually about a type of jellyfish. The jellyfish discovery was provocative, even though it is indisputable.  This certain type of jellyfish is biologically immortal. Like all living beings, he goes through cell aging, and cell death, but unlike us he repeats the lifecycle. So the jellyfish becomes old, then young, then old an infinite number of times. Of course he could die by other means, like getting eaten, or environmental destruction, but this particular jellyfish will not die of old age. http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5448422-a-jellyfish-is-the-only-animal-immortal

The other story this week was the release of a TED Talk about suspended animation. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html This is worth watching.  Like the jellyfish finding, this story finds that our notion that all living things die, is not strictly accurate. We know that seeds can be in a state that is like death, but can come to life when planted.  Certain frogs can stop all metabolic function during the winter. They actually freeze, then in the spring thaw out and hop away. The TED Talk speaks about how this type of suspended animation and reanimation is possible in humans through adjusting oxygen levels and temperature. So it is possible to suspend life, and start it up again.

These two cases (eternal jellyfish and reanimation) are not the same for an obvious reason. In the case of the jellyfish, life is continuous, where the reanimated frog (or person) has a period of time which more closely resembles death. They both do make us reconsider how we view the present and the future. While many of us live neither as the jellyfish or the frog, this is not the case for a large part of the population who (I imagine) can relate very closely to one of these templates of existence. The jellyfish school is perhaps best exemplified by the gerontologist Aubrey De Grey. De Grey is the long bearded, Oxford educated scientist, who is spending his life and intellect on immortality. He is widely criticized for this, not because his science is questionable, but for more ethical reasons. In fact his science may be too new to yet know if it is valid, but it is not pseudoscience. He has real theory, and performs real experiments in labs around the world. Many of us like hearing him speak, because this is a voice of reason talking about something so unreasonable. What a mess the world would be if we all lived forever? Still the prospect is exciting, as the unknown of death is a haunting one. His ideas are in essence to make people like the eternal jellyfish. And, he would probably argue, the jellyfish is immortal but doesn’t seem to overwhelm the planet with its presence.

The other common school of thought is one that I relate to the reanimated frog. Many of the world’s major religions think of life as being in a state similar to the frozen frog. This is of course not how they would describe it, but how I think of religious belief in an afterlife. These people feel that a more full existence happens after the one where our bodies are alive. Therefore, for the moment, our bodies are essentially waiting for the spring to come so that our souls can be awakened in heaven.  The obvious difference between the religious person and the frozen frog is that while both views seem magical, the frog’s condition is strictly material. There is no extra implied force, location, or spirit involved. What is the same is the cycle of life, death and new life.

These two views leave out much of the world, even while being analogous to the cases I mention. Buddhists for instance embrace emptiness, which is basically uncertainty about death, as does the Jewish faith. Both of these admit a certain amount of ignorance, but don’t go all the way, since both have resurrection or reincarnation stories built into them. Stories of course or not wrong, or even unscientific, as they can be viewed metaphorically. Still they can lead to a hope that is not completely unlike the hope to either be like the jellyfish or like the frozen frog. Maybe there is nothing that can be done about this. Perhaps we are stuck by our own neural structure to think about the future in one of these ways. We try to look to nature, and to our intuition to connect the dots from the past through the future. For me as I naturalist, I tend to think that everything is causal. Our present is on a course that was determined by our past, and if we knew all of the variables, we could extend that to the future. We can’t know all of the variables, so this lack of counter causal free-will , for the most part, doesn’t change the way we make decisions. What it does do is change the way we think about the ultimate future, or death. It is metaconscious. If we think of our past as our birth, our present as just a point on a line, and our death as being the place that the line ends, it is very different than considering either the line continuing forever (like the jellyfish), or having a break in it (like the frozen frog). So just by hearing these stories I am in that unique state of being human; abstracting to understand the future rather than living in the present.

Living a Dream

Free-will is one of the longest running philosophical and scientific struggles. I am certainly not an expert on the history of this issue, but have encountered it in a completely counterintuitive way with Physics, where Quantum Mechanics, possibly the most relevant set of theories to my field of physics, and Newton’s determinism collide. Determinism in my mind is the same as free will, though this may not be a proper philosophical comparison, as I am too uneducated in philosophy to determine that. Anyway, despite a Ph.D. in physics, I fail in a huge way. Neils Bohr, a founder of quantum mechanics said something like “if you are not shocked by quantum mechanics you don’t understand it”. Well, I am shocked. Certainly confused, if that is the same thing, but I am not sure if the destruction of Newton’s classical view of an ordered universe changed my perspective, as it is too damn difficult to comprehend. While this observer based world of quantum mechanics was taking shape, a larger natural prediction of the universe was putting to rest some very progressive ideas of free will. Mainly this is that we are a part of a natural system, which can be predicted, with knowledge of enough of the variables. This is understood in probability. We can think of ourselves as containers of atoms, all organized by our genome. While there is a lot of complexity in this system, it is one that has been recorded, and can be studied. Our brain is also a cluster of atoms, cells (neurons) that are bundled in convenient groupings to create extremely efficient processing. Also, this is not completely understood but, the concept is directly observed. In essence through both the understanding of the genome and neuroscience, humans are shown to be natural, in that they are no different than any other matter, plant or animal, and can be studied and observed in the same way. This bundle concept, that the body is arranged in bundles of atoms, including the brain, does away with the concept of the soul, as the soul no longer has a place to reside. Our atomic structure is interchangeable with all other atoms, whether they make up a rock or a cock roach. So, does a rock have free will? From everything we know about rocks it does not. It rolls with classical certainty, breaks from predictable forces, etc. The same is true of humans. So this now the excepted way of viewing the situation, but as with quantum mechanics, it just never felt right, and was shocking.
So I have been thinking about those two problems, both being problems of intuition, not problems of science. Science makes clear that quantum phenomena occur, and also that free will does not exist, in any spiritual sense. I have also, at the same time been haunted by something that seemed unrelated. I nearly always remember several dreams a night, and have since I was a young child. Like most people (so studies say) a majority of my dreams are nightmares. They seem to be lifetimes in themselves, and each time, I am relieved to wake up. Psychologists often say that nightmares are a productive way of coping with anxiety, but for me I think they cause more anxiety than they cure. None of this gets me anywhere with this thesis, but it does set up my state of mind, which in general has led me to not wanting to go to sleep at night. I take sleeping pills, but still have these worries about the dreams. Then it occurred to me that my philosophical lack of intuition where free-will is concerned might be in some way informed by my fear of the dreams. Since I remember my dreams so well, I realize that the thing that is most disturbing about them is that they are completely out of my control, completely me, and completely personal. Often the bad, or even in the rare case happy, ending of my dreams may be known to me, or my character as experienced in the dream, before the end of the dream, which make it all the more frustrating. Unless I am having my yearly wet dream. Why should conscious existence be any different from unconscious existence? Perhaps it is this determined, uncontrollable outcome of life that makes the dreams so upsetting. Maybe I now can intuit what existence and lack of free-will feels like. It feels like a dream.